Masters of Health: Racial Science and Slavery in U.S. Medical Schools
Christopher Willoughby, PhD Visiting Assistant Professor in the History of Medicine Pitzer College
Wednesday, Nov. 9, 2022 Noon – 1:30 p.m. (EST) Registration is required.Click HERE to register for this online event
Christopher D. E. Willoughby is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the History of Medicine at Pitzer College in Claremont, California. In 2016, he completed his PhD in history at Tulane University. He is the author of Masters of Health: Racial Science and Slavery in U.S.Medical Schools (University of North Carolina Press, 2022), and with Sean Morey Smith, he edited the book Medicine and Healing in the Age of Slavery (Louisiana State University Press, 2021). He has published widely in popular and academic publications including The Washington Post and The Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences. Previously, he has held long-term fellowships at the Huntington Library, Harvard’s Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History, The Pennsylvania State University, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and Emory University.
Live closed captioning will be available.
Harvard University welcomes individuals with disabilities to participate in its programs and activities. If you would like to request further accommodations or have questions about this event, please contact Susan Legere at susan_legere@hms.harvard.edu in advance of your participation. Please note that the University will make every effort to secure services, but services are subject to availability.
We’re delighted to welcome our new partners at the Ruth Lilly Medical Library and to share this introductory post from Brandon Pieczko, Digital and Special Collections Librarian.
The Medical Heritage Library has a new contributor, the Indiana University School of Medicine’s Ruth Lilly Medical Library. Beginning in May 2022, the library began contributing select digitized items to the Medical Heritage Library to improve the discoverability of print materials from its History of Medicine Collection.
History of Medicine Collection Research Room
The History of Medicine Collection is a special collection unit within the Ruth Lilly Medical Library located in Indianapolis, Indiana. As part of the Indiana University School of Medicine, the mission of the History of Medicine Collection is to support the research, learning, and educational success of Indiana University students, faculty, and community members by collecting, preserving, interpreting, and providing access to unique materials documenting the history of medicine; medical education, training, research, and practice; and health and disease treatment and prevention in the state of Indiana and beyond. The collection includes archival records and manuscripts from Indiana University School of Medicine faculty and alumni, researchers, professional organizations, advocates, and practitioners in the medical and health care professions; a significant number of medical instruments and other artifacts; audiovisual recordings in a variety of formats; and rare and early print books, periodicals, and other publications (1542 – present) in multiple languages (e.g., English, French, German, Latin, Russian) on various subjects including anatomy and physiology, surgery, obstetrics and gynecology, pediatrics, pathology, pharmacology, psychiatry, military medicine, medical ethics, and public health.
To date, the Ruth Lilly Medical Library has uploaded 37 issues of the Indiana University School of Medicine yearbook to the Internet Archive, as well as an incredibly detailed notebook containing pathology lecture and laboratory notes written by an Indiana Medical College student between 1903 and 1904. Looking ahead, the library plans to contribute additional digitized resources from its History of Medicine Collection including early medical school commencement programs and a series of monthly bulletins published by the Indiana Department of Health between 1899 and 1925.
Drawing of pulmonary tuberculosis from medical student’s pathology lab notes, 1904
In addition to the print materials it is contributing to the Medical Heritage Library, the Ruth Lilly Medical Library has also digitized a large number of audiovisual recordings from its holdings and made them made available for direct online streaming through Indiana University’s Media Collections Online, a digital repository developed specifically to provide access to digitized and born-digital media. Since November 2020, the library has uploaded nearly 200 items to Media Collections Online including public health, disease awareness, and emergency preparedness programs produced by local, state, and national organizations; demonstrations of dissections, surgeries, and other medical procedures developed to inform medical student education; and recordings of history of medicine guest lectures and student and faculty conference presentations.
Still from a video recording of lecture on minority healthcare delivered by Dr. Joycelyn Elders at IU School of Medicine in 2000
The History of Medicine Collection also contains a variety of artifacts ranging in date from the late 18th to early 21st century including surgical and dissection kits; diagnostic equipment like microscopes, ophthalmoscopes, hemocytometers, sphygmomanometers, and stethoscopes; as well as a disarticulated (Beauchene) skull and a life-size model of a human skeleton. Some of these artifacts have been digitized using photogrammetry scanning techniques to create 3D models that researchers and learners can interact with dynamically online. These models have been uploaded to a designated collection in Sketchfab, the 3D modeling platform the Ruth Lilly Medical Library also uses to provide access to the anatomical models it creates for use in medical education. To date, the library has uploaded models of 12 historical artifacts to the collection and plans to expand this digital project to include additional artifacts from the History of Medicine Collection.
3D model of an English pewter bleeding bowl, circa 1840s
The Ruth Lilly Medical Library is excited to join the Medical Heritage Library and hopes that its contributions will benefit both the library and the MHL’s broader mission to provide open online access to digital history of medicine resources.
As a collaborative digitization and discovery organization committed to providing open access to the history of medicine and health resources, the Medical Heritage Library, Inc. (MHL) works to ensure that researchers and other people have access to the historical records at the heart of evidence-based history.
The June 24, 2022 decision by the Supreme Court of the United States in Dobbs v. Jackson to overturn the 49-year precedent of Roe v. Wade, as analyzed by historians and commentators, is based, in part, on a faulty reading of history and an intentional misunderstanding of the evolution of laws around abortion. As noted in the amicus brief filed by both the American Historical Association and the Organization of American Historians, “the court adopted a flawed interpretation of abortion criminalization that has been pressed by anti-abortion advocates for more than 30 years. The opinion inadequately represents the history of the common law, the significance of quickening in state law and practice in the United States, and the 19th-century forces that turned early abortion into a crime.” The MHL fears how such interpretations can and may be used to overturn existing law. We also fear what that overturning will mean for individuals seeking medical care.
This decision inserts government into considerations that should be made between an individual and their physician. It not only restricts access to reproductive services, but also lays the foundation for increases in maternal mortality. The United States already has the highest rates of maternal mortality of any developed country, with Black women dying at a ratio of 3:1 to 4:1 in relation to white women. This decision will also disproportionally affect individuals from historically disadvantaged communities. We fear that this decision will become a gateway to other actions taken at the state level to restrict access to birth control and forms of medical intervention needed for reproductive and sexual health.
This decision also impacts women’s health overall by reducing a person’s ability to gain access to medications that not only aid in abortion and miscarriage recovery, but also in other aspects of health care, such as cancer treatment and in-vitro fertilization. The MHL stands on the side of complete health care for all.
While the sources made available by the Medical Heritage Library, Inc. document what happens when access to healthcare for all individuals is limited, these sources often reflect the perspective of institutions run by white males and religiously biased organizations.
History is meant to be not only a window into our past, but also a guidepost for our future. To paraphrase, the history of medicine is also its prologue. The MHL, as professionals who serve all who learn from the health sciences, expresses disappointment at the Dobbs decision, as well as our sadness at its impact on future generations.
Hello! My name is Genie Yoo and I’m excited to be an Educational Resources Fellow (alongside my colleague Lorna Ebner) at the Medical Heritage Library this summer. In collaboration with librarians and curators, faculty and fellows, I will be curating a new collection on the theme of climate change and medicine. My goal is to create an accessible collection for students, educators, and the general public, highlighting the rich digitized resources available through the Medical Heritage Library’s archive.
By way of a quick introduction, I am a historian of early modern and modern island Southeast Asia, working at the intersection of history of science, medicine, environment, and religion. My dissertation, titled Mediating Islands: Ambon Across the Ages, explores the history of colonial and indigenous knowledge-making about the natural world of the spice islands, particularly the island of Ambon in present-day Indonesia. I demonstrate how imperial and indigenous knowledge production about nature, medicine, and the environment was inextricably tied to the archipelago’s inter-island Islamic networks.
My interest in climate change has everything to do with the past, present, and the uncertain futures of the islands I study, touching on natural resource extraction, colonialism, environmental degradation, and natural disasters. And as the World Health Organization announced in 2021, climate change poses the gravest health threat to society on a global scale. It is estimated to affect over 930 million people worldwide, especially the most vulnerable. In order to understand the link between climate change and health inequities, I plan to curate a collection that highlights, among other things, the historical connections between climate, medicine, and empire, and the development of different scientific and medical fields, from medical climatology and minerology to tropicalmedicine and hydrology.
Upon defending my dissertation this summer, I will continue to explore these themes using indigenous manuscripts as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow for the ERC-funded project, “Textual Microcosms: A New Approach in Translation Studies,” at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. If you would like to chat further, you can reach me by email at jhyoo@princeton.edu or find me on Twitter @genieyoo818. For samples of my public writing, feel free to check out my blogposts at Environmental History Now and The Recipes Project:
“Birds in Life and in Ink: An Errant Tracing,” Environmental History Now: https://envhistnow.com/2021/09/07/birds-in-life-and-in-ink-an-errant-tracing/
“Drinking the Ink of Prayer,” The Recipes Project: https://recipes.hypotheses.org/17556 I’m excited to learn from this fellowship and look forward to sharing the collection with you at the end of the summer!
Well hello, my name is Lorna Ebner, I am a Ph.D. candidate at Stony Brook University. This summer I’ll be working to curate an online dataset for the Medical Heritage Library that highlights LGBTQ+ resource materials. Over the course of the next few months, I’ll be sifting through the over 300,000 available resources to create a narrated shelf of materials that focus on the LGBTQ+ community as it intersects with and around the history of medicine.
My experience with the LGBTQ+ community in an academic capacity began as a graduate student at Rutgers-Newark, where I had the privilege to work closely with the Queer Newark Oral History Project. QNOHP is an oral history collection focusing on LGBTQ+ Newarkers and allies. This inspiring organization highlights over 70 local voices and creates a space for these voices that is accessible to a wide audience while honoring the local community in Newark. Check out their website by clicking on the image below.
My plans for the summer fellowship with the Medical Heritage Library are threefold:
· To create a curated shelf that highlights the incredible and numerous resources the Medical Heritage Library has to offer, which will serve as a gateway for future researchers interested in the intersection of medical and LGBTQ+ history.
· To narrate the resources in such a way that it broadens the scope of understanding about how the LGBTQ+ community evolved and transformed over time in the United States.
· Most importantly, to highlight the diversity and agency within the source material in regards to the LGBTQ+ community and create a widely accessible range of resource materials.
I’m looking forward to sharing not only my findings, but also my research and creative process with you in the coming months.
My current academic endeavor is my dissertation, or as I refer to it, that pesky little project. Tentatively titled “Burning Contagion,” though in my head I call it “We didn’t start the fire,” the dissertation analyzes five cases of arson against healthcare facilities, from 1774-1901. It attempts to understand how medical facilities became a focal point for political unrest, and in doing so, questions the idea of the “mindless mob” by replacing the moniker “mindless” with “minded” in order to show arson was enacted through contemporary knowledge rather than ignorance. As one of my professor’s at Stony Brook used to say “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it sure does rhyme,” and the ongoing pandemic has taught me a lot, so much so that I almost thought of it as a form of ethnographic research. (Ha!)
A brief follow-up: In the midst of writing this blog post the Supreme Court rescinded Roe v. Wade. As someone who recently moved from a state where the right to bodily autonomy is protected to one of the most restrictive states in the country, I am enraged and terrified. More than ever, I feel the importance of the Medical Heritage Library and this project to highlight marginalized voices and the history, good and bad, that haunts the United States and informs present ideologies and actions.
The UCSF Library Archives and Special Collections and Makers Lab are accepting proposals for the third annual UCSF Library Artist in Residence program. The UCSF Library Artist in Residence award, valued at $6,000, will be given annually to one candidate with a degree in Studio Arts or a related field and/or a history of exhibiting artistic work in professional venues.
Possible projects can include, but are not limited to: painting; photography; performance; sculpture; 3D scanning and 3D printing; programmable electronics; and digital, video or installation art. The 2022 residency will be in-person, however, the artist may need to pivot to a remote residency depending on the epidemiological situation. Applicants are advised to review the remote project of the UCSF 2020 Artist in Residence, Farah Hamade.
UCSF Archives & Special Collections (A&SC) is excited to announce that it was awarded a grant by the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC) in support of the project titled Pioneering Child Studies: Digitizing and Providing Access to Collection of Women Physicians who Spearheaded Behavioral and Developmental Pediatrics.
The $149,814 award will support the creation of a digital collection on Calisphere containing materials from five collections held at UCSF documenting life and work of five women physicians and social workers, Drs. Hulda Evelyn Thelander, Helen Fahl Gofman, Selma Fraiberg, Leona Mayer Bayer, and Ms. Carol Hardgrove, who were pioneers in the developmental-behavioral pediatrics research, patient care, and public-health policy. These materials will enable researchers and general public to understand evolution of social policy and cultural norms as they relate to special education, people with disabilities, and equitable access to health care.
A relatively new field in medicine, developmental-behavioral pediatrics came out of an increased demand for mental health services in pediatric care starting in the 1920s. While infant and child mortality rates declined in part due to public health campaigns and medical breakthroughs, concerns over behavioral problems and developmental delays grew as pediatrics began to look beyond mere survival and started to consider the whole child.
Documents from these five collections often illustrate the work of their creators on the same or similar projects and collaboration between the creators; these will be digitally “reunited” in the course of the grant by being posted on the same digital platform, Calisphere and being linked through extended metadata.
As part of this project UCSF archivists will engage with communities of women physicians, researchers, and health care providers, discussing how to document their voices that have been underrepresented, absent, or excluded from the history in general and history of their institutions (including UCSF) or professions in particular.
This 24-month project was launched in September and will be managed by our processing archivist, Edith Escobedo. The materials will be digitized by the UC Merced Library’s Digital Assets Unit that has been partnering with UCSF on successful collaborative digitization projects for more than 10 years.
Please contact Polina Ilieva, Associate University Librarian for Collections with questions about this award. Please read full announcement here.
In early 2020, the UCSF Library’s Archives and Special Collections and Makers Lab launched the inaugural Artist in Residence program. Farah Hamade was selected as the 2020/2021 artist. You can now watch Farah’s final project, “The City is a Body,” an audio-visual animation examining disparities in COVID-19 outcomes experienced by different communities in San Francisco and exploring what existing disparities may have played a role.
Learn more about the “The City is a Body” project and Farah’s one-year residency on the UCSF Library website.
~Post courtesy Polina Ilieva, head, Archives and Special Collections, UCSF Library.
Join historians Dan Royles and Antoine Johnson for a conversation about the long—and little told—history of responses to HIV/AIDS in African American communities. They’ll discuss Royles’s book To Make the Wounded Whole: The African American Struggle against HIV/AIDS, Johnson’s research on the impact of HIV/AIDS on the Bay Area’s Black communities, their favorite finds in the UCSF archives, and more.
Dan Royles is an Assistant Professor of History at Florida International University in Miami, where he teaches courses on United States, African American, LGBTQ, public, and oral history. His first book, To Make the Wounded Whole: The African American Struggle against HIV/AIDS, was published in 2020 by University of North Carolina Press. He also runs the African American AIDS History Project, a digital archive of responses to HIV/AIDS in Black America.
Antoine Johnson is a History PhD candidate in UCSF’s Humanities and Social Sciences program. His dissertation examines Black AIDS activism in the Bay Area and ways structural racism increased African Americans’ disease vulnerability. His dissertation is tentatively titled, “The Other Epidemic: AIDS, Activism, and Anti-Black Racism in the Bay Area, 1981-1999,” which he will be defending next April.
~By Nicole Baker, Reference Librarian in the History of Medicine Division at the National Library of Medicine.
The Great Amherst Mystery by Walter Hubbell recounts his personal experience of what has been purported to be one of the most widely witnessed poltergeist phenomena in history. Hubbell observed these events and the family in their home from June 1879 through August 1879. Hubbell believed he was an authority on the “illusive effects” that stage performers like himself would use to entertain and trick audience members into believing performed magic acts. With a background in professional acting, he believed he would be able to decipher any trickery afoot or deception tactics being used in the widely reported Amherst haunting and expose the mystery to be a fraudulent act put on by the afflicted family.
Truth, it has been said, is often stranger than fiction. What I have written is the truth, and not fiction, and it is very strange. —Walter Hubbell, 1888
On the afternoon of August 28, 1878, nineteen-year-old Esther Cox went out driving with Bob McNeal, a local young man. During their drive, Bob suddenly pulled the buggy over in a remote area and pointed a revolver at Esther, commanding her to get out of the buggy. Unsure of what nefarious plans Bob had in store for her, Esther was terrified and refused. Esther’s refusal made him increasingly irate, but luckily she was saved by the sounds of another wagon approaching in the distance. Fearing being caught, Bob put away the revolver and drove Esther back home. Locals described Bob as cruel, and even went so far as to say he would skin cats alive and watch them run about in pain for amusement. He was said to have left Amherst shortly after the incident but was still alive in 1879.
Within a month after this frightening attack, mysterious events at the Teed cottage in Amherst, Nova Scotia began to occur. While several ghostly entities would be identified throughout Esther’s coming ordeal, it is worth mentioning that the chief ghost, sharing several traits in common with Esther’s attacker, would come to be known as Bob. During the three months Walter Hubble spent observing these events, he was unable to come to any firm conclusions in his attempt to supplant the supernatural explanations with more mundane reasoning. Hubbell’s theory was that the “astral body” of Bob McNeal had been tormenting Esther at the behest of the demon called Bob Nickle. Hubbell believed that after the attack, the demon attached itself to Esther instead and was the most active spirit.
Esther Cox lived in a small house with her married sister Olive and Olive’s husband, Daniel Teed, along with their two young sons Willie and George. Esther’s sister Jennie and brother John and Daniel’s brother, also named John, lived with them as well.
The nearly year-long haunting of Esther included a wide range of activities including objects disappearing and reappearing in other locations, spontaneous fires, disembodied voices, and unexplainable physical ailments. The voices would eventually identify themselves as Maggie Fisher, her sister Mary Fisher, Peter Cox, Jane Nickle, Eliza McNeal, and Bob Nickle. Relating one of these attacks, Jennie described her sister Esther as appearing with “her short hair almost standing on end, her face blood-red and her eyes looking as if they would start from their sockets, while her hands were grasping the back of a chair so tightly that her finger-nails sank into the soft wood”. Esther’s account was that she was so swollen, she felt like she would burst, and her skin had become incredibly hot.
When a local doctor named Dr. Carritte was called to the Teed cottage several days later to examine Esther’s strange symptoms, he diagnosed her with nervous excitement and prescribed her a sedative to help treat it. In his account Walter Hubbell reports that Dr. Carritte attempted this medical intervention for Esther Cox with strange effect:
He informed me that on one occasion he had given her one ounce of bromide of potassium, one pint of brandy and heavy doses of morphia and laudanum on the same night, without the slightest effect on her system… He stated, on this same evening, that all the medicine was neutralized by the ghosts.
In December of that year, Esther was diagnosed with diphtheria and during this time, all paranormal activity ceased. However, once she returned home, small fires began to start around the house, including one in the cellar. All family members, including Esther, were visible and accounted for when the fire started. Shortly after the fire, a ghost appeared to Esther and insisted that if she did not leave the house that very night, he would set the loft on fire and burn them all to death. The family knew that Esther had to leave, and they were able to find temporary shelter for her at John White’s home.
Both the Teed cottage and the White home experienced a lull in ghost activity. But soon the previous pattern began to repeat. First, the ghosts began to make contact with Esther in the White home. Then the fires started. In fear of losing his home to a fire, John White convinced Esther to accompany him to work at the dining-saloon. Still, the ghost followed her and showed off his abilities to many guests and strangers. At one point, a knife belonging to John’s son was taken from his hands and instantly stabbed Esther in the back, twice. Afterwards, the knife was locked away in the cash register at White’s dining-saloon.
After this escalation of events, Esther moved around several times, back to the Teed home and then to the homes of neighbors, but ghosts followed wherever she went. Each time the events began to spiral out of control with fires or violent actions, and Esther would be asked to leave in order to prevent irreparable damage or other serious consequences.
Neighbors, friends, and townspeople alike witnessed these strange happenings around Esther Cox, and they were widely reported in the local news. The Amherst Gazette published several accounts by locals, including that the loud sounds could be “heard by people in the street as they passed the house”.
In August 1879, Walter Hubbell saw Esther for the last time, leaving Amherst with the mystery unsolved. Sometime later, he wrote to Esther’s family to discover her fate and learned that Esther had been implicated in a barn fire in Amherst later that year. Because of her location in relation to the barn and outbuildings, which were totally destroyed by the fire, Esther was arrested and eventually convicted and sentenced to four months in jail for arson. She was released after a month and did not experience further poltergeist activity. By 1882, she seemed to have finally moved on from the hauntings, was married, and had a son. The ghosts no longer bothered her from this point on.
Walter Hubbell had arrived in Amherst committed to disproving the haunting as a hoax because of his personal experience with individuals fraudulently claiming to be in touch with the spiritual world. However, he reports in the end that he came to believe that ghosts were, indeed, real:
From what I saw and heard in the haunted house, I have been led to infer that the ghosts of the dead live in a world similar to ours, and that it is to them just as material as our world is to us.
Despite this testimony on ghosts, Hubbell remained critical of people claiming to be spiritual mediums, claiming that less than 5% had ever seen a ghost or had a message from one.
