We are very excited to offer our first Spring Speaker Series! We have four marvellous scholars excited to share their research with you.
First, on March 26 at noon (US EST), is 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:
After World War I, as 200,000 military members returned home with a disability, the US government standardized rehabilitation programs for the first time. The consolidation of rehabilitative services by the government resulted in a consistent definition of disability and ability, one which was intimately tied to a veteran’s economic contribution to their family and community. By combining clinical treatment and work training within these programs, the government promised a return to economic independence. This promise was communicated through government propaganda geared to veterans, including the magazine Coming Back (1919) and Carry On (1919-1918). This paper explores the government’s message of disability through such propaganda and the public’s response through popular magazines, like Ladies’ Home Journal and Saturday Evening Post. Veterans’ organizations, like the American Legion, also responded to such messages through their own publications. While magazines and advertisements inundated the public with the story of the disabled veteran returning home, earning a job, and providing for their family, the American Legion argued that the government had failed in its promises due to veterans’ experiences of discrimination. The government, popular media, and veterans’ organizations embraced a changing definition of disability to accommodate the many formerly abled men who returned from the war. Though the government promised a reformulation of disability as compatible with independence, rehabilitation failed to take into account the lived experiences of all disabled veterans, including veterans of color, women, and people who developed disabilities other than amputations. Disability, coupled with the valor associated with Great War veterans, was redefined to include the possibility of achieving independence through paid work, and yet this independence was only ascribed to those who government officials believed could succeed in their programs: white men with physical disabilities.
Register for Nora’s talk here.
On April 2 at noon (US EST), is Trisha Haldar from Kolkata,India. She has completed her graduation (History Honours) from Bethune College, Kolkata and post-graduation from the University of Calcutta. She has a keen interest in the History of Medicine and so did her M.Phil. in this area from Jadavpur University, Kolkata, under the supervision of Professor Nupur Dasgupta. At present, she is an Assistant Professor at Ghoshpukur College, Siliguri.
Professor Haldar’s talk is titled Western Medicine in the face of the scourge of the fevers of Bengal:
Since the time the English East India Company established its bases in Calcutta, most travelers to the city wrote about its unhealthful environment. Gradually, as the English Company metamorphosed from a commercial unit to a political power, it indulged itself more in the Oriental wars. It is not unknown to us that in wars, deaths are bound to occur on both sides of the battlefield. But surprisingly, the Company lost more soldiers to the underlying disease than to the wars. It was the fevers of Bengal, which was perceived to be a deadly disease and was known to slew its patients within hours. Quite naturally, this fatality was to draw the attention of the medics working under the English East India Company. Eventually, there arose a curiosity among the medical practitioners to look out for effective medicines against such fevers. While looking into the fatality, in this paper, I have drawn special attention to the therapeutics prescribed by the Company appointed medics and in doing so I have in particular consulted the e-collections of these medical practitioners. Especially those archived by the Medical Heritage Library and also the Internet Archives. A close glimpse at these works shows that their medical practice was influenced both by the metropole and the indigenous medical culture of Bengal. Overall, the paper attempts to track the uncertainty relating to the treatment process. Such quandary over the therapeutics was essentially the outcome of colonial policies. Juxtaposed to it, the paper also attempts to show that how the practice of medication also got altered with the anatomization of the body.
Register for Trisha’s talk here.
On April 9 at noon (US EST), is Sarah Berry, Visiting Assistant Professor of English at State University of New York—Oswego. She specializes in Health Humanities and writes on medicine, gender, race, and U.S. cultural history. She is a Contributor-in-Residence at Synapsis, serves in the Health Humanities Consortium, and is working on a book titled Patient Revolutions: Health and Social Justice in America from Abolition to the Affordable Care Act.
Her talk is titled “Black Museum”: An American Medical Experiment:
Racial disparities in health and medical care have been highlighted by the current pandemic, but they have long roots in U.S. history. Teaching and researching this history is important for moving forward with restorative justice and health equity. A particularly rich starting point is “Black Museum,” a 2017 episode of the sci-fi television series Black Mirror. This episode features three fictional medical technologies that call up specific, real ethical problems in U.S. racial and medical history. The technologies, exhibited by the Black Museum’s owner, a former research recruiter, harken back to the nineteenth-century commodification of race and somatic difference in three linked areas: the new science of forensics (institutionalized in the original Black Museum of Scotland Yard); medical museums; and circus “freak” shows. This presentation explores the “Roots of Racism in Health and Medicine” collection and other resources in the Medical Heritage Library in order to uncover the historical connections among race, medicine, entertainment, and crime dramatized in the episode. This talk offers pedagogical techniques to immerse students in digital archival research, enabling them to make their own connections among race and health justice in U.S. cultural history.
Register for Sarah’s talk here.
Our final speaker on April 23 at noon (US EST) will be Elizabeth McNeill, Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at the University of Michigan. Her dissertation, “Speaking (of) Animals in the Life Sciences and Literature of 20th-Century Germany,” tracks the various knowledge practices at work in the constellation of animality, language, and experimentation from the mid-19th to the late-20th century in the German-speaking world. “Speaking (of) Animals” ultimately reorients well-known scientific and literary figures such as Franz Kafka, Wilhelm Wundt, Robert Musil, and Konrad Lorenz in the context of once popular but today mostly forgotten or disqualified scientific discourses about animal intelligence and communication.
Her talk is titled The Animal Soul between Peter Scheitlin and Charles Darwin:
This talk concerns the 19th-century origins of studying animal behavior, which is commonly traced back to Darwin’s experiments in the late 1830s at the London Zoological Gardens with the aim of researching mental evolutionism. I complicate this origin story by resituating it within the 19th-century history of psychology in the German-speaking world and, more specifically, the contentious emergence of animal psychology as an object and mode of scientific study. By tracking the shift from the question of the “animal soul” to that of the “animal expression of emotions” over the course of the 19th century, I draw into relief the tenuous position of animal psychology in emerging psychological fields, as the positivist, experimental Naturwissenschaften gradually dethroned Naturphilosophie. With the Swiss theologian, naturalist, and philosopher Peter Scheitlin as the missing link in this history, I center my interrogation on his paradoxically forgotten yet foundational contribution to the study of animal behavior and expression. In doing so, I restore Scheitlin to his place in the history of science while tracing the 19th-century reverberations of the term he coined: “Thierseelenkunde” [science of the animal soul] or, as experimental psychologist Wilhelm Wundt disdainfully called it at century’s end, “Thierpsychologie” [animal psychology].
Register for Elizabeth’s talk here.
The speaker series is co-sponsored by MHL partner Center for the History of Medicine, Countway Library, Harvard University.