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How I Fell In Love With The History Of Medicine
- 1. How I fell in love with the history of medicine… (with apologies in advance to my parents) Ashley E. Bowen, PhD Science History Institute @AEBowenPhD Twitter Image courtesy of the National Library of Medicine
- 2. We all have bodies World Health Organization photograph by R. Haswell, courtesy of the National Library of Medicine
- 3. And bodies are how we make sense of the world Image courtesy of the National Library of Medicine
- 4. But we all believe irrational things about our bodies Image courtesy of the speaker, 2016
- 5. And that’s where history can help Image courtesy of the National Library of Medicine
- 6. You can’t understand people without understanding bodies Image courtesy of the National Library of Medicine
- 7. Because bodies are history Image courtesy of the National Library of Medicine
- 8. Thank you! Ashley E. Bowen, PhD abowen@sciencehistory.org @AEBowenPhD Twitter Image courtesy of the National Library of Medicine
Editor's Notes
- “The brain exposed from above,” plate 1 in Anatomy of the Brain by Sir Charles Bell, 1802. Description: “Head resting on the back of the right wrist, the flesh and skull cap have been removed exposing the brain; lettered lines lead to the various parts and convolutions.” Image link: http://resource.nlm.nih.gov/101436359 Welcome and thanks so much for staying through to the end of tonight’s talks! I’m thrilled to be here and am really grateful to the folks at Science on Tap, the Philadelphia Science Festival, and National Mechanics for hosting me tonight. I’m an historian of medicine who specializes in the period between the US Civil War and World War I with a focus on the mind-body connection. Basically, I’m the least useful doctor it’s possible to be. However, I might be very useful if we end up living in a post-antibiotic hell-scape and/or find ourselves a time machine. So there’s that.
- WHO photo by R. Haswell, “Edinburgh medical students examine the skeleton of a notorious nineteenth century murderer and body-snatcher, William Burke” Image source: http://resource.nlm.nih.gov/101437030 That said, I love my field. It’s something that’s easy to teach and, I think, easy to understand because it might be obvious but we all have bodies– sick or healthy, disabled or abled, tall, short, fat, thing, raced, gendered, etc. Our bodies are what embed the human in history. SLIDE Just as a side note, the medical students in this photo are looking at the skeleton of the infamous body snatcher William Burke (of Burke and Hare fame). Nerd murderinos, come talk to me about that later. Okay, next slide… 16 murders in 1828, sold bodies to medical school because there was a shortage. Legal limits on where they can get bodies Trial began on Xmas eve Hare was given immunity, Burke hung. His skeleton is on display in Edinburgh to this day
- “Tail-piece showing the five senses enclosed in an elaborate border,” in A Treatise on the Operations of Surgery by Samuel Sharp, 1769. Image source: http://resource.nlm.nih.gov/101435882 Like I said, our bodies make us subjects to history and enable us to act as subjects in history. Our senses orient us in the world and how cultures react to our bodies sets up all kinds of hierarchies that we don’t have any control over. Just think about how people used medical language to justify sexism, racism, the exclusion of immigrants, etc.
- This is all well and good, yes bodies are everywhere and they’re at the center of all of human history but why did I get into the history of medicine? In no small part, it’s the product of my teenage rebellion coinciding with my mother’s cancer diagnosis. SHE’S FINE so I can now poke fun at this, but when she was first diagnosed with lymphoma, my parents understandably freaked. They got very into “natural” health, alternative medicine, and complimentary therapies in addition to chemo. I was 13 or so at the time and didn’t quite have this language, but I was like “this seems like bullshit.” Dry body brushing feels nice but, like, it’s not going to help check the growth of cancer cells? So began my quest to understand how and why people do the things they do to manage illness.
- “History of Medicine Division's card catalog,” photograph by Peter N. Pruyn, 1962. Image source: http://resource.nlm.nih.gov/101445942 In other children, a parent’s cancer diagnosis would lead them down the path to med school. BUT my particular version of teen rebellion and a life time of disappointing my family meant that I wasn’t gonna be a doctor. Not only because that’s not nearly as much fun, but then I would’ve missed out on all the stuff that makes medicine a deeply human field– the irrationality, the guesswork, and the failure to come to certainty about these remarkable meat sacks we walk around in. At it’s best, medical history provides us with a way to think about the changing meaning of the sick, infirm, disabled, and healthy body that emphasizes the human over the pathology.
- “People looking at the bulletin board in front of the S.G. Office,” Image: http://resource.nlm.nih.gov/101395086 Everything that makes us people relates in one way or another to the bodies that we have and how we care for those bodies. What people understand about their bodies and their health organizes so much of our world, the amount of space we require in buildings, how often we wash our clothes, the food we eat, religious practices, labor regulations, safety. These standards don’t fall out of the sky, they are created by cultures and groups of people in response to the world they find themselves in. They’re also shaped by human knowledge that’s imperfect and makes use of available information. Doctors ‘back then’ did the best they could and although they got a hell of a lot wrong, they got some of it pretty right. When we investigate how they came to know what they did– laboratory practice, observation, religion, guesswork, classical education, whatever– we learn something much more than “antique science.” We learn about how people make these weird contraptions we all walk around in understandable, we learn about what makes us us.
- Angel Island Immigration Station]: [examinations for trachoma, 1931. USPHS photograph. Source image: http://resource.nlm.nih.gov/101540261 When I say “bodies are history” I’m only talking half in hyperbole. I can make the case that everything we think of as history has a medical component. There’s the obvious stuff like war, immigration, and slavery that involve the literal destruction, movement, and abuse of physical bodies. But there’s also the less obvious stuff like tariff policy or politics. While new tariffs on washing machines might not have been motivated by concerns over health, the indoor plumbing expected in most homes is something with roots in urban sanitation a century ago. Likewise, the assumption that we’ll wash our clothes after we wear them or to keep personal items sanitary has roots in shifting personal care standards. The tariffs might be about the cost of steel and manufacturing but the impact on the available number of washing machines is embedded in a larger world in which care of the body is our central, pressing concern. When we talk about history without talking about the physical body, we ignore the thing that makes history the most interesting– the pain, joy, birth, death. If you’ll forgive me, bodies are the marrow of history and the subject of a ton of science.
- “Dance of Death,” in Nouveau recueil d’osteologie et de myologie, v. 1, l. [60] by Jacques Gamelin, 1779. Image source: http://resource.nlm.nih.gov/101435807