In his new book Drugs: The Story of Pharmacology (Yale University Press, 2026), Rod Flower, Emeritus Professor of Biochemical Pharmacology at Queen Mary University of London, offers a grand-sweeping account of how humans have come to know and use medicines as we do in the present day. Throughout the book’s twenty-two chapters, Flower guides the…
Tag: medical history
The Emotional Labour of Medical History
Recently, a professor questioned my use of the word “madness” when describing the mental states of patients in asylums in nineteenth-century Britain. The comment surprised me, as many renowned historians and recent publications use madness to describe mental health in nineteenth-century contexts.[1] Despite my confidence in my word choice, I panicked, worried that I had…
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…
Persons or Things? On the Ethics of Anatomical Dissection
Erik Larsen // “Open up a few corpses: you will dissipate at once the darkness that observation alone could not…” (Qtd. in Foucault 146). Xavier Bichat’s maxim, written in his Anatomie générale of 1801, described a new medical epistemology—one that informs medical practice and training to this day. Along with his Parisian colleagues, Bichat attempted…
Twilight Sleep to Push Playlists: (Re)Sounding U.S. Childbirth 1840-Present
Bennett Kuhn // A certain origin myth at the intersection of music and care is celebrated by ambient music composers and their critics. In 1975, Brian Eno slipped while crossing a London road and was struck by a car. Immobilized and on the mend in a hospital room, Eno was visited by a friend, who set…
From the Dental Parlors: Dentistry and Masculinity in Frank Norris’s “McTeague”
John Carranza // In his introduction to Frank Norris’s turn of the century novel McTeague: A Story of San Francisco, Eric Solomon poses the question, “Still, a novel about a dentist?”[1] In response to this question, Solomon cites Norris’s desire to have a main character that had not yet been written about. In many ways,…
Review of Lindsey Fitzharris’s The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister’s Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine
Livia Arndal Woods Lindsey Fitzharris’s 2017 The Butchering Art is a compelling medical biography of Joseph Lister, pioneer of antiseptic surgical theory and practice. Lister’s work, building on the germ-theories of Louis Pasteur, “Transform[ed] the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine” from a chaotic and deadly battle against seemingly inevitable infections to a more systematic and…