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~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:

• Diseases of slavery
• The Negro Health Problem
• Early physical anthropology
• Eugenics and human experimentation

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! 

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:

• Ocular Aids – Glasses
• Ocular Aids – Guide Dogs
• Ocular Aids – Reading Devices
• Hearing Aids
• Dentures
• Prosthetic Limbs

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!

We are delighted to open the blog to our 2021 Jaipreet Virdi Fellow in Disability Studies, Rachael Gillibrand

Hello there, my name’s Rachael and I’m delighted to introduce myself as the Medical Heritage Library’s Jaipreet Virdi 2021 Fellow in Disability Studies. As a Fellow, I will be working with the Medical Heritage Library to curate new collections of primary sources on the topic of ‘Disability and Technology’. These will be made available online, so keep an eye out for them appearing over the summer months!

The ‘Disability and Technology’ focus of this fellowship is very closely connected to my personal research interests. In September 2020, I completed my PhD at the University of Leeds. My thesis, entitled The Material Culture of Physical Impairment: Assistive Technology in Northern Europe, c. 1400–c. 1600, considered the construction, use, and popular perceptions of a variety of assistive technologies, and thought about the ways in which current debates in the fields of transhumanism and cyborg theory could be applied to questions of historical dis/ability, technology, and the body. 

Drawing upon this research, I have a number of published and forthcoming book chapters, including: 

• ‘Military Masculinity and Mechanised Prostheses: The Use of Assistive Technologies in Sixteenth Century Warfare’, in Alan Murray, James Titterton (eds.), The Material Culture of Medieval War (Leiden: Brill) – expected 2021
• ‘Sight and Sanctity: Images of Saints Wearing Spectacles in Later Medieval Visual Culture’, in Stephanie Grace-Petinos, Leah Pope Parker, Alicia Spencer-Hall (eds.), Disability and Sanctity in the Middle Ages, vol. 2 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press) – expected 2021
• ‘The Smithfield Decretals (c.1340)’, in Cameron Hunt-McNabb (ed.), The Medieval Disability Sourcebook (New York: Punctum Press, 2020)

If you’d like a taste of my research, I recently published an article in EPOCH magazine about my favourite knight and his use of a prosthetic arm (you can find that here:  https://www.epoch-magazine.com/post/to-fight-as-well-as-anyone-else-medieval-knights-and-mechanised-prosthesesby) 

Since completing my PhD, I have been employed as a Lecturer of Medieval History and Heritage at Aberystwyth University in Wales. In this position, I teach several research-led modules including ‘Dread and Despair? Living with Disability in the Middle Ages’. This module encourages students to draw upon an interdisciplinary body of primary source materials to challenge the popular notion that the historical experience of disability was one of ‘dread and despair’. By thinking critically about the validity of the ‘dark ages’ myth, my students and I enjoy more nuanced conversations about historical understandings of health, dis/ability, and the body. 

However, despite the pre-modern focus of my research and teaching content, I am fascinated by the use and development of disability technology more broadly. As such, I hope this fellowship will unearth some fascinating material from the medieval through to the modern. If you would like to talk to me about my fellowship or my research more broadly, you can find me on Twitter @r_gillibrand or via email at rag32@aber.ac.uk. 

I look forward to sharing my findings with you over the coming months!