Anyone else remember Cheaper by the Dozen? I remember shrieking with laughter over the book and the play was a real treat (done by my local theatre company when I was a teenager).
The Gilbreths were a real family and Frank and Lillian real experts in their field, as I’m reminded by finding this title in among our latest uploads:
~Update from our 2021 Education Resources Fellow, Aja Lans!
Hello all! I am partway through my time as the MHL’s Education Resources Fellow and have updates on my research into race and equity in healthcare. There are discussions of sensitive topics in this blog, many of which pertain to historical discussions of members of the African diaspora.
Any research pertaining to the history of race is challenging, as the meaning of “race” is constantly in flux. Humans do not fit into neat biological categories based on race, and yet the concept has dominated studies of diversity for centuries. Searching through the MHL to identify sources on the topic takes time and a lot of trial and error. While today we might use descriptors such as “people of color,” “Black,” or “African American,” not so long ago we would replace these words and phrases with terms such as “Negro” and “slave.” The same goes for medical terminology. For example, the disease we now know as tuberculosis used to be called “consumption” and “phthisis.” Therefore, I constantly try different words and phrases to locate materials on the history of race and health.
I am compiling these resources based on broad themes/time periods so that they are more easily accessible to those of you interested in learning this history:
I am currently working on a journal article that focuses on the history of mental health in the Black community. This inspired me to locate resources pertaining to the health of enslaved people in antebellum America. Take the research of Dr. Samuel Cartwright (1793-1863) who diagnosed self-emancipated Black people with “drapetomania,” or the disease that caused the enslaved to run away.
My research on Black life after emancipation was the starting point for investigating “The Negro Health Problem” in historic medical literature. This phrase was popularized in a paper written by physician L.C. Allen in 1915 in which he argued
“It is undoubtedly true that the negro race has deteriorated physically and morally since slavery times. In some ways he is perhaps more intelligent, but freedom has not benefited his health, nor improved his morals. There is more sickness and inefficiency and crime among them now than before the war. All old physicians tell us that in slavery time consumption was practically unknown among the negro race. This fact, I believe, is thoroughly established.”
Essentially, after emancipation certain diseases became more prevalent in Black communities, including tuberculosis and rickets. Instead of acknowledging that such illnesses were due structural inequalities including but not limited to discrimination, subpar segregated housing, and poor working conditions, Black people were accused of being vectors of disease due to a lack of moral and physical hygiene.
As an anthropologist, I also have to include a set on the role early physical anthropologists played in creating and maintaining notions of race. Anthropologists defined types of people by studying the bodies of both the living and the dead and classifying humans. Studies of cranial features, skin color, and hair type and form were common. These types of studies would bolster eugenics, or the theory of race improvement.
Curating collections on this topic has been both challenging and rewarding. I still have quite a bit of work to do, and I look forward to sharing the finished sets with you in the fall!
We’re delighted to be able to announce the first of the recorded and captioned videos from our spring speaker series held back in March and April of this year. Our first speaker was Nora O’Neill, a first-year medical student at Yale School of Medicine. She is pursuing a combined MD-PhD in the History of Science and Medicine. In 2018, she completed her bachelor’s degree from Harvard University in the History of Science, focusing on the intersection of disability rights and reproductive justice. At Yale, she plans to study the social constructions of disability in medical and social activist spaces. As a physician historian, she hopes to engage in patient-centered care while also unraveling the historical complexities of the patient-doctor relationship. Her talk is titled “Carry On: The Depiction of Post-War Disability in Government Propaganda and Consumer Culture, 1919-1925.”
Check out the cover of this manuscript notebook filled by James Rush during a lecture by his father, Benjamin Rush, sometime in the early nineteenth century.
Rachael Gillibrand, our 2021 Jaipreet Virdi Fellow in Disability Studies, offers this look at her work half-way through her fellowship period.
Hello there, I hope you’re all having a lovely summer. I can’t quite believe how quickly the summer months are flying by! Here at the Medical Heritage Library, I am already half-way through my research for the Jaipreet Virdi Fellowship in Disability Studies. So, I thought I would write a quick blog post to update you on my progress so far.
The purpose of my fellowship is to use the Medical Heritage Library’s digital collections to produce a primary source dataset relating to the theme of ‘Disability and Technology’. (If you saw my previous blog post you’ll know just how excited I was about this subject, given that my personal research focuses on the relationship between disability, technology, and the body in the pre-modern period.) The first thing I did when I started the fellowship in June was to dive into the primary sources. Using a really broad array of search terms, I trawled the Medical Heritage Library’s Internet Archive catalogue for anything and everything relating to disability and technology. As a result of this search, I found five-hundred individual sources that deal with some kind of disability technology dating from c. 1650 to c. 1950.
I input these five-hundred sources into an easily accessible ‘shelf’, listing the author, title, publication details, and URL addresses. This shelf will be made accessible to you soon, and will hopefully enable you to quickly search for and scan through the Medical Heritage Library’s materials relating to disability and technology. However, I have almost certainly missed something or failed to search for a particular kind of disability technology that folks might be interested in, so I have also compiled a short guide to using the Medical Heritage Library’s catalogue to help research the history of disability. This guide will be released alongside my ‘shelf’, so take a look and go digging into the archives yourselves, I’d love to hear what you find!
With this ‘shelf’ at my fingertips, I was able to see how certain materials might be brought together in themed primary source sets. As is the way with research, I found huge amounts of material relating to items for which I had expected to find very little (such as the construction and use of dentures), and only a limited amount of material relating to devices that I thought would generate more results (such as wheelchairs). I intend to address some of these disparities in my primary source sets – so stay posted for more on that!
At the moment, I have arranged material into the following six source sets:
Of course, these source-sets are currently a work in progress, so the themes may change before they’re published and, depending on time constraints, new sets might be added to the list – but this is where I’m at for now! I plan to spend August digging more deeply into the material and bringing together these data-sets ready for online publication towards late-summer/early-fall.
I look forward to seeing how things shape up over the coming weeks!
Cover of an 1877 advertising pamphlet for Boyer’s Carmelite Melissa Cordial. Click on the image below to see the full item!
Dominic Hall, curator of the Warren Anatomical Museum at the Center for the History of Medicine at Harvard Medical School wil be speaking as part of a free webinar offered by the American Association for Anatomy on anatomical legacy collections. See more details and sign up to attend here!
New to our collections this week (or late last week to be specific), are runs of the Annales de dermatologie et de syphiligraphie from the 1890s through the 1930s and Janus: Archives internationales pour l’histoire de la médecine et pour la géographie médicale from the 1890s through the 1940s.
The cover of an advertisement booklet for the Maison de Santé de Picpus in Paris; there’s no date in the metadata for the item but it has a late nineteenth century look to me.
And our second fellow introduces herself!
Hello all, my name is Aja Lans and I am excited to be assisting the Medical Heritage Library as an Educational Resources Fellow. I will be developing collections on race and equity in health and healthcare, which is a major focus of my academic research.
In addition to spending my summer working with the MHL collections, I am preparing to defend my doctoral dissertation, “♀ Negro: Embodied Experiences of Inequality in Historic New York City,” at Syracuse University. My research focuses on bioarchaeology, race, and collections ethics by investigating the skeletal and archival remains of Black women who died in Progressive Era New York City, and who were subsequently dissected and curated. Drawing from Black feminist and critical race theory, I position myself as a Black woman and an anthropologist with the goal of accurately representing Black history in the United States. Viewing skeletal collections as an extension of the archive, I draw ties between historical and contemporary events in order to better understand how race becomes biologically embodied.
By closely examining the historical record we can see how racial inequality is created and maintained. In the fields of medicine and anthropology, Black bodies, both living and dead, have consistently been used as research subjects. However, due to the many forms racism and discrimination take, there are many disparities in overall health and mortality in the Black community. Unfortunately, Black death and suffering are often seen as the norm. Archival and historic research can be used to expose the roots of racism and health discrepancies, revealing that these patterns are not naturally occurring, but instead perpetuated by inequality. Early science and medicine played an important role in creating racialized peoples and hierarchies of humanity.
I look forward to exploring the MHL this summer and compiling resources that can be used to teach this important history. These collections will be freely accessible online. Come fall, I will be heading to Harvard University as part of the Inequality in America Initiative Postdoctoral Program, where I will continue my research. If you are interested in learning more, feel free to follow me on Twitter @aja_lans or find my work on Google Scholar!
