From our researchers

How to Talk About Difficult Issues in Medicine

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– by Wood Institute travel grantee Dr. Edward Allen Driggers*

 

American medicine has many problems and virtues. One way to “probe” and vindicate the virtues and deal honestly with the problems is participating in writing the history of medicine. Many of the readers of this blog suffer from or will suffer from some sort of medical illness or pathology. One difficulty of illness is talking about it with friends, family, and relatives. American society, much like many other world societies, is oddly squeamish about bodily fluids, belches, smells, and discharges. These passé manners do not serve our open and heartfelt discussions of diseases. For instance, dear reader, I suffer from Irritable Bowel Disease (IBD), specifically Crohn’s Disease. I have had abscesses, discharges, leaky bowels, and, to confess, I do not have all my original parts that I started life with. One of the most difficult things about being chronically ill is explaining these problems to friends, family, or a new lover. How do we talk about difficult things?
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What Can (and Can’t) We Learn From 19th Century Physicians’ Account Books?

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– by Wood Institute travel grantee, Jonathan Jones*

 

What sources can tell us the most about the health of nineteenth-century Americans, their aches and ailments, malaise and medicines? Diaries might come to mind, or letters between family members. These narrative sources are familiar to historians, and are more-than-commonplace in archives. On the one hand, narrative sources can be windows into the health of nineteenth-century Americans, revealing how they coped with the horrifying sicknesses and symptoms that plagued them. On the other hand, letters and diaries are impressionistic, better for figuring out how people felt about their health than the fine details of healthcare.

But what about the other stuff, the nitty-gritty details of medical history? Where can historians turn if, for instance, we want to find out how often the average nineteenth-century American saw a doctor? Or how much he charged them for lancing a boil or delivering a baby? What if we needed to know the most commonly prescribed medicines in nineteenth century America, like mercury, calomel, or opium? How can we investigate these questions with numbers and not just with quotes? Historians using only narrative sources would likely be unable to. Luckily for us, most nineteenth century American physicians kept account books, which contain invaluable quantitative data that historians can use to illuminate historical health patterns, supplementing impressionistic sources with hard data.
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The Great Surgeon: Georgia O’Keeffe

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– by Ashley Lazevnick*

 

In one of the most influential essays on the artist Georgia O’Keeffe—published in the 1922 issue of Vanity Fair—the art critic Paul Rosenfeld made a vivid comparison between surgical procedures and  her creative method:

The painter appears able to move with the utmost composure and awareness amid sensations so intense they are wellnigh insupportable, and so rare and evanescent the mind faints in seeking to hold them; and, here, in the regions of the spirit….[she seems] to sever with the delicacy and swiftness of the great surgeon aplunge in the entrails of a patient.[i]

Rosenfeld was not the only writer to pick up on the surgical qualities of O’Keeffe’s abstract paintings (Fig. 1); among dozens of others, Alexander Brook identified a pointed asepsis in her works that “seem all to be transfixed by an absolutely clean dagger that pierces neatly and hits a vital place.”[ii] And O’Keeffe was just one of several modernists that merited this analogy. Guillaume Apollinaire observed that “Picasso studies an object like a surgeon dissecting a corpse,” while Walter Benjamin characterized the cinematographer as a surgeon, for whom cutting exposed a more trenchant reality than could be achieved by a painter.[iii]

It was this uncanny collection of metaphors that brought me to the Historical Medical Library of The College of Physicians of Philadelphia. What was going on in the history of surgery during this period—I wondered—that would elicit such widespread comparisons between surgical science and the arts? What popular connotations or visual imagery would have informed such critics? Did the specialized literature—though unknown to many of these figures—contradict or enhance the metaphors they used? During my time at the Library, I consulted a wide range of materials, including trade journals, manuals of surgery, and—most stunningly—the collection of medical illustrations done by Hermann Faber and his son, Erwin Faber. It became quickly apparent that the metaphor with which I was dealing was not simply unidirectional; during the same period, surgeons were being thought of as artists—often compared to painters, draftsman, or etchers—while the highly skilled illustrations attested to the enmeshed pursuits of artistic representation, scientific accuracy, and even beauty.[iv]

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The Diversity of Hormone Therapies in the United States, 1920-1964

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– by Kate Grauvogel*

 

With the isolation of estrogens, androgens, progestins, and insulin in the 1920s and 30s, boundless therapeutic uses for hormones became possible.[i] Fertility control, mental illness, and tuberculosis were just a few of the seemingly disparate problems that researchers attempted to treat or control by regulating hormones. My research adds to this picture by showing just how varied these uses were and how the community of researchers compared and coordinated their efforts. At the Historical Medical Library of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, I discovered additional diverse uses for hormone therapies in the published works of Dr. Edward Strecker and the papers and published works of Dr. Max B. Lurie.

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Before Leprosy became Hansen’s Disease

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– by Elizabeth Schexnyder*

 

I’m always on the lookout for materials that have a connection to leprosy. In particular to the leprosarium established in Carville, Louisiana. Hansen’s disease is another name for leprosy.

Last year, a visitor from Philadelphia toured the National Hansen’s Disease Museum in Carville, where I am the curator.  He suggested that I look into the collections at the Mütter Museum and Historical Medical Library. He thought we had much in common.  And so we did.

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The Importance of Nooks, Crannies, and Color in Researching National Negro Health Week

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– by Paul Braff*

 

In 1896, statistician Frederick Hoffman confirmed what Charles Darwin and other scientists and doctors had asserted for years: African Americans were going extinct.[1] Within the context of the burgeoning professionalization of the medical field, such a conclusion had the potential to omit African Americans from medical care, especially when combined with the preconceived racial differences of the time. Indeed, white physicians in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries frequently wrote African Americans off as a lost cause, categorized the race as inherently unhealthy, and refused to treat black patients or used heavy-handed tactics, such as forced vaccinations, to improve black health.

To fight this perception, in 1915 Booker T. Washington inaugurated National Negro Health Week (NNHW), a 35 year public health campaign, and the subject of my dissertation. Washington, and his successor, Robert Moton, ran the Week for its first 15 years out of Tuskegee Institute. After a brief transfer of control to Howard University, the U.S. Public Health Service (USPHS) decided to take over the Week in 1932. Under the leadership of Roscoe C. Brown, head of the Office of Negro Health Work, the campaign blossomed. Participation estimates increased from 475,000 in 1933 to millions by the mid-1940s as the Week became a National Negro Health Movement and increased its focus on year-round health improvement.

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Reading feces, from scatomancy to coprology

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– by Wood Institute travel grantee, Guy Schaffer*

 

Four years ago, Kathy High and I started an artistic investigation into fecal microbiota transplantation (FMT), a medical treatment in which stool from a healthy donor is used to replenish the intestinal microbes of an unhealthy patient. The treatment has been approved for a chronic bacterial infection—C. difficile—and it is currently in clinical trials for inflammatory bowel disease, as well as for illnesses that are only tangentially intestinal: depression, autism, chronic fatigue, Parkinson’s, and others.

Through this engagement with feces, we’ve become curious both about the current culture of fear and control around feces, and the kinds of hope that we see people take on when they talk about FMT. We came to the Historical Medical Library at the College of Physicians of Philadelphia to try to trace a genealogy of our contemporary relationship with feces. In our history of shit, we wanted to probe the annals of proctology to search for different kinds of frameworks for imagining the relationship between feces and health, in the hopes of finding new conceptual tools for exploring the future of shit.

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