Physicians' Gallery

This talk explores the relationship between madness, psychiatry and gender over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, using the Royal Edinburgh Asylum as a case study. It outlines the ways in which psychiatrists linked different types of mental illness to their male and – in particular – female patients, and what values lay behind those differing diagnoses. The talk also considers why mental illness has been characterised historically as the ‘female malady’, and how accurate this characterisation appears to be within the context of Edinburgh psychiatry.

Speaker: Dr Gayle Davis (University of Edinburgh)

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The body brings together a number of vexing questions: it is ‘animal’ yet ‘human’; ‘natural’ yet the ultimate object of cultural inscription? The part of the body that most represents us to others is its surface: for Victorians, skin, especially of the face and hands, was an important medium through which to read character and selfhood, a membrane that both divided the inner and outer worlds and served as a medium for the projection and interpretation of interiority.

In this talk, Pamela Gilbert discusses Charles Bell, Charles Darwin and Cesare Lombroso’s discussions of blushing and the emotions. She surveys examples from both literary and visual culture to show how Victorian perspectives on the skin aid our understanding of representations of the relation between selfhood, the material body and the emotions.

Speaker: Professor Pamela Gilbert (University of Florida)

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In the majority of his novels, short stories, and essays, in his diaries and personal letters, that is throughout his life and work, Thomas Mann (1875-1955) reflects on matters of health and disease, patients and doctors, healing and dying. The radically autobiographical roots of his writing blur the boundaries between fact and fiction, historiography and the art of narration, experience and imagination. In this talk, Rütten explores the interface between medicine and literature in his work and assess the latter’s relevance for a medical historiography that takes the individuality of the patient seriously.

Speaker: Dr Thomas Rütten (Newcastle University)

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Bodily suffering is central to the experience of being human, yet we still know remarkably little about how people actually experienced pain in the past. How can historians know what pain ‘really felt like’ in previous centuries?

What models did people use to understand pain, and how have these changed? Pain is inter-subjective, thus opening a space to explore questions of clinical empathy, or what 18th-century surgeon William Hunter called the physician’s ‘necessary Inhumanity’.

Speaker: Professor Joanna Bourke (Birkbeck College University of London)

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Aristotle's Masterpiece is neither a masterpiece nor by Aristotle. It was the best-selling popular book about reproduction from its first publication in 1684 all the way into the 1930s. It offers us a rare window into plebeian sexuality, popular medical books, and reading practices.

Speaker: Professor Mary Fissell (The Johns Hopkins University)

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This talk explores the various stages of the Battle of Waterloo (1815), highlighting particular medical issues of the campaign. The Army Medical Department was ill-prepared. Over the long Peninsular War (1808-14), it had been honed into an efficient force by Sir James McGrigor and his ‘Medical Gentlemen’, as Wellington called them. However, many of these surgeons had since dispersed and were worn out. The Scots’ input to the war, injuries sustained, and aspects of wounds and surgical treatment are addressed, including the challenges for surgeons working without antisepsis, anaesthesia, nursing and the modern understanding of physiological trauma that we possess today.

Speaker: Mr Michael Crumplin (Royal College of Surgeons of England)

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This talk combines history of science, food and culture and applies these to Anglo-German relations and perceptions by examining how between 1850 and 1914 the German sausage was used as a metaphor for the German nation

Alarm about what went into German sausages was both part of wider concerns about food safety and formed part of a growing strand of popular anti-German sentiment, which drew on increasing insecurity about Britain’s position on the world stage and the perceived economic threat Germany and German immigrants presented.

Speaker: Professor Keir Waddington (Cardiff University)

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This talk examines responses to Thucydides’ narrative of the plague of Athens.

While in recent years Thucydides has sometimes been praised for his prescience, some earlier physician-readers found his picture simply impossible to believe.

Thomas Sprat, in his 1659 poetic work, uses Thucydides work as a framework in which to reflect on the English Civil War.

Speaker: Professor Helen King

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Sir John Pringle was born in 1707. He studied medicine at the universities of Edinburgh and Leiden. During the War of the Austrian Succession, Pringle was made Physician General to the British Army and was appalled to see the huge number of deaths resulting not from casualties of battle but from diseases such as typhus and dysentery. He introduced a wide range of improvements which helped to reduce the appalling number of deaths from disease.

His book Observations on the Diseases of Army, brought him fame across Europe. He was made physician to King George III and was elected President of the Royal Society in London. Pringle left 10 volumes of medical annotations to the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. He tells us in Volume 1 that his intention with these annotations is to preserve what he has found most useful in his practice.

Speaker: Dr Stephen Craig (Assistant Professor, Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, Bethesda, USA)

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Forensic anthropology has a relatively long history in the USA but is a more recent addition in the UK. However, just a shallow scratch below the surface of this modern discipline shows that it is firmly rooted within human anatomy.

This talk charts the history of forensic anthropology in the UK and illustrate its constant links back to so many aspects of applied anatomy that we might be forgiven for thinking that it has been incorrectly named.

Speaker: Professor Sue Black (University of Dundee)

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