Physicians' Gallery

The doctor-patient relationship has changed considerably over the centuries. There have often been cyclical changes: diagnostic improvements leading to increased respect but often followed by disillusionment if there is subsequently no effective treatment. The relationship is especially exemplified in works of art because, as John Berger has emphasised, ‘No other kind of relic or text from the past can offer such a direct testimony about the world which surrounded other people at other times.’

Speaker: Professor Emeritus Alan Emery (Edinburgh and Oxford University)

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Contrary to widely believed assertions, the concept of unbiased creation of treatment comparison groups in clinical trials was not ‘a seminal statistical idea’, but was rooted in the much older idea that fair tests of treatments involve comparing like with like, achieved at least 200 years ago using alternate allocation to treatment comparison groups. Strict alternation deals with selection bias as effectively as strict random allocation, but alternation is more likely to result in foreknowledge of allocations among those recruiting research participants. The historical importance of the iconic MRC streptomycin trial published in 1948 is not its use of random sampling numbers to generate the allocation schedule. Rather, it is its clear description of the precautions taken to conceal the schedule, and so secure unbiased allocation. Several hundred reports of controlled trials published before 1948 have already been identified. However, without multilingual, collaborative research the history of the evolution of the controlled trial, a crucially important technology in medical research, will remain seriously incomplete.

Speaker: Sir Iain Chalmers (Editor - James Lind Library)

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This talk looks at how forensic and investigative techniques were used to study epidemics in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Speaker: Professor Anne Hardy (University College London)

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This talk examines the links between Benjamin Rush’s autobiography ‘Travels through Life’ and his protracted feud with the English journalist, politician and agriculturalist William Cobbett. The rhetorical strategies used by Rush to defend his character and medical practice, and the influence of his autobiography on later physician-writers are also explored.

Speaker: Dr Catherine Jones (University of Aberdeen)

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In this talk a CSI-style approach is taken to the discussion of the notorious murders carried out by Burke and Hare, who supplied bodies for dissection at Edinburgh's medical school.

Speaker: Professor Lisa Rosner (Richard Stockton College, New Jersey)

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The nerves have been the principal focus of ‘fashionable disease’ studies, but the stomach arguably has an equal claim for consideration. The stomach and bowels were not only implicated in a wide range of digestive diseases, but also in almost all à la mode conditions, from nervousness to the ‘flying gout’. This was due both to the connotations of over-eating with wealth, and because of the assumed link between the digestive system and the mind. This talk examines the development of thinking on the mind-stomach nexus, and how such thinking was incorporated into critiques of modern Britain.

Speaker: Dr James Kennaway

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This talk explores the migratory patterns of Irish patients into and through the Lancashire asylum system in the later 19th century. Asylum medical superintendents referred specifically to the pressure placed by the Irish on what were to become severely overcrowded institutions.

Many Irish migrants ended up in asylums after periods spent ‘wandering’ across England or the globe. Pressure on the asylums was exacerbated by the intake of lunatics returned from North America to Lancashire.

This talk couples the big picture of the impact of the Irish on asylums and their management to individual stories of movement through migration, the search for work, destitution and confinement.

Speaker: Dr Catherine Cox (University College Dublin)

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The two World Wars intensified the study of the psychological effects of combat for both soldiers and civilians. This talk explores how health-care professionals in the UK interpreted psychosomatic disorders such as shell shock, battle exhaustion and traumatic neurasthenia, in the context of psychiatric research and the new forms of warfare. Civilians and emergency workers were exposed to extreme stress during air-raids forcing doctors to weigh up the causal contribution of personality versus traumatic events.

Speaker: Professor Edgar Jones (King’s College London)

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Considerable doubt has been cast on the claim that King George III suffered from acute porphyria. The alternate diagnosis of recurrent acute mania is much more in keeping with his clinical features, but historians and their adherents still claim that suggestive features of acute porphyria in some of his ancestors, notably King James VI/I, support a diagnosis of porphyria in George III.

Assessment of his detailed and complex clinical history and features using the computerised diagnostic aid SimulConsult provides no support for porphyria in James but indicates a quite unexpected diagnosis that may help to explain the King’s medical condition and psychological behaviour.

Speaker: Professor Timothy Peters (University of Birmingham)

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The Royal Edinburgh Asylum is fortunate in having a very rich archive of its history, including an extensive collection of patient accounts of their mental struggles and experiences of the institution.

This talk focuses on the period when the renowned psychiatrist Thomas Clouston was Superintendent. Drawing on over a thousand patient letters, it examines the lives of inmates: their feelings of being unjustly confined, and the tedium of institutional life, but also the relationships which were struck up with fellow-patients and staff. The talk looks at patients’ descriptions of their mental worlds: of being tormented by voices, plagued by electricity and X-Ray machines, condemned to execution, and coming into untold wealth.

Speaker: Dr Allan Beveridge (Queen Margaret Hospital, Dunfermline)

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