How did Victorians understand and diagnose mental illness? If a person on trial in a nineteenth-century British courtroom was thought to be suffering from “madness,” the court did not necessarily ask a physician to provide an expert opinion or to diagnose the individual. As Joel Peter Eigen explains, doctors were not respected as expert witnesses…
Category: History of Medicine
When Medicine Met Diplomacy (Part II)
How did American medical professionals design and learn from the 1923 Japanese Medical Commission to the United States for the promotion of “American medicine”?
“Innocent” and “Guilty” AIDS Victims: A Review of The Life and Times of Ryan White by Paul M. Renfro
Flyer, “Bring Your Grief and Rage About AIDS to a Political Funeral in Washington, D.C.” October 11, 1992. Several years ago, I was asked to give a presentation for World AIDS Day while working as a sexual health educator at a youth center. Popular histories of AIDS activism were in vogue, such as David…
Book Review: Inspired and Outraged by Alice Rothchild
“[T]he analyst who points us out from our classmates and announced (disapprovingly)/ You women are taking the place of a productive male…You are here because of your Unresolved Penis Envy” (pp 166-7). These are the attitudes which Dr. Alice Rothchild, obstetrician and gynecologist at Beth Israel Hospital, Associate Professor of Obstetrics, Gynecology and Reproductive Biology…
Good Vibes Only?: Medieval Plague Tracts and the Powers (and Limits) of Positive Thinking in a Pandemic
When the first waves of the Black Death struck Europe in the fourteenth century, the last thing likely to be on anyone’s mind was staying cheerful; yet overwhelmingly, this is the advice that contemporary physicians gave. Medieval plague treatises explained that dwelling excessively on the horrors of the plague and thoughts of death could actually…
Between Killing and Curing: Doctors in Literary Depictions of the Russian Revolution and Civil War
The historian Roy Porter observes that “We turn doctors into heroes, yet feel equivocal about them […] Even in Greek times opinions about medicine were mixed; the word pharmakos meant both remedy and poison – ‘kill’ and ‘cure’ were apparently indistinguishable” (4). This paradoxical mixture of killing and curing is perhaps nowhere more visible than…
The Rupture of Silence: The Body, Language, and The Power Dynamics in Health with Monica Ong
In “The Vulnerable and the Political,” Estelle Ferrarese talks about the affinity between care and the management of vulnerability. Both become political as they pertain to individual and social bodies. “The distribution of care,” Ferrarese says, “depends on patterns of domination and historical organizations that may stem from the sedimentation of gendered roles…” (237). Social…
Reducing Creativity to a Psychiatric Syndrome: On the Pathologization of Female Poets
October 17th, 2024. Public reading of my latest collection of poems, Permettez-moi de palpiter [Allow Me to Pulsate][3]. Open discussion with the audience. […] Suddenly, in a eureka moment, an elderly man speaks up: “You have Cotard’s syndrome. You must have. All the symptoms you describe match up.” This anecdote – whose significance is, in fact, more than anecdotal – gives me the opportunity to revisit a centuries-old tradition in patriarchal discourse of pathologizing female poets.
What Happened to Mrs. Taguchi? Reading Medical Pluralism in Imperial Japan
Trigger Warning: This essay discusses attempted suicide. What Happened in the Hallway? The story of “Mrs. Taguchi” had a happy ending. Having attempted suicide by hanging for a third time while an inpatient at the Tokyo Matsuzawa Hospital, an elite psychiatric facility where she received treatment in 1930, the 42-year-old’s symptoms took a sudden turn…
When Medicine Met Diplomacy (Part I): “American Medicine” and Its Ambition in East Asia (early 20th century)
How was medical exchange intertwined with diplomacy between Japan and the United States in the early 20th century?