Physicians' Gallery

Curators of the history of medicine are now facing one of the greatest challenges of their careers – how to collect and preserve objects that convey the impacts of COVID-19 on science, medicine and wider society, whilst that same pandemic rages around them. But in such a rapidly changing situation, might looking back help us in going forward? The Science Museum’s galleries and stores are rich in medical history, but can examining what was, or indeed was not, collected in the past assist curators in capturing key artefacts from this present crisis? Using the world-famous Medicine collections at London’s Science Museum, Natasha McEnroe explores how both presences and absences in the museum record can shed light on the challenges and dynamics of collecting around pandemic and infectious diseases.

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In this lecture Dr Maureen Park uses the archive of the Royal Edinburgh Hospital to examine the reasons why, and the extent to which, drawing was promoted as a ‘therapeutic’ activity in the hospital. The lecture discusses the surviving drawings produced by patients such as William Bartholomew, John Myles and John Willis Mason at the Royal Edinburgh Hospital, and locates their productivity within the wider context of hospital art.

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What exactly is the placebo effect? How does it work? How do doctors decide whether a treatment is actually effective? What is ‘good’ medicine and how do you test for it?

In this lecture Iain Milne discusses some key figures from the history of medicine and clinical trials, including James Lind, pioneer of naval hygiene, whose medical trials were thought to have discovered a cure for scurvy.

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We are all suffering an acute case of prostrate angst. Men worry about their own prostates and those of others close to them; women worry about the prostates of the men they love. The prostate—a gland located directly under the bladder—lurks on the periphery of many men’s health issues, but as an object of anxiety it goes beyond the medical, affecting how we understand masculinity, ageing, and sexuality. In this talk and her book, A Cultural Biography of the Prostate, Ericka Johnson discusses what we think the prostate is and what we use the prostate to think about, examining it in historical, cultural, social, and medical contexts.

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In this talk, Dr Stephanie Allen examines an element of female sexual fraud; counterfeit maidenheads. She discusses the methods authors imagined women to use, including herbal concoctions, animals blood and leeches. Dr Allen also discusses how false virgins were presented within medical texts, popular works and literature, as by using a combination of sources we can begin to understand the fears of counterfeit virginity.

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In conversation with Dr Jivitesh Vashisht (IASH, Edinburgh), Gavin Francis discusses his experiences in Edinburgh and the islands of Orkney. When the pandemic arrived in our society he saw how it affected every walk of life: the anxious teenager, the isolated care home resident, the struggling furloughed worker and homeless ex-prisoner, all united by their vulnerability in the face of a global disaster. And he saw how the true cost of the virus was measured not just in infections, or deaths, or ITU beds, but in the consequences of the measures taken against it.

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In 1845 the new Scottish Poor Law established a funded medical service for the registered poor. By 1852 the Physicians’ Enquiry concluded that medical provision in the Highlands of Scotland was still seriously inadequate. In this talk Dr Patricia Whatley discusses the changing issues relating to the work of the general practitioner in the second half of the nineteenth century in the remote and isolated regions of the Highlands, culminating in 1913 in the establishment of the Highlands and Islands Medical Service.

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Charlotte Holmes (University of Edinburgh) examines the history of early recipe books and their use to treat a wide range of complaints, including festive maladies such as hangovers and over indulging. Where treatments can include bat blood and stale urine – this is definitely not one to try at home!

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Anatomy and surgery have strong extra-textual elements. The development and transmission of these crafts rely heavily on visual communication in a range of media, whether by practitioners or (other) illustrators.

Some artists are justifiably renowned (eg Jan van Rymsdyk in the 18th century), some not as famous as they deserve (eg Joseph Towne and Henry Vandyke Carter in the Victorian era), and some (like 20th-century draughtsmen Kirkpatrick Maxwell and Sydney Sewell) are almost lost to history. Each brought new approaches, but older illustrative methods have also endured, even if deployed for different ends.

The early 20th century was a key period in the history of depicting anatomy, whether surgical, morbid or comparative. Mass reproduction brought its own challenges and opportunities; pathological illustration played a surprising role in the medical history of WWI. Examining such developments aids our understanding of the relationship between clinician and artist, text and image, material and visual culture.

Speaker: Dr Sam Alberti (Keeper of Science and Technology, National Museums Scotland)

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When the first medical photographs were taken in 1840, the camera was presented as a revolution to medical education, psychiatry and pathology. Gradually, however, two things became apparent: medical photographs alienated the subject and they were, quite frankly, ugly. The concern with aesthetics and the relationship between the body and the patient would combine to shape the future of medical photography, and in some ways medicine itself.

Closely examining two cases – Duchenne’s Mécanisme de la Physionomie Humaine (1856), and Grant’s An Atlas of Anatomy (1962) – this talk considers the role of alienation and beauty in medical photography, and the evocative questions each raised for doctors.

Speaker: Dr Lauren Barnett (Birkbeck, University of London)

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