Events
21 May 2012
“Damaging the Body”
Seminar Series, funded by the Wellcome Trust
Foreign Bodies? - Self-Injury, Surgery and Performance
St Bartholomew’s Hospital Pathology Museum & Gallery, Monday 21 May, 6.30 – 8.30pm
A panel discussion considering the variety of ways in which acts and objects are attributed medical, social, political and aesthetic meaning. Drawing on their own research relating to the topic of so-called self-inflicted injury within history, literature and the arts, specialists will open up broader philosophical and historical ideas for debate with the audience. Questions will include, but will not be limited to:
- How is a foreign body defined and understood?
- What is the relationship of the foreign body, and “damage” to the healthy human body?
- What can the exhibition of foreign bodies indicate about consumption, collection and display?
- What is the relationship between the body, surgery and art?
- What is the relationship between the physical body and the body politic?
Speakers:
Emma Spary (University of Cambridge)
Enlightened surgeons and the fabrication of the extraordinary eater in eighteenth-century France
Louise Hide (Birkbeck Pain Project, Birkbeck, University
of London)
Bodily pain and persecutory delusions in London’s asylum patients, c.1900
Mary Cappello (University of Rhode Island)
Swallowed and Saved: The Chevalier Jackson Foreign Body Collection and the Art it has Inspired
Dominic Johnson (Queen Mary, University of London)
Operation Spanner: Performance and the Cultural Politics of Body Modification
The event will take place at St Bartholomew’s Hospital Pathology Museum and Gallery, 3rd floor, Robin Brook Centre, West Smithfield, London EC1A 7BE
Nearest tube: St Paul's
Doors open at 6pm for a chance to explore the museum collection, including a display of foreign body specimens. The event will start promptly at 6.30.
Refreshments provided
Email: info@damagingthebody.org
Web: http://DamagingtheBody.org
14 May 2012
'Severest of Critics, Kindest of Fathers': Silas Weir Mitchell, John Kearsley Mitchell, and Enquiries into Phantom Limb Pain in Late 19th c. U.S. Neurology
Daniel S. Goldberg, J.D., Ph.D Assistant Professor, Department of Bioethics & Interdisciplinary Studies, Brody School of Medicine, East Carolina University
This talk addresses Silas Weir Mitchell’s well-documented interest in the phantom limb pain suffered by amputees during and after the U.S. Civil War. Although Mitchell’s interest has long been noted, it has received surprisingly little sustained historical analysis, which presents an important lacuna in 19th c. understandings about pain within the nascent specialty of neurology in the U.S. Analysis of archival holdings and primary sources reveal that the interest in phantom limb pain passed from father to son, as John Kearsley Mitchell took up his father’s fascination with the subject in earnest. Mitchell the elder joined with Mitchell the younger is sending out a survey to amputee Civil War veterans in the 1890s regarding their experiences with pain, sensation, and nervous ailments. These surveys, contained in the Library of the College of Physicians in Philadelphia, PA (U.S.) offer a rare glimpse of late 19th c. patient narratives of phantom limb pain. Furthermore, many of the completed surveys formed the basis of a chapter on “stumps” in J.K. Mitchell’s 1895 treatise entitled Remote Consequences of Injuries of Nerves, a book that was well-received in its own time by British and American neurologists alike, and that also awaits rigorous historical analysis. Therefore, analysis of S.W. Mitchell’s ideas and work on phantom limb pain is inchoate without close examination of J.K. Mitchell’s work, and the collaboration between them.
In contextualizing the significance of the Mitchells’
individual and collective work on phantom limb pain, the talk builds upon the
author’s prior research regarding attitudes, practices, and beliefs of leading
American neurologists towards pain without lesion in the 19th c. The talk further notes the significance of
the U.S. Army Hospital, South Street, in Philadelphia, P.A., also known as the
“Stump Hospital.” From 1863-1865 this
hospital served as one of the principal clinics in the northern U.S. for the
treatment of those who had experienced amputations during the Civil War. Although the historiography on S.W. Mitchell
rightly notes the significance of Turner’s Lane Hospital as one of the first
neurological research hospitals in the Western world, there is virtually no historical
work on the South Street Hospital. The
latter is important because, given Mitchell’s interest in amputation and
phantom limb pain, and the fact that he rounded at multiple U.S. Army hospitals
during the War, there is reason to suspect that some of his experiences and
care of veterans suffering from phantom limb pain occurred at the South Street
Hospital. Indeed, cross-referencing some
of the names on the Hospital roster with the names from the 1890s surveys shows
several in common, providing additional evidence of the significance of the
South Street Hospital in the Mitchells’ investigations into phantom limb
pain.
5.30 - 7.00 pm, Monday 14 May
Council Room, South Wing G12
Click here for link to location map
13 March 2012
Hormones and the Brain: The Maudsley Cases 1923-1938
Dr Bonnie Evans, Centre for the Humanities and Health, King's College London
The interwar period saw a burgeoning interest in the relationship between hormones and the brain. An analysis of case-notes from The Maudsley Hospital from the period 1923-1938 shows that the prescription of extracts taken from animal testes, ovaries, thyroids and other organs was widespread within this London Hospital. This talk explores the way in which Maudsley doctors justified these treatments by unifying psychological theories of the unconscious with experimental data drawn from laboratory studies of human organs. It explores the logic behind these treatments and examines beliefs about their efficacy. The connection between this historical episode and current research in endocrinology, psychology and neuroscience will also be explored.
Room G12 (Council Room), South Wing
Click here for poster and link to location map
5 December 2011
Psychometric Means: Neuropsychiatry and the Ends of Psychometric Testing
Stephen T. Casper, Assistant Professor, Clarkson University, Humanities and Social Sciences
The Rorschach Test, Slosson Intelligence Test, Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale, and the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory – each test is a psychometric tool that transformed neuropsychiatry. Judged one way, such tools readily fit into the developmental history of psychiatry and neurology; they are a part of the narrative of those field’s advances in understanding, intervening, and treating people with mental illnesses. At the same time, the advent of such tools also fits into a history of neuropsychiatry as a record of the rise of obsessional observational and evaluative techniques and technologies that formed, disciplined, and supervised individuals, groups, and societies.
Both narratives rather
neatly parallel a more general thesis recently advanced by Paul Forman that
revises contemporary understanding of the relationship between science and
technology in the (distinct) ages of modernity and postmodernity. Using
psychometrics – especially the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory – to
illustrate its case, this paper compares these two narratives for the history
of psychometrics and contrasts both with Forman’s more general observations. It
appears that the advent of psychometrics, the contexts in which psychometrics
developed, as well as the alternative historical narratives themselves,
parallel Forman’s more general historical claims.
Room B15, UCL Anatomy Building, Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT
Click here for poster and location maps
16 November 2011
THE AMALIE and EDWARD KASS LECTURE
The Image of Modern Medicine: Professional Identity and Aesthetic Belonging
John Harley Warner
Avalon Professor and Chair, History of Medicine, Professor of History
Yale University
This talk explores physicians’ strivings to re-enchant
the art of healing in the age of scientific medicine. Historical
understanding of the shaping of modern medicine has been transformed during the
past two decades by attention to the extent to which late-19th -century doctors
took up banner of experimental science as a powerful cultural tool they could
use in the marketplace, and to how, in particular, they attached their
collective image to that of the laboratory. This attention to how displaying
the trappings of science took part in the remarkable social elevation of the
profession that ensued has been important in sorting out the relationships
between science and professional authority in the early 20thc, yet at the same
time it risks reducing aesthetic choices to mere show. I instead want to
suggest that they were constitutive elements of medical culture and crucial to
private constructions of self, that is, important ingredients in telling
doctors who they were. Focusing on the U.S. from the late-19th through
the mid-20th centuries and on counter-currents to a reductionist aesthetic in
medical projects of self-representation, the lecture seeks to widen our
understanding of the choices doctors made in crafting an image of themselves,
their profession, and their work, and to consider the meaning of those choices
for our larger understanding of the grounding of modern medicine.
Gavin de Beer Lecture Theatre, UCL Anatomy Building, Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT
Click here for poster and location maps
10 June 2011
Biography and its place in the History of Psychology and Psychiatry
