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Keynote Digitized Disability Histories
Speaker Jaipreet Virdi, Assistant Professor for the Department of History at the University of Delaware
Abstract Digital collaboratives and open-access collections present immense opportunities for historical methodologies and public engagement. Such curated collections can also reveal the cultural contingencies and politics entailed in how medical histories are preserved—what materials and whose stories are prioritized or left behind. As a scholar working at the intersection of medicine and disability, finding sources on disability within medical collections also requires addressing how disability is curated and defined within the database. To what extent is disability separate from medicine and where do we find stories of disabled people without implementing a medicalized gaze? Additionally, working with digitized disability histories forces the need to address access—not only in terms of accessing collections, but also in acknowledging who is able to access via digital interface, and what kinds of accessibility requirements are in place.
Bio Doctor Virdi is a historian whose research focuses on the ways medicine and technology impact the lived experiences of disabled people. Her first book, Hearing Happiness: Deafness Cures in History (University of Chicago Press, 2020) raises pivotal questions about deafness in American society and the endless quest for a cure. She has published articles on diagnostic technologies, audiometry, hearing aids, and the medicalization of deafness and has published essays in The Atlantic and the New Internationalist.
Session I
Title Searching for female perfection in the MHL collections
Speaker Hélène Cazes, Ph.D., University of Victoria, British Columbia
Abstract The research project Perfecta (The Perfection of the Female Body: anatomical discourses and defenses of women, 16th-18th c., SSHRC) explores the shift in defining the female body that was launched by the “sensible anatomy” of the early 16th century in Italy (Berengario da Carpi). Whereas the traditional medical texts considered the male body an exclusive model for the “perfection” of the human body, the emphasis on observation through dissection and the philological humanist movement propelled the female sexual anatomy as an emblematic topic for renewing the medical and cultural conceptions about sex, gender, and procreation. Beyond the (alleged) first anatomical findings of Estienne (1545), Colombo (1559), and Fallopio (1561), the female organs observed and situated in this new context contributed to a general reassessment of the hierarchy of sexes.
The scope of the MHL collections and their search tools allowed the reading of this historical shift in medical theories beyond a linear narrative of “great discoveries”. Consulting the collections as a treasure comprising of – along with well-known titles – obscure pamphlets, compilations, controversies, and out-of-the-discipline writings etc., we identified new sources and questions for a history of gynecology. First, we measured the resistance that cultural practices oppose to this past medical research: one example is the elusive membranous seal of virginity, called the “Hymen”, whose existence was disproved quite early in the 16th c., but which has been described, commented on and “repaired” until now. Second, we heard the conversation of the reception, discussion and transmission of new ideas in secondary collections (compilations, controversies, errors, recipes, textbooks, proverbs) that are usually overlooked in a linear telling of scientific progress. Thus, we appraised the erratic polyphony of past medical investigations: chronology is deceptive in the positivist tellings of knowledge advancement. The Renaissance perfection of the body female has coexisted with enduring mentions of its imperfections.
Bio Professor at the University of Victoria (Canada) since 2001, Hélène Cazes has published collections of essays and numerous papers on history of medicine, editorial mediations, learned networks, and bibliography. She is the director of the Open Journal Topiques, Études Satoriennes and an Associate Editor of Renaissance and Reformation/Renaissance et Réforme.
Her current research project Perfecta, La Perfection du corps féminin: discours anatomiques et défense des femmes, 16-18 explores Early Modern connections between feminism (or misogyny) and anatomy.
Her latest publication is the edition and annotation, in collaboration with Frédéric Charbonneau, of : Alphonse Leroy, Recherches sur les habillemens des femmes et des enfans, (Paris, Hermann, 2019 [1772])
Title ‘A doctor’s advice and prescription is now worth more than any soothing syrup’: Writing ‘Scientific Motherhood’ in the Early Twentieth Century
Speaker Amber Hinde, Ph.D. (candidate), University of Glasgow, Scotland
Abstract The early twentieth century was a transformative period for motherhood in Britain. Contrary to traditional sources of knowledge, mothers were increasingly turning to doctor-authored advice literature for child-rearing information. A significant collection of this advice literature can be accessed via the Medical Heritage Library. In this paper I examine how authors of motherhood manuals used language to construct the ideology of ‘scientific motherhood’ (Apple, 1995), which emphasised the need for mothers to be instructed by experts. Whilst motherhood manuals have been approached by some social historians, they have thus far been neglected by linguists. In her definition of ‘scientific motherhood’, Apple notes its role in ‘prescribing women’s relationship to medical expertise’ (1995), yet how this was textually constructed remains unexplored. This is problematic given that ideologies are ‘built up and transmitted through texts, and it is in texts that their nature is revealed’ (Hunston and Thompson, 2000). In light of this, I adopt a discourse analytic approach to explore the writer-reader relationship in ten motherhood manuals held by the Medical Heritage Library. This approach enables me to not only identify linguistic features in the texts, but also to consider their wider social significance in relation to ideology and genre. My conclusions demonstrate that doctors made rhetorical choices to engineer a writer-reader relationship which worked to advance the ideology of scientific motherhood, attaching credibility to both themselves and the wider medical profession. Linguistic features such as stance markers, directives, and questions are present in the texts, and these were used rhetorically to foster a writer identity and engage with the reader, persuading them to accept the advice presented. This paper demonstrates the value of linguistic analysis in considering the social impact of historical medical texts, contributing a novel perspective to the field of linguistics and complementing the work of social historians.
Bio Amber Hinde is a PhD student in English Language & Linguistics at the University of Glasgow, Scotland. Her research interests centre on language use in medical and health contexts, particularly the rhetorical nature of texts in these areas. Amber’s current research, funded by the Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland, examines the rhetoric of two health gurus in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Britain. Her previous research has included analysis of metaphors used by UK cancer charities, and persuasion in early twentieth century motherhood manuals.
Session II
Title Visualizing Medical Heritage Collections at Scale
Speaker Catherine DeRose, Program Manager for the Digital Humanities Lab, Yale University, and Peter Leonard, Director of the Digital Humanities Lab at Yale University
Abstract The millions of open access images in the Medical Heritage Library (MHL) represent a fascinating curation challenge for librarians and researchers alike. Thanks to a decade of digitization efforts, more primary materials are available than ever before. The question becomes, how can we provide users with entry points into such massive collections that aren’t dependent solely on traditional, human-added descriptions? In addition to empirical metadata—such as the title of a book and image captions located physically near illustrations—other, more experimental techniques hold promise for the discovery, curation, and annotation of images as scale.
Yale’s open-source PixPlot [http://github.com/YaleDHLab/pix-plot] tool highlights one possible technique for providing users with a dynamic overview of large visual collections. PixPlot first uses a convolutional neural network to featurize tens of thousands of images into a high-dimensional space, and then applies an advanced dimensionality reduction algorithm to display those images in a web browser such that visually similar images are clustered near one another. For example, illustrations featuring botanical prints will appear in one section of the visualization, whereas photographs of the human hand will appear in another section. These algorithmically generated clusters provide quick, high-level insights of visual collections at scale. For deeper dives, users can zoom in and inspect these semantic clusters, curate their own subgroupings, filter views according to available metadata, click on an image to return to its source catalog page, and download subsets of images–along with their accompanying metadata—for use in research, teaching, and cataloging. Using a representative sample of images from across the MHL, we will demonstrate how PixPlot works from both a creator and end user point-of-view, walking through the steps from dataset ingest to curation, selection, and export.
Bios Catherine DeRose is the Program Manager for the Digital Humanities Lab at Yale University, where she consults on digital humanities projects, teaches workshops on data analysis and visualization, and directs the Digital Humanities Teaching Fellows program. She received her PhD in English from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Peter Leonard is the Director of the Digital Humanities Lab at Yale University. He received his BA in art history from the University of Chicago and his PhD in Scandinavian literature from the University of Washington. Before coming to Yale in 2013 as the first Librarian for Digital Humanities Research, he served as a postdoctoral researcher in text-mining at UCLA, supported by a Google Digital Humanities Research Award.
Title Rarity factor: Unveiling unique materials from the National Library of Medicine
Speaker Krista Stracka, Rare Book Cataloger for the Rare Books and Early Manuscripts Section in the History of Medicine Division, National Library of Medicine
Abstract
Bio
Title Smoke on Screens: Audiovisual Evidence of the Tobacco Industry’s Harms to Public Health
Speaker Kate Tasker, Industry Documents Library Archivist, University of California, San Francisco and Rachel Taketa, Tobacco Projects Assistant, University of California, San Francisco
Abstract
The Medical Heritage Library includes more than 3,000 audio and video recordings of tobacco industry commercials, internal focus groups, corporate meetings, and government hearings. These recordings were obtained from tobacco companies including Philip Morris, RJ Reynolds, and Juul, and they offer significant insight into decades of corporate communication strategies to deny the health risks of smoking and to promote tobacco products as cool, pleasurable, empowering to women, and part of a long-standing American tradition. The collections are maintained by the Industry Documents Library at the University of California, San Francisco, an online archive of over 15 million internal corporate documents which shed light on how industries influence public health.
Join UCSF Industry Documents Library staff for an introduction to the tobacco industry recordings in the Medical Heritage Library, and watch iconic footage of infamous cigarette commercials, public relations campaigns, and the historic government hearings which exposed industry fraud and helped bring about a $246 billion legal settlement and major tobacco control legislation. Session participants will learn how these audiovisual resources are being preserved, how to search and view the recordings, and how the collections can be used to learn about corporate strategies which influence smoking rates and lead to cancer, lung, and cardiovascular disease.
Bio Kate Tasker is the Industry Documents Library Archivist at the University of California, San Francisco, where she leads a team to manage a digital library of 15 million documents created by industries which influence public health. Kate works to provide permanent access to these collections for the benefit of researchers, policymakers, advocates, media, and the general public. She’s a member of the Academy of Certified Archivists and holds a Master of Library and Information Science from San Jose State University.
Rachel Taketa is the Industry Documents Library Specialist at the University of California, San Francisco. Rachel is a member of the Society of California Archivists and holds a Master of Library and Information Science from San Jose State University.
Session III
Title Drugs and Digitization: Investigating Opiate Addiction in the U.S. Civil War Era with the Medical Heritage Library
Speaker Jonathan Jones, Ph.D., Civil War Era Postdoctoral Scholar, George and Ann Richards Civil War Era Center, Pennsylvania State University
Abstract The Civil War triggered a massive epidemic of opiate addiction—America’s original opioid crisis. Thousands of sick and injured veterans struggled with drug addiction in the war’s wake. “Opium slavery,” as addiction was often described, ruined veterans’ health and manhood, alarmed government officials and doctors, and even rattled the foundations of 19th-century American medicine.
This paper investigates Civil War America’s opiate addiction crisis, illuminating the causes and costs of addiction for veterans and the broader consequences of the phenomenon for 19th-century American medicine. Along the way, this paper also highlights the methodological process and benefits of using full-text 19th-century medical journals to investigate medical phenomena like opiate addiction. This paper is derived from Jones’s dissertation manuscript on opiate addiction in the Civil War era—a project made possible by the Medical Heritage Library’s digitization efforts.
For decades, historians suspected that Civil War veterans suffered from opiate addiction. Yet before now, scholars lacked ready access to full-text Civil War-era medical journals. Identifying cases of addicted veterans in analog sources was akin to searching for needles in a haystack, and, consequently, the postwar addiction crisis has never previously been investigated closely, despite its scale, historical significance, and relevance to today’s opioid crisis. The MHL’s digitization efforts have resolved methodological and evidentiary hurdles, enabling this research, which represents the first major study of the Civil War-era opiate addiction crisis. Nineteenth-century American medical journals like the American Journal of Insanity and the Buffalo Medical and Surgical Journal, both digitized by the MHL, represent a key evidentiary base for this study. This project has been cited by Emily R. Novak Gustainis as an example of projects benefiting from MHL’s digitization efforts, and some early findings were previously featured on the MHL’s website.
Bio Jonathan S. Jones is the inaugural Postdoctoral Scholar in Civil War History at Penn State’s George and Ann Richards Civil War Era Center in 2020-21, where he is currently preparing a book manuscript on opiate addiction in the Civil War era for publication. The project is derived from his dissertation on the same topic, defended at Binghamton University in June 2020. Jonathan’s recent publications include an article in The Journal of the Civil War Era’s June 2020 issue titled “Opium Slavery: Civil War Veterans and Opiate Addiction.” After Penn State, Jonathan will be joining the Department of History at Virginia Military Institute as an Assistant Professor of Civil War history starting in August 2021. You can contact Jonathan on Twitter at @_jonathansjones or at jonathansjones.net.
Title Medicine in the Monthly Review: A Large-Scale Analysis of Medical Texts and Discourses
Speaker Whitney Arnold, Ph.D., Adjunct Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature and Director of the Undergraduate Research Center for the Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences at the University of California (UCLA)
Abstract This paper employs digital tools to uncover popular views of medicine and health in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain and its environs. Historians of medicine have long noted the importance of recovering non-specialist views of medicine and health, and this paper examines popular print portrayals of medical knowledge through the British periodical the Monthly Review. Published monthly from 1749 to 1844, the Monthly was greatly influential in its time, and, due to its aim of reviewing every published text, provides valuable records of and contemporary discussions about thousands of texts currently outside the scope of scholarly analysis.
However, the Monthly has received limited scholarly attention, likely due in part to the unwieldy size of its corpus, which spans 96 years and 246 volumes, each composed of 3 to 6 monthly issues (totaling over 140,000 pages). By digitally analyzing the entire Monthly Review corpus through the machine learning technique of statistical topic modeling, this paper reveals the presentation and prevalence of various medical discourses in the popular periodical, as well as how these discourses varied over the years. The analysis sheds light on the medical topics and texts that featured prominently in the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British publishing sphere. The digitized Monthly Review issues in the Medical Heritage Library were referenced for the project, while the text-only dataset was received from HathiTrust. The Medical Heritage Library collections proved especially helpful in uncovering the original eighteenth- and nineteenth-century texts reviewed in the Monthly’s pages.
Bio Whitney Arnold is Adjunct Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature and Director of the Undergraduate Research Center for the Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Her research and publications focus on self-narratives and autobiographical texts in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain and France, as well as literary history and theories of authorship. Her current project is an analysis of narratives of health and medicine in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century autobiographical texts.
Session IV
Title Diet, Weight, and the Authority of Books: Santorio’s Medical Method
Speaker Caterina Agostini, Ph.D. (candidate), Rutgers University
Abstract The main source for this study is Santorio Santorio’s book Ars de statica medicina (The Discipline of Weight-Related Medicine, 1614) where he reported observations on diet, weight, and health. Santorio considered it so important to check diet and weight, that he weighed himself regularly for thirty years. He also collected ten thousand weight records of patients and friends, Galileo included, and was a professor of theoretical medicine at the University of Padua (1611-1624). In order to have exact measurements at any time, Santorio used a weighing chair, as seen in my selected illustrations. He recorded weights and clinical variables such as the time of the day, the amount and type of food and drinks, and the patient’s exercise or rest.
I will encourage a wider discussion through a textual and visual approach, and my digital humanities project which I hope to present during my lightning talk. While Santorio’s book preserves textual instructions for a range of recommended foods, based on a person’s age, gender, and physical activity, the book illustrations published over one hundred and fifty years show an evolving perspective of the patients and what they choose to have on the table: “(t)hat quantity of food to everyone is most healthful, which without any uneasiness can be perfectly digested: and that it is perfectly digested, may be known by the sum of the evacuations answering the quantities taken in; which will appear by weighing” (III, 38). My project compares passages to classical sources, integrates illustrations from many editions and reprints (for a total of fourteen texts, editions and translations of Santorio’s text, found in the Medical Heritage Library), and examines the meaning of modern-day replicas of the weighing chair as a scientific instrument.
Bio Caterina Agostini is a Ph.D. candidate at Rutgers University Department of Italian and a Eugene Garfield fellow at the American Philosophical Society’s Library & Museum.
She has developed and published digital projects and articles on early modern science and medicine as a fellow at the Electronic Textual Cultures Lab at the University of Victoria and at the Advanced Institute on Text Analysis at Northeastern University. Caterina is currently a digital humanities research specialist at Rutgers Digital Humanities Initiative and Lab.
Title A Properly Made Mask: Historical Lessons from Popular Culture and Medical Discourse during the 1918 Flu Epidemic
Speaker E. Thomas Ewing, Ariel Ludwig, Jessica Brabble
Abstract During the influenza epidemic that ravaged the United States in the fall and winter of 1918 and 1919, cities across the country advised or required masks. Soon, discussions of masks took center stage across American media. Newspapers were filled with articles explaining how to make, wear, and purchase masks. From their inception, these discussions were focused on gender, and women in particular: how were women adjusting to the new normal? What was the public’s perception of women wearing masks?
This paper will focus on how masks became gendered and how the media responded during the 1918-1919 flu epidemic. Specifically, it will explore how masks were used as a necessity by working women and as a form of expression, and will discuss the various ways in which newspapers and magazines responded to these forms of mask wearing.
This paper will draw upon the Medical Heritage Library’s collections to provide information about perceptions of the influenza epidemic. The state medical journals provide particular insights into the medical community’s understanding of mask use and effectiveness during the epidemic. Editorials representing the view of the medical societies, reports from individual doctors, and research on infection patterns provide evidence of the most important question during the 1918 epidemic which resonates during Covid in 2020: were masks effective at preventing the spread of disease?The title of this presentation comes from a November 1918 Journal of the Indiana State Medical Association editorial, which endorsed the use of masks in medical facilities to prevent droplet infection, yet also acknowledged “we have utterly failed in the present crisis” to contain the epidemic. As we look back on the 1918 epidemic from the perspective of 2020, we can find historical lessons in understanding how medical experts and the American public responded to advice regarding “a properly made mask.”
Bio Ariel Ludwig recently received her doctoral degree in Science and Technology in Society (STS), Jessica Brabble is a second-year graduate student in history, and E. Thomas Ewing is a professor of history, all at Virginia Tech. More information about their flu mask research is here: https://sites.google.com/vt.edu/flumasks/home.