From our researchers

The Transformative Power of Diagnosis

Staff From our researchers June 12, 2019December 16, 2019Diagnosis, Doctor-patient relationship, Nineteenth century medicine, Serious disease

– by Wood Institute travel grantee Annemarie Jutel*

The moment a serious diagnosis is named marks a boundary. As Suzanne Fleischmann wrote: “It serves to divide a life into “before” and “after,” and this division is henceforth superimposed onto every rewrite of the individual’s life story” (p. 10). The power to cleave one’s sense of self in two is what Fleischmann referred to the “transformative power of the diagnosis.” The illustration accompanying this post paints a picture most of us can immediately recognise, so often the power of diagnosis is referred to in popular culture, in medical and patient accounts of illness.

Bad Blood: Nineteenth-Century Anti-Vaccination Rhetoric

Staff From our researchers, Out of the stacks May 15, 2019October 7, 2020Anti-vaccination movements, Ephemera, History of medicine, Visual communications

– by Wood Institute Travel Grantee Elena Jarmoskaite*

It was in the scorching heat of summer 2018 that I arrived in Philadelphia, having travelled some three and a half thousand miles separating the Historical Medical Library and my home in London. I came here for the sole purpose of learning more about the phenomenon most of us would happily never hear about again: the anti-vaccinationists, or, colloquially, the anti-vaxxers.

Not that long ago I would have seen vaccination opponents as a merely baffling movement, perhaps not all that distinctly removed from other fringe groups like the infamous flat-earthers or tin foil-hat-wearers; at the point of my visit, however, they had become central to my Master thesis. A lot has been said about the anti-vaccinationists, and it is an increasingly hot topic at the moment, with unfortunate and unignorable outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases happening all over the globe. Vaccination opposition, however, is a difficult subject, both because of its multi-layered nature, and because of the immense amount of emotion surrounding it.

Between the Pages: Victorian Women’s Letters to H. Lenox Hodge

Staff From our researchers, Out of the stacks, Voices from our collection April 17, 2019December 16, 2019Doctor-patient, Gynecology, H. Lenox Hodge, Nineteenth century medicine, Women's healthcare

– by Wood Institute travel grantee Annelle Brunson*

Cracking open the accordion-notebook of Dr. Hugh Lenox Hodge (1836-1881), I read from the top, thumb and index finger poised delicately at the faded yellow corners. Each turn of the page wafts the familiar musty odor of the archives. Each page brings another woman in distress. Hodge was one of the leading doctors of female diseases in nineteenth-century Philadelphia. His entries can seem vaguely impersonal, a simple version of the forms we fill out today: name, age, address, family members, symptoms, and physical notations. Unlike today, his diagnoses carry a heavy weight of non-scientific judgment.

Nineteenth-century doctors, almost exclusively male, entertained peculiar ideas about the female body. Hysteria was at its diagnostic climax, reproduction was at the root of all women’s ills, and terminality was still a gift and a punishment from God. But what intrigued me most were the documents inter-leaving the accordion; the correspondence from female patients, who offer a very different view of the patient experience. Their letters appear carefully composed but the ink blots at the ends of sentences and words suggest an occasional hesitation, a desire to get this right—and they tell a deeper story of the women’s lives read in-between the lines.

A Day at the Beach? Mothers at the Children’s Seashore House

Staff From our researchers, Out of the stacks February 25, 2019December 5, 2019Beaches, Children's health, Children's Seashore House, Fresh air treatment, Vacation

– by Meggie Crnic, Senior Lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania

As I carried the hefty, bound volumes to my research station, I wondered what stories they might reveal. Unwrapping the protective covers, I maneuvered a book to examine its spine. It was a Children’s Seashore House (CSH) patient log book from the 1920s.

From my previous research I knew that the CSH was a pediatric hospital in Atlantic City, NJ. It opened in 1872 to care for Philadelphia’s children who could not otherwise afford time at the seashore. The CSH was a beachfront institution where physicians used “marine medication,” to care for children with a range of pediatric disorders. At the hospital children experienced sea-air, sea-water, and sun bathing as their therapies. Elite medical research supported marine medication and prominent physicians on both sides of the Atlantic prescribed patients time at the shore. The belief in the curative and restorative powers of marine environments transcended national, cultural, religious, and class boundaries. It also gave rise to a vast network of pediatric seashore hospitals in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries.

William Osler, Medicine, and Fairy Tales

Staff From our researchers, Out of the stacks, Voices from our collection January 9, 2019January 9, 2019Fairy tales, History of medicine, Literature and medicine, William Osler

– by Wood Institute travel grantee Ryan Habermeyer*

Several years ago, in a daze of dissertation research, I stumbled upon a passing comment by William Osler, pioneer of modern medicine: “To talk of diseases is a sort of Arabian Nights entertainment.” What a curious coupling, fairy tales and medicine. As much as I tried to forget it and press forward with my dissertation I kept returning to that idea. How is pathology a bedfellow to fairy tales?

Here is my best conclusion: For centuries, disease was almost indistinguishable from magic – spontaneous, metamorphic, at times exotic, powerful, and mysterious. For centuries, disease provoked both wonder and fear; it elicited a kind of grotesque enchantment. Disease, I like to think Osler is suggesting, tells a story. It has traceable beginnings, chaotic middles and dramatic ends. To us, the victims, it is the villain which must be vanquished; but I imagine if diseases could talk they would cast themselves as the heroes and heroines struggling to survive against impossible odds.

Faith, Superstition or Insanity?

Staff From our researchers December 12, 2018December 16, 201919th century mental health, Insanity, Religion

– by Wood Institute travel grantee Alexandra Prince*

If you meet a new acquaintance at a party and one of the first things they share about themselves is their membership in a newly-formed religious group, you are going to assume a few things. You might be polite enough to mask your raised eyebrows with an innocent follow-up question such as, “What is the name of the group?” Or, “What is it that you believe exactly?” But I bet that, behind your polite inquiry, you are likely wondering if they might be crazy, or if they are nuts or have a screw loose or suffer from a mental illness, or any other variety of descriptive phrases or terms we assign to people whose minds we deem not to be “normal.”

My research at the Historical Medical Library at the College of Physicians of Philadelphia in the spring of 2018 concerned the history behind this presumption that members in new religious movements are insane or somehow mentally unsound. Where did this link between religion and pathology emerge? And why are we so quick to assign mental illness to those who espouse divergent religious beliefs? To better understand the pathological frameworks we often use when discussing religion, my dissertation examines how this assumption was historically shaped. To do so, I examined the Library’s collection of archival documents relating to religion and madness during the nineteenth century.

From Hysteria to Anorexia Nervosa: An Evolution of Medical Terminology

Staff From our researchers November 28, 2018August 20, 202019th century mental health, 19th-century asylums, Anorexia nervosa, History of medicine

– by Julia Jablonowski

Most people in our contemporary society are familiar with anorexia nervosa –more commonly known as just “anorexia.” Yet few know the development of medical thought and the advancement of medical etymologies in the Victorian era that led to the emergence of what we know today as anorexia nervosa.

Prior to the pathological conception of anorexia nervosa, its fundamental symptoms, which are grounded in self-inflicted food aversions, were not thought of as an independent disorder until the nineteenth century. A common diagnosis that was used in the days before anorexia nervosa was hysteria, a disease historically exclusive to the female gender.[1]

In the Victoria era, a woman was societally understood to be passive, feeble, emotional, and fragile.[2] These beliefs as espoused by Victorian culture created a space in which women were understood to be societally, and medically, more susceptible to illness. From mood swings to fevers, light-headedness to exhaustion, it seemed that almost any physical or mental affliction residing within the body and psyche of a woman could be met with the diagnosis of hysteria. Other symptoms included a vast array of nervous and erratic behavior projected by women in the form of fatigue, food refusal or self-starvation, depression, bodily pains, anxiety, and the general feeling of unwellness.[3] Because of the broad symptoms of hysteria, it was applied to a large expanse of medical, mental, and emotional cases troubling the fragile Victorian female.