YHR: Spring 2021

YHR: Spring 2021
LIAM SHEAHAN
EDITORIAL BOARD Esther Reichek, BR '23 Managing Editor The Yale Historical Review is published by Yale students. Yale University is not responsible for its content. With further questions or to provide feedback,please email us at: YALEHISTORICALREVIEW@GMAIL.COM THE YALE HISTORICAL REVIEW AN UNDERGRADUATE PUBLICATION The Yale Historical Review provides undergraduates an opportunity to have their exceptional work highlighted and encourages the diffusion of original historical ideas on college campuses by providing a forum for outstan- ding undergraduate papers covering any historical topic. Spring 2021 Volume XI Issue I Grace Blaxill, PC '23 Jisoo Choi, DC '22 Editors in Chief Daniel Ma, BF '23 Louie Lu, BR '23 Executive Editors Lane Fischer, MC '23 Production & Design Director Aaron Jenkins, SY '22 Emma Sargent, TC '22 Gage Denmon, TD '22 Gabby Sevillano, TD '22 Katie Painter, TD '23 Lee Johns, BF '25 Natalie Simpson, GH '23 Assistant Editors Alex Battle Abdelal, TC '25 Alex Nelson, SM '25 Deirdre Flanagan, BR '23 Eming Shyu, SM '25 Emma Yanai, DC '25 Katie Painter, TD '23 Logan Ledman, TC '24 Lucy Gilchrist, MC '24 Oliver Huston, TC '25 Copy Editors Alex Nelson, SM '25 Daevan Mangalmurti, TC '24 Linh Pham, JE '24 Sharmaine Koh-Mingli, SM '22 Production & Design Editors Cover by Alex Nelson, SM '25 i THE YALE HISTORICAL REVIEW Maya Ingram, MC '23 Social Media Chair Marcus McKee, TC '23 Director of Humanities Now
LETTER from the EDITORS VOLUME XI ISSUE I SPRING 2021 ii Welcome to the Spring 2021 Issue of the Yale Historical Review. With this issue, we return to campus and to print publication, having bid farewell to previous editors and welcomed many new ones to our ranks. As managing editors,we inherited an organization with many strengths,but by far our greatest asset was our robust, dedicated, and talented team of editors. After one of the strangest years in its decade of existence, this issue marks our third term of editing an issue remotely. With more editors and readers than ever before, we moved our editorial process online, Zooming with authors and each other over the long months of the spring and summer to bring these papers to you. The product of those long pandemic months is an issue that features five extraordinary works of undergraduate research, each with a strong reliance on and innovative use of primary source media among other strengths. Liam Sheahan analyzes a collection of letters written by one American soldier in World War II to explicate how the large scale events of the war were affecting his individual psychology. Helen Zhang weaves together testimonies of Korean and Chinese “comfort women” during and after the Japanese occupation, giving a voice to traumatic experiences and delicately challenging the politics of memory and trans- lation in the process. Alyssa Durnil investigates Irish support for Palestinian self-determination, tracing a movement that began with radical political factions but left a lasting impact on the government of Ireland. Libby Hoffenberg zooms in on the early life of X-ray technology and examines its rise during a medical and industrial turning point in American history. Sophie Combs delves into the history of the Franco-American Orphanage in Lowell, Massachusetts, demonstrating how a state institution became a battleground for modern ideas of immigration, welfare, and community activism. We plan to build on the foundations we’ve laid in an unprecedented year of publishing. Expect an increase in original online content, continued conversations with the Yale community, and more ways to engage with us both online and in person. We’re proud to present to you five examples of excellence in undergraduate historical research. We’re even more excited for you to see more excellence from us in 2022. Sincerely, Grace Blaxill, Editor in Chief Jisoo Choi, Editor in Chief
CONTENTS Technology and Paradigm: The X-Ray, Electrical Therapeutics, and the Consolidation of Biomedicine by LIBBY HOFFENBERG How Comfort Women Speak: The Politics and Social Norms in the Narrations of Comfort Women’s Experiences by HELEN ZHANG ''Tiocfaidh Ár Lá, Our Day Will Come'': Tracing the Origins of Ireland's Support for Palestine by ALYSSA DURNIL Pushing The Envelope: How Personal Correspondence Can Shape Our Understanding of National Events by LIAM SHEAHAN iii THE YALE HISTORICAL REVIEW The Franco-American Orphanage: Immigrant Community and the Development of the Modern Welfare State, 1908–1932 by SOPHIE COMBS PAGE 1 PAGE 15 PAGE 32 PAGE 70 PAGE 91
SPRING 2021 THE FRANCO-AMERICAN ORPHANAGE Immigrant Community and the Development of the Modern Welfare State,1908–1932 by Sophie Combs, University of Massachusetts Lowell '20 Classroom of “orphans” circa 1920. [1] Written for a Directed Study Advised by Professor Robert Forrant Edited by Esther Reichek and Aaron Jenkins VOLUME XI ISSUE I SPRING 2021 1
N 1908, OWNERSHIP of the Frederick Ayer Mansion in Lowell, Massachusetts passed from a millionaire investor to a community of immigrant workers. This change corresponded to the industrial city at a moment of social reckoning.At the time that organizers from St.Joseph’s parish fundraised to buy the property from the Ayer’s estate,living conditions and wages had degraded to abject lows.This sprawling fortress—four stories tall, complete with stained glass,pillars,and67rooms—wasatestamenttothefortunes amassed in local mills and,subsequently,became a home for the children of mill workers.In place of an elaborate house, the French-Canadian church established an orphanage for the care and education of children with working families. The Franco-American Orphanage (FAO), first a manor and then a childcare facility, can be considered emblematic of the dual versions of Lowell created by industry in the 19th and early 20th centuries.1 Lowell’s orphanage was the result of local activism and can be understood as a formalized structure of mutual aid. Financially, the FAO was symbiotic with its community, both catering to and supported by the immigrant population of the city’s Little Canada.Founders intended that the institution to provide short- and long- term childcare services for families; in remembrance of this objective,board members articulated,“In those days, orphans did not receive any special consideration by the civil authorities and the burden of education and caring for those unfortunate children fell on the shoulders of relatives.”2 By situating the FAO within the legacy of American mutual aid, this paper asserts an alternative interpretation of the orphanage in which the institution 1 This paper relies upon archival documents translated by the author from the original French. Additionally, the character of the orphanage was assessed through several interviews of a former resident by the author. "Cul- tural Resource Inventory – History of Ayer Home incl. Photos," Box 1 Franco-American Orphanage/School collection, Center for Lowell History. 2 Most influential in plans for the FAO was Reverend Joseph Campeau, who considered the orphanage his "dream." For most of the FAO’s early life, board members were active members in St. Joseph’s Parish and/or local busi- nessmen while the daily activities of the orphanage were run by women. "Fr. Campeau brings Grey Nuns to Orphan- age," Box 1 Franco-American Orphanage School collection, Center for Lowell History. 3 Peter Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (London: Heinemann, 1902. Reprint, Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, 2012), 7-8. 4 Donations varied in size and originated entirely from the Greater Lowell area. "Album Historique: Paroisse St. Joseph Lowell, Mass. 1916," Box 1 Franco-American Orphanage/School collection, Center for Lowell History. was the product of grassroots collaboration rather than philanthropy in the patronizing sense.This reconceptualization of the institution deviates from an individualistic narrative of progress to one where the contributions of working families are central.As expressed by the original theorist of mutual aid, Peter Kropotkin, in 1914: The leaders of contemporary thought are still inclined to maintain that the masses had little concern in the evolution of the sociable institutions of man, and that all the progress made in this direction was due to the intellectual, political, and military leaders of the inert masses. […]The creative, constructive genius of the mass of the people is required whenever a nation has to live through a difficult moment in its history.3 Ordinary people were responsible for the existence of the FAO.Notably,a donation campaign in 1914 to pay the $30,000 mortgage exceeded its goal by nearly $10,000 and owed its success in large part to the contributions of other immigrant groups.4 In following years, the orphanage accepted increasing numbers of children with Irish, Italian, and Syrian backgrounds. The FAO was at once an institution rooted in its immigrant community, dedicated to the preservation of French-Cana- dian heritage, and instilled with an ethos of multicultu- ralism. As such, the orphanage can serve as a crucial case study in grassroots organization. In a broader context, social relief that was built up from the grassroots had a long-standing effect on the landscape of American welfare.In line with scholarship by Matthew Crenson and Peter Fritzsche (1998), this paper bolsters their claim that “welfare echoed charity and its child-centered character recalled the institutional purpose of the orphanage itself,” positing that orphanages were the foundation, functionally and ideo- INTRODUCTION I 2 THE FRANCO-AMERICAN ORPHANAGE
logically, for subsequent developments in public relief.5 Jessie Ramey (2012), in the same vein, emphasizes the agency of working-class people in establishing institutions thereafter absorbed into governmental structures. “Families were active participants in the history of institutional childcare, making decisions and choices that affected the development of early social welfare,” Ramey notes.6 It is this process, wherein governmental structures are based in the charities that precede them, which creates the decentralized, variable systems of welfare coined by Alan Wolfe (1977) as a “franchise state.”7 Michael Katz (1986) adds that “the boundaries between public and private have always been protean in America.The definition of public as applied to social policy and institutions has never been fixed and unam- biguous.”8 The FAO exemplified this ambiguity; it was at once a private organization and one that received funding from the Massachusetts government for acting on its behalf. Institutions such as the FAO were the product of mutual aid and later, to varying degrees, absorbed into the state. Mutual aid and American welfare 5 Matthew Crenson and Peter Fritzsche, Building the Invisible Orphanage: A Prehistory of the American Welfare System (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), 325. 6 Jessie Ramey, Child Care in Black and White: Working Parents and the History of Orphanages (Chicago: Univer- sity of Illinois Press, 2012), 1. 7 Alan Wolfe, The Limits of Legitimacy: Political Contradictions of Contemporary Capitalism (New York: Free Press, 1977). For further reading on decentralized welfare vis-à-vis orphaned children, see: S.J. Kleinberg, Widows and Orphans First: The Family Economy and Social Welfare Policy, 1880-1939 (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2006). 8 Michael B. Katz, In the Shadow of the Poorhouse: The Social History of Welfare in America (New York: Basic Books, 1986), 2. have in this way a historically porous relationship. While immigrants created the model for community assistance in Lowell, top-down governmental reform aimed to discriminate against immigrants deemed unassimilable into white society.In Massachusetts, policymakers espousing eugenic and nativist beliefs were instrumental in dismantling generalized institutions of relief and replacing them with specialized institutions of rehabilitation. Reorganization of the welfare state relied upon an ideological dichotomy between “deserving” and “undeserving” paupers, with the latter subject to new apparatuses of policing. This paper highlights the interrelation of ideology and structural implementation as articulated by John Mohr and Vincent Duquenne (1997), who state: Most historical accounts of social-welfare institutions suggest that (1) the institutional logic of relief is com- posed of two elements—a system of differentiated relief practices (outdoor relief, the poorhouse, etc.) and a system of symbolic distinctions consisting of various The Ayer Mansion turned orphanage at an unknown date. The original 1859 house, the extension built in 1913, and the grotto for religious ceremonies are visible. [2] VOLUME XI ISSUE I SPRING 2021 3
normatively defined categories of the poor, and that (2) these two systems are mutually constitutive in the sense that changes in one corresponds to and constitutes changes in the other.9 Contradiction,therefore,was built into the Mas- sachusetts welfare state of the 20th-century. From the top down, legislators and social workers organized systems of relief in accordance with racist objectives and, from the bottom up,immigrant workers established mutual aid societies that were later integrated into the state. Immigrant communities were responsible for many of the earliest forms of assistance; simultaneously,the emerging welfare state was shaped by policy work steeped in contempt for immigrants themselves. In Lowell,the FAO existed as a community-fun- ded childcare service. Despite the mainstream conception of the orphanage, the FAO was an institution that provided temporary care for children with living families. This paper’s analysis of administrative documents and over 3,000 orphan records determines that (a) approximately 97% of children at the FAO had family members paying dues and (b) 55% of orphans stayed at the institution for less than one year.“Orphans”were not forgotten nor parentless children. Immigrants, already the engines of economic growth for Lowell’s industries, were at the forefront of bold initiatives to survive within harsh industrial conditions.10 These are the strands worth following from the single orphanage in Lowell.The first section of this paper investigates the political context of the FAO from local and national perspectives,delving into currents of eugenic thought that interwove 20th-century social work.An examination of Massachusetts legislative documents, notes from state committee meetings, and contemporary litera- ture points to a conception of poverty that was the basis for enduring governmental reform.The second section de- tails the situation of immigrants in Lowell, including the health crisis brought on by industrial poverty, the history 9 John W. Mohr and Vincent Duquenne, "The Duality of Culture and Practice: Poverty Relief in New York City, 1888-1917" in Theory and Society 26, no. 2/3 (New York: Springer, 1997), 313. 10 Statistics calculated by author from financial records and over 3,000 admission records dated 1908 to 1932. The 97% of orphans with paying family members was calculated from figures dated the year 1920. Despite inconsis- tent records of orphans paying and not paying dues, the 1920 statistic appears representative of the FAO between 1908 and 1932. "Compter de l’Année," Box 3 Franco-American Orphanage/School collection, Center for Lowell History; "Recorded Meetings of the Members of the Executive Committee of the Orphanage," Box 3 Franco-American Orphan- age/School collection, Center for Lowell History; "Admission Records," Box 4 Franco-American Orphanage/School collection, Center for Lowell History. 11 United States Children's Bureau, Child Care and Child Welfare; Outlines for Study (Washington: Federal Board of French-Canadian presence in mill work, and the social networks that sustained the community during economic upheaval.Third, a statistical analysis of over 3,000 orphan records at the FAO between 1908 and 1932 reveals the function of the orphanage in the lives of Lowell’s working people. Orphan ethnicities, parental occupations, city origins, and length of stay shed light on New England's mill city at a moment of significant change. T THE TIME of the FAO’s foun- ding, Massachusetts was in the process of constructing its welfare system. Within the span of 60 years, Massachusetts established a State Reformatory for Juveniles (1847), several schools for “feeble-minded” children (1848), the State Board of Inspectors (1851), the State Board of Charities (1863), a Massachusetts Infant Asylum (1867), a State Primary School for Dependent and Neglected Children (1866), the State Board of Health (1879), an Industrial School for Girls and for Boys (1908), and along with many others. Specific categories of people—such as “juveniles” or “feeble-minded youth”—were relegated into institutions for rehabilitation.11 Simultaneously, facilities that catered to broad swaths of the population,including almshouses, were in the process of dismantlement. A federal report in 1921 understood this process as: LICENTIOUS MOTHERS AND MENACING CHILDREN Political Context of the Orphanage A 4 THE FRANCO-AMERICAN ORPHANAGE
Increasing differentiation and classification of those re- quiring care, together with the tendency toward centra- lization under State control of provision for these classes, and the use of the family home instead of the institution as a means of providing for dependent,neglected,and certain classes of delinquent children.12 Classification of welfare recipients for the purpose of separating, specializing in,or denying care was foundational to Massachusetts reforms throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. Paupers were divided into official categories: The poor are of two classes:first,the impotent poor,in which dominion are included all who are wholly incapable of work, through old age, infancy, sickness, or corporeal debi- lity. Second, the able poor, in which denomination are included all who are capable of work, of some nature or other, but differing in the degrees of their capacity and the kind of work of which they are capable.13 It was the understanding of this 1821 report that the“evils”of poverty originated from the“difficulty of dis- criminating between the able poor and of apportioning the degree of public provision to the degree of actual im- potency.”14 In the same vein,an 1866 annual report from the Massachusetts State Board of Charities asserted that “it is better to separate and diffuse the dependent classes than to congregate them,” while providing instructions for a “system of observation” in which to “collect all the valuable facts” necessary for classification.15 In Lowell, politicians regularly made distinctions between the “worthy poor” and their unworthy counterparts, fretting for the “idlers” who took advantage of state provisions. Mayor James B. Casey expressed, “the giving of aid […] for Vocational Education, 1921). 12 United States Children's Bureau, Child Care and Child Welfare; Outlines for Study, 1921. 13 Massachusetts Legislative Committee, The Josiah Quincy Report of 1821 on the Pauper Laws of Massachu- setts, Written for the Massachusetts Legislative Committee (Boston: Massachusetts Legislative Committee, 1821). 14 Massachusetts Legislative Committee, The Josiah Quincy Report of 1821 on the Pauper Laws of Massachu- setts, Written for the Massachusetts Legislative Committee, 1821. 15 Massachusetts Board of State Charities, Second Annual Report, January 1866 (Boston: Massachusetts Board of State Charities, 1866). 16 Hon. John F. Meehan, Inaugural Address to the Lowell City Council (Lowell: Buckland Publishing Company). 17 DavidWagner, Ordinary People: In and Out of Poverty in the Gilded Age (NewYork: Paradigm Publishers, 2008), 17, 28. 18 Massachusetts State Board of Lunacy and Charity, Twenty-Eighth Annual Report (Boston: Wright and Potter Printing Co. State Printers, 1906). 19 William H. Slingerland, Child Welfare Work in California: A Study of Agencies and Institutions (New York: Spe- cial Agent Department of Child-Helping, Russell Sage Foundation, 1916), 195. 20 Robert A. Davis, Mentality of Orphans (Boston: Gorham Press, 1930), 164, 198. as an injury is not only worked upon the family, but to the community as well.” The objective of the state board, Casey emphasized, was to ensure that charity only went to paupers with no potential of self-sufficiency. Methods of differentiating care were contingent on the idea that some paupers were intrinscally unworthy.16 This conception of poverty was the ideological foundation of the orphanage. A resolution from the Massachusetts Board of Charities in 1864 warned of “the unfavorable influences of [adult paupers], which, if a child be long subjected to them, will always haunt his memory,” and surmised that reform was only possible for children. By 1895, Massachusetts had become the first state to switch to a foster-care system that placed children into rural families; such a move was justified by fears for the “contaminating influences”of “licentious mothers.”17 Reiterated in 1906, the Massachusetts State Board of Charity and Lunacy pushed for “the separation of the children at [the] institution from the more or less contaminating influences of the adult inmates, most of whom are from the lowest strata of life.” Adults coded as “immoral” were disproportionately those from immigrant and working-class backgrounds.18 Anti-immigrant sentiment was not incidental to welfare reform, but deeply integral to its design. In expli- cit language, academic studies linked the “importation of foreign laborers”to “dependency among adults and children,”and asserted as fact that “low class laborers,generally of foreign birth or descent” have “menac[ing]” children.19 A professor from the University of Colorado warned of both the“army of immigrants”and“army of human energy among the ranks of the orphan population.” A “clear line of demarcation,”he suggested,was the only solution to this problem.20 The psychologist G. Stanley Hall remarked in 1916 that “from the standpoint of eugenic evolution alone VOLUME XI ISSUE I SPRING 2021 5
considered, [certain immigrant groups] are mostly fit for extermination in the interests of the progress of the race,” and was quoted in a study by the Russell Sage Foundation on orphan children.21 Echoed in governmental reports,officials expressed that immorality was “inherited,” and assessed that “vice and crime” were “forced upon [orphans] by those whose blood courses in their veins.” Definitions of worthy and unworthy paupers, upon which hinged the creation of entire governmental entities, were steeped in white supremacist convictions.22 To this point, a committee formed in 1851 entitled the Massachusetts Board of Commissioners in Relation to Alien Passengers and State Paupers conflated the threat of homeless paupers with immigrant residents.The intention of this organization was to “ascertain the names of all forei- 21 Slingerland, Child Welfare Work in California, 38. 22 Massachusetts Senate, Report of Committee on Public Charitable Institutions on Visits to Several Public Chari- table Institutions Receiving Patronage of the State, no. 79, (Boston: Massachusetts Senate, 1851). 23 Massachusetts General Court, An Act to Appoint a Board of Commissioners in Relation to Alien Passengers and State Paupers, May 24, 1851, chap. 347, (Boston: Massachusetts General Court, 1851). 24 Massachusetts General Court, An Act in Relation to Paupers Having No Settlement in This Commonwealth, May 20, 1852, chap. 275, (Boston: Massachusetts General Court, 1852). 25 New York Board of State Charities, Twenty-first Annual Report of the New York State Board of Charities: Special Report of the Standing Committee on the Insane in the Matter of the Investigation of the New York City Asylum for the Insane (New York: New York Board of State Charities, 1887); Massachusetts Commissioner of Mental Diseases, Annu- al Report of the Massachusetts Commissioner of Mental Diseases for the Year Ending November 20, 1924: Report of Director of Social Service (Boston: Massachusetts Commissioner of Mental Diseases, 1924). gners [...] and also procure all such further information in relation to age,etc.[...] in order to identify them in case they should hereafter become a public charge.”23 Following suit, 1852 witnessed the criminalization of vagrant paupers and systemic deportations of the homeless; no less than 7,005 paupers were deported from Massachusetts between 1870 and 1878.24 Adjacent to welfare,the expansion of a diagnostic apparatus saw to the practice of psychiatric evaluations andthecollectionofpersonaldatainasylumsandprisons— not dissimilar from processes for pauper classification and the record-keeping of vagrants.The carceral state was formed in tandem with welfare.25 Amid these national trends, Lowell in the early 20th century operated as a self-contained welfare apparatus. In the years leading up to the federalization of Beds for children in the interior of orphanage, unknown date. [3] 6 THE FRANCO-AMERICAN ORPHANAGE
welfare in the New Deal, Lowell assumed responsibility for impoverished children and adults within its boundaries. In 1901, for example, the city invested a total of $46,791.45 in relief, including expenses for ambulances, food, medicine, surgeons, and coffins.26 The following year, Lowell allocated $4,605.21 for the support of 98 orphans. Expenditures for dependent children ranged between $1.25 (per orphan, per week) at St. Peter’s Or- phan Asylum and $7.00 (per orphan, per week) at the Children’s Hospital in Boston. Interestingly, Lowell’s charitable budget made accommodations “on account of Lowell’s paupers residing [elsewhere],” with payments totaling $68.28 to Beverly, $482.25 to Lawrence, and $542.28 to Boston in the year 1902.27 This system of localized responsibility can be understood as incentivizing the tracking and policing of paupers, particularly with programs geared toward behavior modification. In this way, the framework for Massachusetts’ state welfare system predated the “big bang” of Roosevelt’s New Deal and was initially a localized process. Contradiction was built into the DNA of Mas- sachusetts welfare from the beginning.The fundamental tenets of welfare—in which poverty was both a charitable cause and a moral failing to be discouraged—were locked in existential conflict. As Michael Katz (1984) has explained in his research on almshouses: Built into the foundation of the almshouse were irre- concilable contradictions.The almshouse was to be at once a refuge for the helpless and a deterrent to the able-bo- died. It was to care for the poor humanely and to dis- courage them from applying for relief. In the end, one of these poles would have to prevail.28 Development of the welfare state was shaped by conflicting and discriminatory conceptions of care. Demographic anxiety underpinned moves toward cen- tralization and classification. Specialized institutions of rehabilitation replaced generalized institutions of relief 26 Lowell City Council, Auditor's Sixty-Sixth Annual Report of the Receipts and Expenditures of the City of Lowell, Massachusetts. Together with the Treasurer’s Account and the Account of the Commissioners of Sinking Funds for the Financial Year Ending December 31, 1901 (Lowell: Buckland Publishing Company, 1901). 27 In turn, Lowell received funding from neighboring municipalities for their claimed paupers. Lowell City Council, Report of the Secretary of the Overseers of the Poor for Lowell, January 1, 1902 (Lowell: Buckland Publishing Company, 1902), 24. 28 Michael B. Katz, "Poorhouses and the Origins of the Public Old Age Home," in The Milbank Memorial Fund Quarterly. Health and Society (Hoboken: Wiley, 1984), 118. 29 David Vermette, A Distinct Alien Race: The Untold Story of Franco-Americans, Industrialization, Immigration, and Religious Strife (Montreal: Baraka Books, 2018), 98-111. in order to omit care to low-income, non-native populations.As a result,immigrants in Lowell relied upon their own community networks to build systems of assistance. HE INTERRELATION OF industry and immigration remains key to understanding the economic context for French-Cana- dians in Lowell. As early as the 1840s, mill recruiters scoured depressed areas of Quebec for inex- pensive labor, attracting wage-earners with the promise of opportunity and personal betterment.A ten-day strike following the reopening of Lowell mills after the Ci- vil War further accelerated recruitment in Canada. By 1900, 24% of all cotton mill workers nationwide were French-Canadian New Englanders;workers with at least one French-Canadian parent comprised 44% of textile operatives at this time.29 The dimensions of French-Ca- nadian identity in the U.S. were, from the beginning, economic in addition to cultural.In a presentation to the Massachusetts Bureau of Labor Statistics, the editor of the newspaper Le Travailleur elucidated this connection: The Canadians are peaceful, law-abiding citizens; and they accept the wages fixed by the liberality, or sometimes the cupidity and avarice, of the manufacturers. […] Ca- nadians have been great factors in the prosperity of ma- nufacturing interests. Steady workers and skilful [sic], the manufacturers have benefited by their condition of THE FINEST MILLS AND THE DIRTIEST STREETS Economic Context of the Orphanage T VOLUME XI ISSUE I SPRING 2021 7
poverty to reduce wages and compete favorably with the industries of the Old World.30 Upon arrival to Lowell,French Canadians faced deteriorating working conditions, living conditions, and nativist backlash. Public officials who referred to French-Canadians struck a careful balance between demonization and appreciation of their contributions. Simultaneously, immigrants were a “horde of industrial invaders” and “indefatigable workers” supporting the city’s most lucrative industries. Condemnation and exploitation were not opposing forces but two sides of the same coin. David Vermette (2018) demonstrates that the degradation of industrial conditions coincided with the shift from Yankee women to immigrants as the principal source of labor in Lowell.The defamation of French Canadians, such that they were referred to as “sordid” and “an inferior race,” was both symptomatic of and justification for the inhumane environment in which they lived.31 Vermette explains, It was the othering of the distinct, alien races in the mills that made possible this dehumanization, the identifi- cation of human beings with interchangeable machine parts. Care and empathy extended to those within the tribe and French-speaking Catholics of Quebec were not members of the Yankee tribe.32 Downstream, poverty wages and the retrac- tion of mill-subsidized housing had created a health crisis. In 1882, the Lowell Board of Health reported that the French-Canadian neighborhoods of Little Ca- nada were an “unwholesome quarters” where “sanitary 30 Le Travailleur was a French-Canadian newspaper based in Worcester, Massachusetts. Massachusetts Bureau of Statistics of Labor, "Resolve Relative to a Uniform System of Laws in Certain States Regulating the Hours of La- bor," in Thirteenth Annual Report of the Massachusetts Bureau of Labor Statistics, chap. 29 (Boston: Massachusetts Bureau of Statistics of Labor). 31 DavidVermette, A Distinct Alien Race, 207, 250. Notably, the degradation of working conditions at this time coincided with an overall increasing population of immigrants in Lowell. Statistics compiled by the Lowell Board ofTrade report that 40% of the city’s population circa 1916 was native born.The remaining 80% of residents were of either foreign or mixed heritage. Lowell Board ofTrade, Digest of the City of Lowell and its SurroundingTowns (Lowell: Lowell Board ofTrade, 1916), 5. 32 Lowell Board of Trade, Digest of the City of Lowell and its Surrounding Towns, 116. 33 George Frederick Kenngott, The Record of a City: A Social Survey of Lowell, Massachusetts (New York: Mac- millan Company, 1912), 68-71. 34 Yukari Takai, Gendered Passages: French-Canadian Migration to Lowell, Massachusetts, 1900-1920 (New York: Peter Lang Publications, 2008), 50. 35 Statistics calculated from survey data. Children's ages ranged between 1 and 5. G. Frederick Kenngott, The Record of a City: A Social Survey of Lowell, Massachusetts (New York: Macmillan Company, 1912), 68-71, 133-34. 36 Frederick Kenngott, The Record of a City: A Social Survey of Lowell, Massachusetts, 108. 37 Alfred Laliberté, "L’école paroissiale," in [Rev. Adrien Verette] La Croisade Franco-Americaine (Manchester, laws [were] grossly violated. As a result, “many of these innocents [have] died from lack of nourishment, care, cleanliness, and pure air.”33 Two years prior, the Lowell Daily Citizen described the city as having “the finest mills and the dirtiest streets," marked by foul odors and animal matter. In 1881, a physician visiting Litt- le Canada found “the family and borders in such close quarters, that the two younger children had to be put to bed in the kitchen sinks.”34 At this time, Lowell’s Little Canada constituted the second densest neighborhood in the country after Ward 4 of New York City.The pre- carity that French-Canadian immigrants experienced was most evident in their heightened mortality rates; between 1890 and 1909 the likelihood of French-Ca- nadian children passing away before the age of 5 ranged from 14% to 18% compared to 3% for native children. In 1890, adult French-Canadians experienced more than double the 15% mortality rate of their non-immigrant counterparts. The stakes for mutual aid societies in Lowell were demonstrably high.35 Shared culture was the foundation for facilitating intra-community relief in Lowell. By 1880, French-Cana- dians in New England had founded 63 parishes, 73 national societies, and 37 French-language newspapers, often directly and indirectly involved with charitable causes. By 1908, 133 parochial schools attending to 55,000 students had been instituted.36 As the artist Alfred Laliberté has articulated:“the parish school remains the cornerstone of our national survivance in the United States.We can have parishes,societies,newspapers,and efforts of all kinds,but if our children do not attend parochial schools, we [will] lose all that.”Survival was a matter both literal and cultural.37 8 THE FRANCO-AMERRICAN ORPHANAGE
Interestingly, Little Canada was an enclave no- table for its French-Canadian roots and internal demographic diversity. Yukari Takai (2008) finds that the neighborhoods attracted workers of various backgrounds; a former resident recalled, “Everyone spoke French, including several families with names such as O’Beirne, O’Flahavan,Moore,Murtagh,Thompson,O’Brien,Lord, Sawyer, Thurber, Sigman, Tumas, Protopapas, Brady, and Grady.”38 It is this complexity—that the city was a place where immigrants could affirm their identities, be absorbed into other identities, and one where cultural he- terogeneity was celebrated among the workers—which offers a glimpse of a multicultural ideal specific to Lowell. Before instituting the FAO, the Grey Nuns were certain to include the clause: “while the orphanage is essentially Franco-American,we will not exclude other nationalities.” Children from Italian,Irish,and Syrian backgrounds were accepted throughout the subsequent decades.39 Indeed, the development of the FAO as a mutual aid organization was in many ways the mirror inverse of restructuring that occurred at the state level.The orphanage was established to be specifically French-Canadian and later expanded to cater for a more general, diverse population; Massachu- setts policymakers, on the other hand, worked to restrict access to more specific and narrowly defined categories of paupers.American relief,in this way,has historically been a site of contestation and contradiction.The FAO may have been the pride of French-Canadians, but it was also a resource made deliberately available to anyone who needed it. N.H.: L’Avenir National, 1938), 256. 38 This was likely because of Little Canada's proximity to local mills. Takai, Gendered Passages, 55. 39 "Correspondence of Grey Nuns 1908" Box 1 in Franco-American Orphanage/School collection at the Center for Lowell History; "Admission records," Box 4 of Franco-American Orphanage/School collection at the Center for Lowell History. 40 "Compter de l’Année," Box 3 Franco-American Orphanage/School collection, Center for Lowell History. 41 The FAO remained at full occupancy every year between 1908 and 1932. There was an expansion of the orphanage's facilities in 1913 that can account for a surge in orphans cared for by the FAO. This coincided with both a deadly pandemic and the first world war; Statistics calculated by author from admission records 1908-1932. "Admission Records," Box 4 Franco-American Orphanage/School collection, Center for Lowell History. 42 To further the conversation on industrialization and immigration as interrelated processes, it is worth noting HE FAO CAN be conceptualized as both a mutual aid society and an agency opera- ting on behalf of the emerging welfare state. As early as 1910, the FAO received funding from the Massachusetts Bureau of Charity that ranged between $300 and $700 annually and amounted to approximately 1-2% of the orphanage’s income. Between 50-80% of the institution’s revenue was derived from “child’s pensions”paid by the orphans’families. Payment varied according to means; of the 291 children in 1920, 188 paid $3 per week,84 paid $2.25,and 19 paid nothing. As stipulated in the Grey Nuns’contract,“if an unknown orphan is admitted to the orphanage, Monsieur le Curé of [St. Joseph’s] parish would pay his pension […] to be reimbursed by the parishioners.” Contributions through Oeuvre du Pain,the fundraising initiative,peaked in 1923 at $5,567.12 and dropped to an all-time low of $99.55 in 1933.40 Orphan families, the French-Canadian community,and the state of Massachusetts account for the FAO’s survival at a time of economic recession and depression. The term “charity”ascribed to the orphanage understates both its proximity to the state and the contributions of ordinary people to its success. A statistical analysis of the FAO’s admission records dating 1908 to 1932 further illuminates the institution’s role in the community. Information including the orphan’s birthday, parental occupations, home address, ethnicity, date of entry, and date of departure was dutifully recorded by the Grey Nuns when available.41 As depicted in Figure 1.1, most orphans had French-Canadian heritage despite minor diversification in the 1920s. Between 1908 and 1920, a considerable 97% of orphans were French-Canadian compared to 85% between 1920 and 1932. Figure 2.1 examines the representation of orphans from industrial cities, with exactly 69.7% from Lowell and the remainder with ties to Lawrence and Haverhill. In total, 94% of children were born in Massachusetts.42 ORPHANS WERE NOT PARENTLESS Inside the Franco-American Orphanage T VOLUME XI ISSUE I SPRING 2021 9
Demonstrated in Figure 3.1, the plurality of parental occupations for children at the FAO were mill workers and journaliers (“day workers”). Most interestingly, the 3% of orphans with “none”parents—including those listed as “dead,” “unknown,” or “unemployed”—reveals that 97% of orphans, the overwhelming majority, had living and working parents.43 The documented du- rations-of-stay for orphans at the FAO, depicted in Fi- gures 4.1 and 4.2, bolster this discovery. Between 1908 and 1932, over half—55%—of children were dropped off and picked up within the span of a year. Approximately 78% of orphans resided at the FAO for less than 3 years. The average length of stay was 21 months compared to the median of 9 months. Most orphans at the FAO (a) had living,working parents,(b) were financially supported by their families, and (c) returned to their families after a temporary leave. This is a reconceptualization of what it meant to be an orphan in the early 20th century.44 In the case of a Syrian workman,George Alias,a decision was made to keep his son Philippe and daugh- ter Eva at the orphanage for 22 days. Edmund Pinard, a carpenter in a nearby neighborhood, dropped off and picked up his son Joseph three times between 1926 and 1931. The three sons of Emile and Rose Duchanne, si- milarly, stayed for a two month stretch in 1930 and for a four-month stretch the same year. Parents, it is clear, were not abandoning their children. The FAO provided a service for surviving industrial life.45 HE FAO IN Lowell was an organization inseparable from its industrial context. This paper’s discovery that orphans were supported by families and given temporary reprieve at the institution can reconceptualize the that the mill cities of Haverhill, Fall River, Lawrence, and Lynn were locations with large immigrant populations; "Admis- sion Records," Box 4 Franco-American Orphanage/School collection, Center for Lowell History. 43 Journaliers worked primarily in seasonal and temporary job. Additionally, between 1908 and 1932, only 22 children were placed into adoptive care. This was primarily to other family members. "Admission Records," Box 4 Fran- co-American Orphanage/School collection, Center for Lowell History. 44 "Admission Records," Box 4 Franco-American Orphanage/School collection, Center for Lowell History. 45 "Admission Records," Box 4 Franco-American Orphanage/School collection, Center for Lowell History. 46 C.L., "Little Canada," oral interview, May 3, 1975, typewritten transcript. Center for Lowell History, French-Ca- nadian Oral Histories, 5, 22. 47 Richard Santerre, La Paroisse Saint-Jean-Baptiste et les Franco-Americains de Lowell, Massachusetts, 1868- 1968 (Manchester, N.H.: Editions Lafayette, 1993), 43-44. meaning of early 20th century charity. The FAO is analogous to contemporary systems of mutual aid and can demonstrate the indirect, localized mechanisms by which the Massachusetts state distributed relief. The myth of orphanages as repositories for abandoned children remains an outdated stigmatization of working-class parents; indeed, this paper outlines the ways in which orphanages were resources created by neighborhoods in collaboration with each other. Fur- thermore, the centrality of immigrant identity—both as the framework for organizing within working communities and as a site of backlash by nativist intel- lectuals—to the development of American welfare is posited to be a significant dimension of analysis and one that merits future research. The FAO is proof of the interdependent relationships that defined the French-Canadian community in Lowell.As has been articulated by a former resident of Lowell’s Little Canada: The Population was so big in Little Canada that the blocks were real[ly] close. But all families got along beau- tiful[ly] and we were all French people. […] Everybo- dy helped everybody, which is not done nowadays like it was then, but people that had the money—if one needed help that means they would get together and they would come over and help. [...] If you look back to it, I still think I’d like to be there.46 The FAO demonstrates the self-determination of French-Canadians within a context of structural inequality. As Richard Santerre (1993) has put into words, “people found emotional sustenance, psycho- logical security, and a sense of meaning in Little Ca- nada of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.” This meaning and security was built from the bottom up by working families.47 CONCLUSION T 10 THE FRANCO-AMERICAN ORPHANAGE
Figure 1.1 Orphan Ethnicities 1908-1912 1913-1917 1918-1922 1923-1927 1928-1932 % Overall 384 1010 703 550 473 96.0% Fr. Canadian 0 11 10 11 20 1.6% Irish 0 0 3 35 10 1.4% American 0 15 15 59 33 0.1% Italian 4 17 6 76 63 3.9% Other The “Other” category represents the small number of Syrian and Belgian children at the orphanage. [5] Figure 2.1 Top City Origins of Orphans 1908-1912 1913-1917 1918-1922 1923-1927 1928-1932 % Overall 277 627 634 404 311 69.7% Lowell 11 93 4 19 15 4.4% Lawrence 14 24 12 47 10 3.3% Haverhill 1 13 4 31 57 3.3% Salem 4 43 12 8 33 3.1% Lynn 8 6 5 22 7 1.5% Boston [6] Figure 3.1 Top Parental Occupations of Orphans 1908-1912 1913-1917 1918-1922 1923-1927 1928-1932 % Overall 136 249 109 142 106 36.1% Mill workers 121 189 75 42 72 24.2% Day workers 16 57 37 22 24 7.6% Machinists 22 24 23 31 16 5.6% Carpenters 8 33 11 32 16 4.9% Shoemakers 8 21 6 12 18 3.2% Painters 0 21 7 9 27 3.1% Clerks 2 7 6 21 5 2.0% Metalsmiths 1 5 3 12 18 1.9% Drivers 13 2 3 23 25 3.2% None “Day Workers” consisted of seasonal and temporary laborers, primarily working in mills, construction, and agriculture. The “None” category signifies the number of parents designated as “absent,” “unemployed,” “sick,” “deceased,” or "handicapped." Note: not all parental occupations are represented on the table. Other professions include electricians, grocers, farmers, bakers, barbers, and plumbers. [7] VOLUME XI ISSUE I SPRING 2021 11
Figure 4.1 Length of Stay at Orphanages (Percentages) 1908-1912 1913-1917 1918-1922 1923-1927 1928-1932 Total 5.2% 14.9% 13.8% 8% 8.9% 10.6% 5+ years 0.6% 8.6% 18.5% 10.3% 14.9% 11.6% 3-5 years 21.4% 4.8% 32.5% 24.5% 28.1% 22.7% 1-3 years 14.5% 8.3% 11.8% 18.7% 14.5% 13.7% 6-12 months 17.9% 14.3% 6.3% 15.7% 12.3% 12.7% 3-6 months 41% 49.5% 17.5% 23% 21.7% 28.6% <3 months [8] Figure 4.2 Length of Stay at Orphanage (Mean and Median) 1908-1912 1913-1917 1918-1922 1923-1927 1928-1932 Total 11.2 20.4 28.4 19.7 21.6 21.4 Mean 3 3 21 9 12 9 Median Units in months. [9] BIBLIOGRAPHY C.L., “Little Canada,” Oral interview, May 3, 1975, typewritten transcript. Center for Lowell History, French-Canadian Oral Histories. Casey, Hon. James B. 1906. Inaugural Address of His Honor to the City Council. Lowell: Buckland Pub- lishing Company. Hathitrust.org. Crenson,Matthew A.and Peter Fritzsche.Building the Invisible Orphanage: A Prehistory of the American Wel- fare System.Boston: Harvard University Press,1998. Davis, Robert A. Mentality of Orphans. Boston: Gor- ham Press, 1930. Hathitrust.org. Franco-American Orphanage. Admissions Records. Center for Lowell History, Franco-American Orphanage/School Collection Box 4. Franco-American Orphanage. “Compter de l’Année.” Center for Lowell History, Franco-American Orphanage/School Collection Box 3. Franco-American Orphanage. “Franco-American Orphanage Housed in Famous Old Home.” Un- identified Newspaper Clipping. Center for Low- ell History, Franco-American Orphanage/School Collection Box 2. Franco-American Orphanage.“Franco-American Orphanage.”Center for Lowell History, Fran- co-American Orphanage/School Collection Box 1. Franco-American Orphanage.“Recorded Meetings of the Members of the Executive Committee of the Orphanage.”Center for Lowell History, Fran- co-American Orphanage/School Collection Box 3. Franco-American Orphanage. “Une Lettre par Sr. Théodore, Septembre 1917.” Center for Lowell History, Franco-American Orphanage/School Collection Box 2. Katz, Michael B. In the Shadow of the Poorhouse: The So- cial History of Welfare in America. New York: Basic Books, 1986. Katz, Michael B. "Poorhouses and the Origins of the Public Old Age Home." The Milbank Memori- al Fund Quarterly. Health and Society 62, no. 1 (1984): 110-40. doi:10.2307/3349894. Kenngott, G. Frederick. The record of a city: a social survey of Lowell, Massachusetts. New York: Macmillan Company, 1912. Hathitrust.org. Kleinberg, S. J. Widows and Orphans First: The Fami- ly Economy and Social Welfare Policy, 1880-1939. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2006. Kropotkin, Peter. Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution. London: Heinemann, 1902. Reprint, Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, 2012. Citations refer to the Dover edition. 12 THE FRANCO-AMERICAN ORPHANAGE
Laliberté, Alfred. “L’ecole paroissiale,” in [Rev. Adrien Verette] La Croisade Franco-Americaine. Man- chester, N.H.: L’Avenir National, 1938. Lowell Board of Charities. 1908. “Financial State- ment of Charity Department for Year 1908,” Annual Report of the Superintendent for the State Charities. Lowell: Buckland Publishing Compa- ny. Hathitrust.org. Lowell Board of Charities. 1910. “Financial State- ment of Charity Department for Year 1910,” Annual Report of the Superintendent for the State Charities. Lowell: Buckland Publishing Compa- ny. Hathitrust.org. Lowell Board of Trade. 1916. Digest of the City of Low- ell and its Surrounding Towns, published August 1, 1916, by the Executive Committee of the Lowell Board of Trade. Lowell: Lowell Board of Trade. Hathitrust.org. Lowell City Council. 1901. Auditor’s Sixty-Sixth Annual Report of the Receipts and Expenditures of the City of Lowell, Massachusetts. Together with the Treasurer’s Account and the Account of the Com- missioners of Sinking Funds for the Financial Year Ending December 31, 1901. Lowell: Buckland Publishing Company. Hathitrust.org. Lowell City Council. 1902. Municipal Register Con- taining Rules and Orders of the City Council and a List of the Government and Officers of the City of Lowell. Lowell: Buckland Publishing Company. Hathitrust.org. Lowell City Council. 1910. Municipal Register Con- taining Rules and Orders of the City Council and a List of the Government and Officers of the City of Lowell. Lowell: Buckland Publishing Company. Hathitrust.org. Lowell City Council. 1902. Report of the Secretary of the Overseers of the Poor for Lowell, January 1, 1902. Lowell: Buckland Publishing Company. Hathitrust.org. Massachusetts Board of State Charities. 1866. Second Annual Report, January 1866. Boston: Massachu- setts Board of State Charities. Hathitrust.org. Massachusetts Board of State Charities. 1914. Argu- ments Presented March 12, 1914 by the Massachu- setts State Board of Charity Through its Secretary, Robert W. Kelso, to the Legislative Committee Against Proposals of the Massachusetts Commission on Economy and Efficiency, Senate Document 440. Boston: Massachusetts State Board of Charities. Hathitrust.org. Massachusetts Bureau of Statistics of Labor. 1880. “Resolve Relative to a Uniform System of Laws in Certain States Regulating the Hours of Labor,” Thirteenth Annual Report of the Massachusetts Bureau of Labor Statistics, chap. 29. Hathitrust.org. Massachusetts Bureau of Statistics of Labor. 1881. Resolutions Protesting Against Certain Portions of Carrol D. Wright’s Annual Report of the Bureau of Statistics. Boston: Massachusetts Bureau of Statis- tics of Labor. Hathitrust.org. Massachusetts Child Council. 1939. Juvenile Delin- quency in Massachusetts as a Public Responsibility; An Examination into the Present Methods of Deal- ing with Child Behavior, its Legal Background and the Indicated Steps for Greater Adequacy. Boston: Massachusetts Child Council. Hathitrust.org. Massachusetts Child Labor Committee. 1910. “Child Labor in Massachusetts.” Annual Report of the Massachusetts Child Labor Committee. Bos- ton: Massachusetts Child Labor Committee. Hathitrust.org. Massachusetts Child Labor Committee. 1912. “Child Labor in Massachusetts,” Annual Report of the Massachusetts Child Labor Committee. Bos- ton: Massachusetts Child Labor Committee. Hathitrust.org. Massachusetts Child Labor Committee. 1921. Hand- book of Constructive Child Labor Reform in Mas- sachusetts. Boston: Massachusetts Child Labor Committee. Hathitrust.org. Massachusetts Commissioner of Mental Diseases. 1924. Annual Report of the Massachusetts Com- missioner of Mental Diseases for the Year Ending November 20, 1924: Report of Director of Social Service. Boston: Massachusetts Commissioner of Mental Diseases. Hathitrust.org. Massachusetts General Court. 1851. An Act to Ap- point a Board of Commissioners in Relation to Alien Passengers and State Paupers, May 24, 1851, chap. 347. Boston: Massachusetts GeneraL Court. Hathitrust.org. Massachusetts General Court. 1852. An Act in Re- lation to Paupers Having No Settlement in This Commonwealth, May 20, 1852, chap. 275. Boston: Massachusetts General Court. Hathitrust.org. VOLUME XI ISSUE I SPRING 2021 13
Image and Figure Sources Massachusetts Legislative Committee. 1821. The Josiah Quincy Report of 1821 on the Pauper Laws of Mas- sachusetts, Written for the Massachusetts Legislative Committee. Boston: Massachusetts Legislative Committee. Hathitrust.org. Massachusetts Prison Commissioners. 1901. First Annual Report. Boston: Massachusetts Prison Commissioners. Hathitrust.org Massachusetts Senate. 1850. Report of Committee on Public Charitable Institutions on Visits to Several Public Charitable Institutions Receiving Patronage of the State, no. 79. Boston: Massachusetts Sen- ate. Hathitrust.org. Massachusetts Senate. 1858. Report of the Joint Stand- ing Committee on Public Charitable Institutions as to Whether Any Reduction Can be Made in Ex- penditures for the Support of State Paupers, no. 63. Boston: Massachusetts Senate. Hathitrust.org. Massachusetts State Board of Lunacy and Charity. 1906. Twenty-Eighth Annual Report. Boston: Wright and Potter Printing Co. State Printers. Hathitrust.org. Massachusetts State Board of Lunacy and Charity. 1919. Forty-First Annual Report. Boston: Wright and Potter Printing Co. State Printers. Hathi- trust.org. Massachusetts State Charities. 1859. Report of the Special Joint Committee Appointed to Investigate the Whole System of the Public Charitable Institutions of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, during the Recess of the Legislature in 1858: Massachusetts Sen- ate Document No.2. Boston: Massachusetts State Charities. Hathitrust.org. Meehan, Hon. John F. 1905. Inaugural Address to the Lowell City Council. Lowell: Buckland Publishing Company. Hathitrust.org. Mohr, John W., and Vincent Duquenne. "The Duality of Culture and Practice: Poverty Relief in New York City, 1888-1917." Theory and Society 26, no. 2/3 (1997): 305-56. www.jstor.org/stable/657930. New York Board of State Charities, Twenty-first An- nual Report of the New York State Board of Chari- ties: Special Report of the Standing Committee on the Insane in the Matter of the Investigation of the New York City Asylum for the Insane. New York: New York Board of State Charities, 1887. Phelps, Edward Bunnell. “Infant Mortality and Its Relation to the Employment of Mothers.” Washington: Government Printing Office, 1912. Hathitrust.org. Ramey, Jessie. Child Care in Black and White: Working Parents and the History of Orphanages. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2012. Slingerland, William H. Child Welfare Work in Califor- nia: A Study of Agencies and Institutions. Concord: The Rumford Press, 1916. Hathitrust.org. Takai, Yukari. Gendered Passages: French-Canadian Mi- gration to Lowell, Massachusetts, 1900-1920. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, Inc, 2008. United States Children’s Bureau. “Child Care and Child Welfare; Outlines for Study.”Washington: Federal Board for Vocational Education, 1921. Hathitrust.org. Vermette, David. A Distinct Alien Race: The Untold Story of Franco-Americans. Montreal: Baraka Books, 2018. Wagner,David.Ordinary People:In and Out of Poverty in the Gilded Age.New York: Paradigm Publishers,2008 Wolfe, Alan. The Limits of Legitimacy: Political Con- tradictions of Contemporary Capitalism. New York: Free Press, 1977. [1] Box 12 of Franco-American Orphanage/School collection, Center for Lowell History. [2] Box 12 of Franco-American Orphanage/School collection, Center for Lowell History. [3] Box 4 of Franco-American Orphanage/School collection, Center for Lowell History. [4] Box 4 of Franco-American Orphanage/School collection, Center for Lowell History. [5] Box 4 of Franco-American Orphanage/School collection, Center for Lowell History. [6] Box 4 of Franco-American Orphanage/School collection, Center for Lowell History. [7] Box 4 of Franco-American Orphanage/School collection, Center for Lowell History. [8] Box 12 of Franco-American Orphanage/School collection, Center for Lowell History. [9] Box 12 of Franco-American Orphanage/School collection, Center for Lowell History. 14 THE FRANCO-AMERICAN ORPHANAGE
SPRING 2021 TECHNOLOGY AND PARADIGM The X-Ray,Electrical Therapeutics,and the Consolidation of Biomedicine by Libby Hoffenberg, Swarthmore College '20 Written for an interdisciplinary honors thesis in History and Philosophy of the Body Advised by Professor Timothy Burke Edited by Daniel Ma, Gabby Sevillano, and Katie Painter An 1897 setup for taking an x-ray of the hand. [1] VOLUME XI ISSUE I SPRING 2021 15
N NOVEMBER OF 1895, physicist Wil- helm Röntgen discovered a wavelength of electromagnetic radiation that came to be known as the “x-ray” or the “Röntgen ray.” Within months, experimenters and laypeople were producing x-ray images using a simple set of machinery. In order to make an x-ray exposure, one needed just three elements: a current source, a Crookes tube, and a photographic plate.1 Although the process was relatively simple, material limitations made the apparatus brea- kable, bulky, and unreliable. Historians have referred to this phase of the x-ray’s existence as the “gas tube era,” which more or less ended in 1913 when stronger and more versatile equipment was developed.2 The unwieldiness of the x-ray machine as a physical object mirrored its clumsy implementation in various medical and non-medical enterprises. The x-ray was regarded with fascination as a device that clearly did something—it “miraculously” revealed the body’s interior and produced outwardly observable effects on the body—but it had ambiguous uses and meanings. It was entertained as a therapeutic tool in treating everything from blindness to cancer,3 a photographic novelty that produced chic and “coquettish” images of women of means,4 and a way to substantiate prosecuted criminals’ claims to insanity,5 among many other uses. Historians have duly noted the dramatic public re- ception of the x-ray, as well as many of its initial experi- mental applications.Theorists in visual studies particularly emphasize the public’s reaction to the x-ray as “spectacle” and the capitalization of novelty by professionals of various standings to substantiate their authority. This interpretation importantly complicates teleological narratives of the x-ray and articulates the multiple and unstable significa- 1 Matthew Lavine, "The Early Clinical X-Ray in the United States: Patient Experiences and Public Perceptions," in Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 67, no. 4 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 590. 2 Richard F. Mould, A Century of X-Rays and Radioactivity in Medicine: with Emphasis on Photographic Records of the Early Years (London: Institute of Physics Publishing, 1993), ch. 5. 3 "Wonderful X RayTests: Blind Man SeesThroughTop Of His Own Head," Chicago DailyTribune, January 2, 1897, 14. 4 "Her Latest Photograph: It Is An Electrical Picture," New York Times, May 29, 1898, 14. 5 "Electricity Consumption: The New Treatment Of Phthisis By The Use" Los Angeles Times, September 5, 1897, 16. 6 See Lisa Cartwright, Screening the Body: Tracing Medicine's Visual Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minne- sota Press, 1995); Joel D. Howell, Technology in the Hospital Transforming Patient Care in the Early Twentieth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995) for analyses of the x-ray’s implication in public visual culture and the development of the 20th century hospital, respectively. tions of a new technology.It upends the idea that the x-ray was,from its inception,destined to claim the authoritative place it holds in current healthcare practices. It affirms that technologies do not arise in response to pre-existing needs,but they become institutionalized by and in service of contingent relations of power.6 Most histories of the x-ray, however, consider its development as a diagnostic screening tool and fail to consider, or make only cursory reference to, its use as a therapeutic agent. These accounts obscure the epistemological complexities implied by the selection of the nas- cent technology’s diagnostic use over its therapeutic one. In this chapter, the narrowing epistemic field of the x-ray is considered alongside the shifting contexts and contents of American medicine.Across approximately the first half of the twentieth century, multiple potentialities of the x-ray were winnowed to a single diagnostic use just as a modern scientific healthcare paradigm was emerging. In other words, the x-ray technology and its symbolic power evolved alongside changes in the knowledge practices sanctioned by modern healthcare. The negotiation of the x-ray’s potentialities can be contextualized by investigating how the uses for the x-ray were entertained in a medical context that was itself uncertain. Different philosophies, metaphors,and interests were called upon to justify its privileged position as a device of specialized visibility. While the x-ray was invented in Germany, many novel uses of and deliberations over the technology took place in American hospitals, journals, and other sites of medical activity. The x-ray’s early days of use and experimentation—from its invention in 1895 until roughly 1940—reveal an unruly history that broadly parallels na- vigations of ambiguity in the American medical system. The x-ray moved through a series of epistemological and professional paradigms, each of which shaped and were shaped by x-ray practice. The x-ray debuted in a medical system that was largely constituted by idiosyncratic doctor-patient relationships, which were themselves INTRODUCTION I 16 TECHNOLOGY AND PARADIGM
relatively closed worlds of therapeutic practice. In the context of this testing ground,the x-ray proved amenable to a number of explanatory frameworks, as eclectic practitioners integrated the device into their own ideological priorities.Many early practitioners understood the x-ray’s therapeutic potential in relation to other therapeutic uses of electricity, thus revealing the technology’s absorption into vitalistic, or spiritualized, medical paradigms. During the x-ray’s “middle years,” approximately 1900 to 1918, the technology assumed an aura of professional appeal based on its capacity to authoritatively image the body’s interior. At this time, the x-ray became privileged for its capacity to produce certain scientifi- cally verified images. The ascendance of the x-ray’s diagnostic use sheds light on the growing primacy of visual knowledge, and specifically of mechanically-produced images, within medical practice. In its post-WWI years, the x-ray became embedded in large industrial-scientific medical institutions. It was in this context of broad redefinitions of healthcare that the x-ray assumed its diagnostic legitimacy, taking its place alongside a host of other organizational and information technologies that tethered together the practices of different physicians into a single system.At this time,healthcare was increasingly reconfigured as a business that was premised on the modern individual’s health-seeking efforts.The x-ray helped to produce the notion of the body as a site of conti- nual maintenance,as it made the authoritative visualization of the body’s interior a coordinating principle for diagnostic activity. Esteemed medical professionals increasingly augmented their medical judgment with the x-ray’s technolo- gically-advanced capacity to objectively discern the most fundamental structures of any individual. HE X-RAY EMERGED at a moment of confusion about how best to govern the body. In the latter part of the nineteenth 7 P.Thomas, “Homeopathy in the USA," in British Homeopathic Journal 90, no. 2 (NewYork:Thieme, 2001), 99-103. 8 James C. Whorton, Nature Cures: The History of Alternative Medicine in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 18. century and into the early twentieth century, the set of possibilities for this governance was expansive. The American medical community was actively deliberating between different paradigms for understanding and treating the body. A representative, though not com- prehensive, example of the uncertainty regarding medical paradigm was the dispute between allopathic and homeopathic philosophies of care.The tensions between the two illustrate the emergence of an ideologically bounded modern medicine, in relation to which other paradigms would be relegated to the domain of “alter- natives.” Homeopathy and allopathy coordinated their professional activities against one another: the American Medical Association formed in 1847 in response to the organization three years prior of the American Institute of Homoeopathy.7 And, increasingly, regulatory provisions were made to silo the fields from one another: written into the AMA charter was a consultation or ex- clusion clause, meaning that an orthodox doctor could not consult with a homeopath or help a patient who was under concurrent treatment by a homeopath. “Allopathy” was and remains a somewhat conten- tious term. It was coined by Samuel Hahnemann, the in- ventor of homeopathy, in 1807, to designate the opposing ideologies underlying the two medical practices. Homeo- pathic practitioners operated under the principle that “like cures”would cure “like symptoms.”They believed that mi- nute concentrations of a particular toxin would cure the symptoms that the same toxin produced in larger doses. Allopathic practitioners, on the other hand, prescribed cures that opposed the observed symptoms. They sought out substances that would counteract the toxins believed to be causing patients’ ailments.8 Hahnemann used the word “allopathic” to denigrate antagonistic remedies that he believed could only address symptoms and would ine- vitably fail to treat the underlying disease. Homeopathy and allopathy existed alongside one another in the nineteenth century and into the twentieth century,showing that not only were particular cures being deliberated, but the very idea of what constituted a cure was uncertain. The debate between paradigms of care reflected disputed assumptions about what kinds of substances or forces could act on the body to move it closer to health.The way that a body was seen to respond to forces and substances in turn reflected prevailing ways T MEDICINE BEFORE BIOMEDICINE VOLUME XI ISSUE I SPRING 2021 17
of understanding the physical makeup of the world. In charting the unruly history of the x-ray across medical paradigms,different justifications for its use appear in relation to shifting ideas about the constitution of the external world.The ways in which the x-ray is and has been authorized in medical practice reveal much about the assumptions that structure the practice of medicine.Me- dicine is a space where ideas about the world are concre- tized in bodies, and in the social and material relations that produce health and sickness. In tracking the way that certain explanatory paradigms take precedence over others, one can situate the priorities of medicine within a vast and contingent field of knowledge production and recognize the tensions that lie within it. N ASKING HOW practitioners made sense of the x-ray’s potentialities in the context of prevailing understandings of the world around them, it is helpful to look at the paradigms that shaped the x-ray’s early development. Historians of the x-ray have noted that practitioners of the new device drew on metaphors of light, as they “illu- minated” the interior of the body.The public would have been familiar with a number of other light therapies that existed at the time, including the Finsen light, the light bath, and a light bulb that would literally illuminate one’s body from within.These often unorthodox electrical therapies challenge the device’s reputation as a squarely modern scientific tool. As a therapy that is continuous with both ‘occult’ traditions and distinctly modern ideas about causality,the potency of the x-ray could be situated in see- mingly contradictory ways of understanding the world. Uncertainty about the x-ray was in part mitigated by the American public’s familiarity with electrical therapeutics.The x-ray was new in its ability to produce photographic plates of the body’s interior, but the concept 9 Lisa Rosner, "The Professional Context of Electrotherapeutics," Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 43, no. 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988). 10 Linda Simon, Dark Light: Electricity and Anxiety from theTelegraph to the X-Ray (Orlando: Harcourt Books, 2004), 11. of using electricity for medical therapies was not new. In addition to general public interest in new applications of electricity—newspapers featured regular columns on re- cent developments in all things electrical—medical professionals had been experimenting with “electrotherapy” for much of the latter half of the nineteenth century.9 Electrotherapeutics denoted a broad set of techniques used to run an electric current through a particular part of the body. The term was utilized by practitioners with a range of professional standings and was applied to a large array of technologies and apparatuses. Electrothe- rapeutic textbooks were published, colleges inaugurated, and journals convened, indicating that electrotherapy consisted of a fairly well-defined set of practices, coordinated by particular rationales for their use. Developments in electrotherapeutics were part of a long history of fascination with vital forces.Natural philo- sophersthroughoutthenineteenthcenturywereconcerned with identifying an animating force that would explain the aliveness of living things in the context of a purely physical world. Vitalism, broadly defined, was this quest for a single life energy. The term “electrics” was coined in the sixteenth century in the context of naturalists’ “predilec- tion to sustain this notion of a life-giving energy,”10 and was used variously to talk about gravity, magnetism, and electricity. These mysterious forces were weightless and invisible, yet they could act on living matter. Theorizing the relationship between these forces and the human body, Sir Isaac Newton proposed that this ethereal substance also imbued nerves. Modifying Descartes’ understanding of the nerves as hollow tubes through which vital spirit flowed,Newton supposed,rather,that nerves were solid fi- laments that produced Animal Motion through vibration. This modified theory led eighteenth-century scientists to demonstrate the affinity between “artificial electricity” and “animal electricity”—the former externally-produced and the latter intrinsic to animate beings’ physiological makeup. A singular substance was understood to course through both living bodies and the external world; this was the mechanism whereby qualities of the external world animated the human body. In addition to being a pragmatic way to make sense of how forces inside the body were related to forces outside the body, electricity was also useful in thinking I ELECTRICITY AND VITALISM (1895-1900) 18 TECHNOLOGY AND PARADIGM
through the connection between different parts of the body. Around the turn of the century, medical practitioners were theorizing the body as an integrated whole, coordinated by some set of unifying processes.11 Howe- ver, even prior to advances in fields like psychotherapy and endocrinology—both of which are based on theories of homeostasis in the body—electricity was used to conceptualize the way the body was harmonized. James Miller Beard,a neurologist and contemporary of Edison, popularized the term “neurasthenia”in 1869 as a disease that caused depression and anxiety in modern, intelli- gent people with fast-paced urban lives. In the paradigm of neurasthenia, the nervous system and electricity were closely related both causally and conceptually. Beard theorized that electricity was one of the reasons individuals might develop neurasthenia, as electricity was a prominent feature of modern urban life; those living in cities could not escape the stimulation that was induced by constant artificial light.12 Electricity also allowed Beard to theorize the relationship between mental states and physiological activity through the nervous system, which was increasingly understood as the intersection of body and brain.13 As in both psychotherapy and endocrinology,neurasthenia conceived of a relationship between mental states and the chemical or physical makeup of the affected individual’s body. Electricity enabled Beard to describe this movement between the material and the immaterial. Electricity seemed to coordinate the activity of the outer and inner worlds, generating bodily effects from non-living external objects. The effects of electricity on the body could be understood within the frameworks of both scientific medicine and unorthodox therapies. As electrotherapy became a popular modality, Beard supposed that electricity could be used to cure neurasthenia.14 Although Beard was a noted skeptic of spiritualism, the idea that electricity could be simultaneously a cause and a cure for neurasthenia accorded with the homeopath’s assump- tion that the cure could be the same as the cause of a disease. Beard’s theory gained respectability for its focus 11 Stefanos Geroulanos and Todd Meyers, The Human Body in the Age of Catastrophe: Brittleness, Integration, Science, and the Great War (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2018). 12 Simon, Dark Light, 6. 13 Beatriz Colomina, X-Ray Architecture (Baden, Switzerland: Lars Müller Publishers, 2019). 14 Simon, Dark Light, 152. 15 Dr. E. J. Fraser, Medical Electricity: a Treatise on the Nature of Vital Electricity in Health and Disease, With plain Instructions in the uses of Artificial Electricity as a curative agent (Chicago: S. Halsey, 1863). 16 Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, The Theosophical Glossary (London: The Theosophical Publishing Society, 1892), 13. Theosophy was an occultist religious movement begun in America in the late 19th century. on electricity as a feature of the modern world; it was credible to many who sought scientific explanations for the perceived effects of electrical devices. But it was also situated well within theories of causation that would soon be understood by allopathic medicine as primitive and unscientific. Electrotherapeutics appealed to the mysterious mediation of electricity between artificial and natural entities in the world. Practitioners of electrotherapeutics justified their modalities in ways that called upon electricity’s affinity with vital forces in the public imagi- nation. An 1863 pamphlet published by Dr. E.J. Fraser, who designates himself a “practical medico-electrician,” is entitled “Medical Electricity: A Treatise on the Na- ture of Vital Electricity in Health and Disease, With plain Instructions in the uses of Artificial Electricity as a curative agent.”15 Another pamphlet, this one from 1891, is entitled “Ethereal Matter, Electricity and Aka- sa.” Akasa, or Akasha, is a Sanskrit word that means “space”or “sky,”and in Theosophical understanding was seen as a spiritual primordial substance that pervades all of existence.16 The pamphlet’s contents include information on new devices to detect “different conditions of ethereal matter,” “something new about the human organism,”“transmission of ideas to a distance,” and “occult tricks.” Vital forces were understood to operate in a human organism governed by both physiological and mental states.The title page of a 1903 publication by the Phy- sico-Therapeutic Institute indicates that electricity was a candidate, alongside “water, air, heat, light, movement, ozone, oxygen, carbonic acid, etc.,” for treating a number of conditions that were neither wholly physical nor wholly mental. The same title page features a quote by D.J. Rivieré, the publisher of the pamphlet (who did not indicate any professional credentials): “The object of the physico-therapeutic cure is to raise the nervous function when depressed, to put right the trophic functions when out of order. It raises the chemical activity of medicines and it insures the organic eliminations necessary to the VOLUME XI ISSUE I SPRING 2021 19
regular purification of the Economy.”17 Rivieré appeals to discourses of chemistry, neurology, physiology, and hormonal (“trophic”) functions to justify his therapeutic method.These multiple discourses, as well as his des- cription of the body as an “economy,” reveal the impulse within the medical community to theorize health and sickness as involving the equilibrium of the entire organism.Electricity provided a pivot from vague understandings of the body based on the harmonization of its parts to scientific medicine’s updated models of homeostasis based on biochemical entities. Electricity connoted the vital force that coordinated activity but was also distinctly modern, a powerful tool with vast potential to know the world in ever more precise ways. 17 D. J. Rivieré, Annals of Physico-Therapy (Paris: Physico-Therapeutic Institute of Paris, 1903). 18 Herbet Robarts, The American X-Ray Journal 1, no.1 (1899). 19 Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, Public Health Service, National Institutes of Health "200 Years of American Medicine (1776-1976)," an exhibit at the National Library of Medicine. Electricity was an enticing cure for a medical community that was actively deliberating over the proper way to treat sick bodies. The flexible ontologies underlying electricity authorized its use as a therapeutic modality in both allopathic and homeopathic practices. The debate between allopathy and homeopathy as the most appropriate medical system roughly mirrored the debate between those who thought that diseases ought to be cured by treatments administered externally from the body and those who believed that the disease’s natural course of development in the body would cure the patient. Allopathic practitioners sought different kinds of substances to administer to the body, while homeopaths supposed that the body naturally stored the entire phar- macopeia of substances it could need. Allopaths tended to celebrate the variety of pharmaceutical compounds that were being synthesized or discovered with increasing frequency. New therapies presented new tools to combat disease. Homeopaths tended to criticize the search for new compounds. Medical pamphlets and journals featured both drug advertisements and polemics,written by and for doctors, against the use of drugs in medical care. In this space of contradictory mindsets, electricity could be configured as both external and internal; it was integral to the matter of the natural world but also existed innately within the living body. The x-ray’s continuity with electrical modalities meant that its therapeutic potential could be justified by appeals to vitality and energy. The x-ray’s association with vitalism is evident in looking at the cover of the first issue ofThe American X-Ray Journal.This journal began in May 1897 with the stated intention “to give to its readers a faithful resume of all x-ray work.”18 The American medical field saw an increase in the number of published medical journals in the nineteenth century as physicians returned from graduate training in Austria and Germany. They grouped themselves into professional associations and consolidated their reports of clinical and laborato- ry research in medical publications.19 However, even as x-ray practitioners began to coalesce around professional organizations,they did not abandon the vitalistic connotations of the x-ray. The cover of the first issue of The American X-Ray Journal depicts a figure administering the x-ray to the globe from outside the globe, indica- The cover of the first issue of The American X-Ray Journal. [2] 20 TECHNOLOGY AND PARADIGM
ting that the x-rays were seen to come from a mysterious, non-earthbound, place. The spiritual connotations of a figure floating above the earth connotes the idea of an immaterial substance that animates the physical world, flowing freely between living and non-living matter. ISTORIANS HAVE NOTED the uti- lity of the x-ray in consolidating the professional authority of allopathic doctors and radiological specialists—those in fields that would later professionalize in relation to the x-ray’s diagnostic capabilities.However,there has been conside- rably less attention given to the way that non-allopathic practitioners justified their authority through the x-ray, often continuing to use the machine for non-diagnostic purposes.After the x-ray had been wrangled as a specifically medical instrument,but before it became a standardized diagnostic tool, various medical sects incorporated the technology into their practices as a method of legiti- mization. This period—approximately the first ten years of the twentieth century—represents a middle space in the x-ray’s early years that corresponds to the shifting context of professional medicine. Historians have noted practitioners’ self-legitimation through the use of the x-ray, as the device came to symbolize advanced scientific medicine. However, they have not engaged with the particular nature of this sym- bolism—the specific capacities that made the x-ray authoritative. The invocation of the x-ray’s authority by non-allopathic practitioners (those who would not go on to coordinate their activities in relation to this authority) shows that the regard given to the technology was not solely a response to its association with the kind of scientific biomedicine that would go on to dominate health- 20 "Electro-Therapeutics," Chicago Daily Tribune, July 23, 1899, 30. 21 Herbet Robarts, The American X-Ray Journal 1, no. 2 (1899), 30. care. Rather, its authority was premised on its ability to produce objective scientific images. Even when homeopathic practitioners used the x-ray in therapeutic vitalistic contexts,they legitimized their practice by recourse to the x-ray’s privileged capacity for visualization. After the x-ray had become widely known to the general public,but before it attained its diagnostic role in institutionalized biomedicine,it was seen as the most authoritative form of electrical healing. An 1899 article in the Chicago Daily Tribune chronicles the moment the x-ray became a privileged electrical therapy. After ex- pounding the various specialties in which electricity was useful and effective “in the hands of a skilled physician” —dentistry,medicine,surgery,cauterization,thermal and chemical effects—the author laments the hindering of the field’s development at the hands of “quackery practiced in early days.”20 The authority of “regular practitioners,”he says,was threatened by individuals who peddled products like electric belts and electric hairbrushes. The author then suggests that legitimate practitioners, who previously refrained from publicizing electrical therapies, were becoming louder voices in the field.This “change in public sentiment,”he suggests,“[is] greatly stimulated by the discovery of the X ray by Baron Röntgen.” This article also affirms that the x-ray was not considered a distinctly new kind of machine. Articles in The American X-Ray Journal even continued to refer to the x-rays as “vibrations,” indicating the x-ray’s continued association with a broader set of other electro-therapeutic machines. An article in the same journal states that the x-ray had “brought more forcibly before the minds of physicians the value of the electric current as a therapeutic agent.”21 The x-ray, then, was beneficial not only in consolidating the authority of scientific medicine, but also in justifying the continued use of electrical therapeutics. The x-ray, out of all other electrical therapies, became associated with advanced scientific medicine because it was the only electrical therapy that produced an image. The x-ray’s image-making capacity makes it a case study for the history of modern scientific medicine’s self-legitimation through the technique of specialized perception. In the eighteenth century, the epistemically authoritative gaze helped to standardize the interpretation of the body’s interior, so that medical professionals could amass a stable body of knowledge about anato- H MECHANICAL OBJECTIVITY AND THE DOCTOR-PATIENT RELATIONSHIP VOLUME XI ISSUE I SPRING 2021 21
mical structures that were beyond the reach of ordinary perception.22 After the prior sanction against dissection was lifted,practitioners revealed and recorded the typical structures that existed below the surface of an individual’s symptoms and experience, thereby decreasing the need for the patient’s own narrative and symptomatology. Doctors’ordinary sight was augmented by a professional vision that relied upon the delineation of ideal types. The x-ray capitalized on the deep legacy of scientific visuality while also benefiting from the technology’s affinity with photography. Photography, which was invented 60 years before the x-ray,both allowed for “objective” images to be produced mechanically and increased the number of images that individuals encountered, thereby contributing to a visual culture that associated knowledge with sight. The x-ray became authoritative because it could reveal the structure or ideal type—the skeleton—beneath the surface of the patient’s skin and could do so objectively. An early manual that delineates the parts of the x-ray machine and its potential use in surgery is subtitled “Photography of the Invisible,” im- plying that the technology helped to produce legitimate ways of seeing, and thereby knowing, what was beneath the surface of the body.23 Use of the x-ray was justified by its capacity to visualize the body’s interior, even when it was not being used for diagnostic purposes. Rather, the x-ray’s association with scientific visuality allowed its continued use in multiple non-allopathic and non-scientific contexts. A feature in The American X-Ray Journal registers a moment in which the vitalistic powers of the x-ray were called upon, even while the technique was also being valorized for the objective qualities associated with modern scientific vision. An issue from March of 1898 features an article entitled “Is There a Relationship Exis- ting Between The X-Ray and the Luminating Power that Obtains in Telepathic Vision?”written by a “J.J. Fly, M.D.”24 (There were not rigorous standards for medical school at the time,nor would it have been unheard of for a non-doctor to claim medical credentials in the press,so the professional standing of the author is open to ques- 22 Michael Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: an Archaeology of Medical Perception (London: Tavistock Publications Ltd., 1973), xii. 23 William James Morton, The X-Ray; Or, Photography of the Invisible and its Value in Surgery (New York: Ameri- can Technical Book Company, 1896). 24 J.J. Fly, "Is There a Relationship Existing Between The X-Ray and the Luminating Power that Obtains in Tele- pathic Vision?" in American X-Ray Journal 1, no. 5 (1898), 268. 25 Simon, Dark Light, 46. tion).The article narrates what the author considered to be the four great stages in the discovery of the qualities of light,with the last one being the x-ray.The forms of light discerned move “from the coarser to the finer, from the ordinary to the inordinary,”so that the x-ray was seen as a culminating “pulsating stream of ethereal atoms.” The molecules of the latter forms of light were thought to be farther apart so that the light could be compared to a gas or liquid.This characterization of the x-ray recalls earlier notions of electricity as a“fluid.”25 By describing the x-ray in terms of its ethereal qualities,the author explained the x-ray’s effects in vitalistic terms. In comparing the ray to gas and liquid states, he portrayed it as a substance that moves freely between bodies.However,this vitalistic x-ray energy was simultaneously configured as scienti- fically sophisticated. The x-ray, as an advanced stage in the “evolution of the phenomena of light,” allowed the “objective mind”to visualize what could not be seen with the “natural eye.”The x-ray was called upon for its power to augment everyday vision with a professionally-backed scientific sight. It is not clear what exactly the author saw as the possible relationship between the x-ray and telepathy. However, he clearly recognized the symbolic potency of the x-ray as an effective way to coordinate sight with knowledge.The author asks early in the article: “How is it that we know a thing? And how do we come to know? What is knowing?”In his account of the history of light, he articulates a form of knowing defined by the prio- rity of the visual in its ability to impress knowledge from the immaterial world onto the faculties of the mind.The x-ray was seen as the most sophisticated iteration of a revelatory light that was considered to act on the mind itself. As medical professionals were theorizing the relationship between mind and body, between mental states and physiology, the x-ray was both vitalistic enough and scientific enough to authorize research into telepathy, what might have easily been deemed a “quack”practice. Having become squarely associated with the pri- vileges of objective scientific visuality,the x-ray technique was regarded as legitimate enough to explore suspected 22 TECHNOLOGY AND PARADIGM
relationships between invisible or difficult-to-visualize entities in the world. The impulse might not have seemed so unreasonable, given that Thomas Edison himself thought that the x-ray would one day be able to read people’s thoughts.26 What is important is that the author justifies a practice based on thoughts or mental states, things that could not be seen, by appealing to the x-ray’s association with sight. The emphasis on sight becomes even more clear when he cites the potential for the x-ray to cure blindness, writing that “those who never knew what the sensation of sight was like, have been blessed for the first time in life with that knowledge.” Vision and its intimate connection to knowing were repeatedly called upon to legitimize the x-ray’s epistemic authority, even when the relevant practices involved entities that could not be visualized through the x-ray. Visuality became associated with scientific management in the context of the shifting nature of the doctor-patient relationship between the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As visuality became a privileged way of knowing the body, physical manipulations and diagnostic tests became less frequently used.The en- counter between the doctor’s body and the patient’s body took a radically different form, as the doctor’s physicality was diminished in favor of an objective diagnostic eye. Foucault’s analysis of the role of the stethoscope in Birth of the Clinic points to the way that the doctor-patient interaction was assimilated into the nexus of knowledge and perception inaugurated by the discovery of patho- logical anatomy. While the stethoscope was a listening device, it served to both diminish the amount of physical touch in the doctor-patient consultation (by making hand palpitations obsolete) and enforce diagnosis based on images of the ideal healthy body.27 The x-ray occu- pied a similar role in the doctor-patient interaction, as it allowed the doctor to incorporate the expert perception into the evaluation of the patient’s body. Doctors in the early years of the x-ray’s use expressed both enthu- siasm and trepidation over the way that the x-ray would change their interactions with patients. The x-ray’s diagnostic potential was immediately glimpsed, as doctors noted the use of x-rays to detect fractures, particularly in military contexts.While some doctors capitalized on this opportunity to substantiate their medical expertise,some 26 Colomina, X-Ray Architecture, 132. 27 Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic, 184-7. 28 Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, "The Image of Objectivity," in Representations 40 (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992), 81-128. expressed resistance toward using the x-ray for diagnosis,arguing that manipulations of the bone by hand were more accurate. The x-ray’s image-producing capacity was condu- cive to the new role assumed by medical practitioners in the early years of the twentieth century. Whereas the doctor was previously an individual whose healing powers were intimately related to his or her own physicality, around the turn of the century the doctor was reconfigured as a detached interpreter of the body and its processes.The shifting grounds of medical knowledge were conditioned by changing notions of scientific objectivity. In the latter part of the nineteenth century, objectivity came to be defined against the dangerous and even immoral subjectivity of the individual practitioner. The scientist,who in the past may have been admired for qualities of genius, inspiration, and interpretation, was now instructed to censure his or her personal subjectivity. Scientistswerecommandedto“letnaturespeakforitself,” a refrain also commonly heard in discourses around the early invention of photography. Images, in this scientific context, were thought to be the least vulnerable to “sub- jective intrusions,”and so became privileged signifiers of the emerging non-interventionist objectivity.28 And like the camera, the x-ray could purportedly generate images without the polluting individuality of the practitioner. These images would be important in both constituting and symbolizing stable bodies of scientific knowledge. Although early twentieth century x-ray practitioners called upon the visual authority of the device, the context in which they practiced medicine was still largely the medicine of the nineteenth century. Nineteen- th-century medical practice in America was predomina- tely constituted by individual encounters between doctor and patient. There were few professional organizations, little regulation of medical education, and no standardized research protocols to speak of.The earliest volumes of The American X-Ray Journal consisted of a miscellany of anecdotes and curiosities about individual practitioners and experiments. And, because the components of the x-ray were easy to obtain, “practitioners” could refer to individuals of variable professional standing and with variable amounts of clinical medical experience.The journal itself was part of a movement within medicine VOLUME XI ISSUE I SPRING 2021 23
toward professionalization, but its contents indicate that knowledge about the x-ray as a medical device consisted of an accumulation of isolated, ad hoc experiments. NDIVIDUAL MEDICAL encounters afforded practitioners their own particular notions of what constituted medical knowledge. This epistemological idiosyn- cracy changed in the twentieth century as the doctor-patient interaction became situated within larger systems. Whereas treatments and protocols in the nineteenth century were generated idiosyncratically between the physician and the patient, in the early twentieth century, this epistemological space expanded to include a multitude of specialists within complex hospital systems. Whereas medical knowledge in the nineteenth century was generated through the doctor’s use of interpretive subjectivity over a living body, in the twentieth century the “per- ceptive act” moved “outside of heart and head and into the information systems and professional organizations that organize the bits of available knowledge and develop guidelines and clinical pathways that inform clinical practices.”29 The doctor’s own mind and body were present in x-ray experimentation, particularly as they were predisposed to try out the new rays on their own bodies. But between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the shifting character of medical knowledge, and with it the legitimation of the x-ray as a producer of images, was personified in the changing roles of doctor and patient. As the doctor-patient relationship became embedded in complex systems of medical scientific management, the creation of medical knowledge was dispersed between a 29 George Khushf, "A Framework for Understanding Medical Epistemologies," in Journal of Medicine and Philoso- phy 38, no. 5 (Oxford: Oxford Univerrsity Press, 2013), 461-486. 30 Howell, Technology in the Hospital. 31 Martin Kaufman, Homeopathy in America: The Rise and Fall of a Medical Heresy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1971), 166. 32 Frank W. Stahnisch and Marja Verhoef, "The Flexner Report of 1910 and its Impact on Complementary and Al- ternative Medicine and Psychiatry in North America in the 20th Century," in Evidence Based Complementary and Alter- native Medicine (London: Hindawi, 2012). 33 Howell, Technology in the Hospital, 130. profusion of actors. Radiologists, scientific researchers, and hospital bureaucrats assumed positions in a self- consciously scientific practice of medicine, thereby facilitating the standardization and stabilization of objective medical knowledge.30 The rise of the modern hospital accompanied reforms that advocated for increased professiona- lism and scientism in medicine. In particular, the Flexner Report of 1910 was greatly influential in establishing modern scientific medicine as the predomi- nant paradigm for healthcare in America. Abraham Flexner, who was trained in the natural sciences at Johns Hopkins University, promoted a scientific paradigm of academic education and research based on the German university system. He sought to elimi- nate “nonscientific” approaches to medicine, as he believed that “alternative medicine” competed with and threatened appropriately scientific medical practices. He recommended higher admission and graduation standards for medical schools; standardization across curricula, including basic science courses; and centra- lization of medical institutions.The report had almost immediate effects both for establishing mainstream medical practice and for eliminating non-mainstream practices. Between 1900 and 1922, 18 of the country’s 22 homeopathic colleges were closed, along with colleges in electrotherapy.31 Some doctors who practiced homeopathy, osteopathy, eclectic medicine, and physiomedicalism were jailed.32 In 1914, the board of managers of the Pennsyl- vania Hospital, one of the first recognizably modern American hospitals, made a decision to have all patients x-rayed.33 The scientific authority of the x-ray justified the professionalization and coordination of activity within the American hospital at the same time that the demands of professionalization and coordination standardized the use of the x-ray.Radiology emerged as a specialty in medicine in part because radiologists claimed that the x-ray, rather than being the fairly simple and easy-to-operate machine that could be used by amateur practitioners,was a complex I INFORMATION AND AUTHORITY (1918-1940) 24 TECHNOLOGY AND PARADIGM

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