British Society for the History of Medicine
Web Newsletter for 2011
Poynter lecture 2012 -
Guildford 2011 Congress -
BSHM Officers reports
Affiliated Society Reports -
Book reviews
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British Society for the History of Medicine
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The 2011 Newsletter is in the form of several separate files rather than one continuous document. This page has the notice of the Poynter lecture, reports from some affiliated societies, and book reviews. There is a separate web page with a report of the Guildford Congress, with links to abstracts of talks and posters. There is a Word file with the reports of BSHM officers and the John Blair Trust. Some affiliated society reports are in separate files.
The 24th Congress of BSHM was held at the University of Surrey at Guildford, August 31st to September 3rd 2011. We have a Report with photographs.
The lecture is at 6.00 p.m. on 21st March 2012 at the Wellcome Building Conference Centre, 183 Euston Road, London NW1 2BE. It is free and open to the public.
Luigi Galvani's discovery of 'animal electricity' at the end of the eighteenth century resulted in a whole new world of possibilities in which electricity could cure sickness, restore sexual potency and even raise the dead. This is the story of how electricity emerged as a tool for making sense of our bodies and the world around us. For the Victorians, electricity was the science of spectacle and of wonder. It provided them with new ways of probing the nature of reality and understanding themselves. For some people saying that 'electricity is life' was much the same thing as saying there was no such thing as a soul and therefore no such thing as God. For others, the slogan was an invitation to buy new commodities like electric belts or corsets that could revitalize a flagging body. In this lecture, based on his recent book 'Shocking Bodies' the lecturer will turn to the history of electricity and the body to find some shocking answers.
See Biography of Dr Morus at Aberystwyth University and History Press details of "Shocking Bodies"
As the webmaster was resigning he had not intended to obtain reports from affiliated societies. A few societies supplied reports, or notices of future meetings, and those are included here.
We continue to meet every 3 months with about 30 attending most meetings.
2011 was the 25th anniversary of the society and we celebrated with some recollections of past members and
with a joint Xmas meeting with the Bristol Medico Chirurgical Society, where Prof Gareth Williams spoke on Small Pox.
The proceedings volume 5B is just coming out. The new President for this cycle is Dr Bruno Bubna-Kasteliz.
The Hon Sec remains Dr Peter Carpenter at drpetercarpenter@hotmail.com
The
President's Conference of the British Institute of Radiology
CT in Clinical Practice - Past, Present and Future - A tribute to Sir Godfrey Hounsfield
25 - 26 April 2012, Wellcome Collection, London
From the president Dr Neil Adams - on the History of Anaesthesia Society website.
2011 marked the 25th Anniversary of the Society. Since the James Young Simpson Bicentenary took precedent as a celebration to be held this year, the Society will hold a belated celebration at its 2012 Summer Scientific Meeting which will be held at the Hilton St Annes Manor, London Road, Wokingham, Berkshire RG40 1ST on 29th and 30th June.
The Society's thanks go to Alistair McKenzie for the organisation of the 2011 Summer Meeting. Held Jointly with the Lad o Pairts group, this took place in the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh. Highlights included the Blessed Chloroform Lecture 'James Young Simpson - the justification for anesthesia and an interesting "American" book' by Professor Douglas Bacon and 'Simpson: the nature of his genius' by Dr Morrice McCrae.
I would like to thank Gary Enever who stepped down as webmaster in 2010. Gary took over from Mike Palmer and developed the site that had been established by David Zuck. I am pleased to announce that Dr Anne Florence confirmed as the President Elect of the Society at the 25th AGM and we also welcome Dr Chris Woollam as our new Honorary Secretary.
One again the standard of this year's AAGBI/HAS History Essay Prize was high, and in the end a joint first prize was awarded to Dr Harriet Wordsworth, a CT1, for her essay 'The history of biopsychosocial pain - a tale of gladiators, war, papal doctrine and a wrestler' and to Dr Sarah Marsh, an ST6, for her essay 'The evolution of critical care outreach'.
The annual subscription to be a member of the History of Anaesthesia Society is still only £20.00, Interested historians of all ages are most welcome.
Meetings (except summer outing) are at the Society's premises at 1 Wimpole Street, London W1G 0AE and are followed by an optional dinner. Non-members can attend. For booking procedure see Section events page
7 March 2012 at 6 pm
Student meeting - the Norah Schuster student prizes
Closing date for submissions is 15 Sept 2011 -
See details of competition.
Shortly after the AGM on 29 June 2010, Noel Stow reported that he could no longer cope with the job of treasurer to the society, so at an extraordinary general meeting on 22 October 2010, Dr Mac Speake was unanimously elected Treasurer to the Suffolk Medical History Society.
Following the extraordinary general meeting, the members and their guests were subjected to a lecture by the secretary entitled Some Episodes from Suffolk's Medical History.
On 11 February 2011 Dr Pat Murrell gave us a glimpse into the lives of the Macro family, the erstwhile residents of Cupola House, Bury St Edmunds, in a talk entitled SicklyTimes: Illness in late Stuart and Georgian Suffolk.
Thomas Macro, 1649-1737, was a rich apothecary, but this did not prevent his family from being troubled with the many health concerns of the age, from dangerous childbirth to smallpox. Pat Murrell had spent many hours looking at letters written by the Macro family, many of which are stored in the Sheffield Record Office. She presented some of the information culled from these documents, illustrating her talk with some excellent slides.
As usual Elizabeth Cockayne and Pat Murrell prepared the food whilst Dorothy Keeble and her friend helped with the serving and washing up.
On Monday 13 June 2011 just six members of the society went on a Summer Outing to the Red Cross Museum at 44 Moorfields, London.
We had lunch at Corney & Barrow, City Point, 1 Ropemaker Street, and then walked the few steps to the Red Cross building, where we were met by the archivists, who were very welcoming. We were rather surprised by the extent of the archives, which are in the basement of the building and have rather outgrown the space allocated to them. It was perhaps a good job that we were such a small group, but in the event we learned quite a lot about the origins of the British Red Cross and its relationship with the International Red Cross. We also viewed with interest the artefacts and documents which had been extracted for us, notably amongst the latter were the records of some of the branches of the Red Cross in Suffolk
E E Cockayne
On 1st March 2012, joint lecture with the Ulster Medical Society, on the topic of Sir Hans Sloane.
The Gary Love lecture: "Sir Hans Sloane - His Life and Legacy", by Dr Stanley Hawkins, MD FRCP,
Consultant Neurologist, BHSCT and Reader in Clinical Neurology, QUB.
It is on Thursday 1 March at 7.00pm. in the Ulster Medical Society Rooms in the Whitla Medical Building, near the
Medical Biology Centre on the Lisburn Road, Belfast.
For details see the events page of
Ulster Medical Society, with more details at
UMS programme (pdf file).
See www.homsw.org.uk, and report for 2011(Word) and report for 2011 (pdf) which include notices of meetings in 2012. Guests are welcome.
The Faculty of the History and Philosophy of Medicine and Pharmacy of the Society of Apothecaries continues to run a series of eponymous lectures, Diploma courses, and mini-courses.
Published by the author Don Shelton as an e-book of 600 pages, available as a download from
therealmrfrankenstein.blogspot.com/ at £9.99.
That page also has the author's lengthy description of the book.
A contents list and preview are on
Google Books
Review by Alan Bates
The first thing that strikes the reader of this book is its length: by my reckoning, some 400,000 words, or four times the length of the average medical biography. It soon becomes clear why this is so: the life of the surgeon, anatomist, writer and inventor Sir Anthony Carlisle is merely the starting point for a wider exploration of anatomy, obstetrics and experimentation in nineteenth-century British medicine and surgery. Like The Golden Bough, the text is almost a permanent digression, and it presents the reader with such interesting diversions as the Irish Giant, phrenology, baby-farming, body-snatching, and the hermaphroditic Chevalier d'Eon. Almost no tempting byway is left unexplored and even the best-read medical historian is likely to encounter previously unfamiliar material.
Carlisle certainly needed a biographer, and he has found his champion in Don Shelton, from whose sympathetic pen he emerges as an engaging polymath with significant achievements in medicine, anatomy, natural history and literature. A brilliant piece of literary detective work reveals the subject as the author of the gothic novel Oakendale Abbey and possibly of other unattributed works. As is often the case with medical biographies, there is more background material than the casual reader will need. Much supplementary material on Carlisle's friends and family is included, but lack of editing means that this tends to interrupt the flow of the narrative, though these digressions are not without interest in themselves. Mr Shelton devotes a considerable amount of space to the argument that Carlisle was the inspiration for the title character of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. While this is a plausible hypothesis (Carlisle is certainly a more convincing candidate than the usual suspect, Robert Knox) it does not fully engage with the question of how far any fictional character can be said to correspond to a single original.
A very significant part of the work, though distinct from its main narrative, is the claim, made separately by Mr Shelton elsewhere in a scholarly article, that William Hunter and others knowingly used murder victims as subjects for anatomical teaching, most notably in preparing the engravings for Hunter's Anatomy of the Gravid Uterus. A substantial amount of statistical evidence is presented to show that that there were unlikely to have been enough late maternal deaths to supply subjects for all the engravings in Hunter's spectacular book, even allowing for the probability that a distinguished man midwife would have attracted difficult cases in which deaths were more likely. It may occur to the reader that Jan van Rymsdyk, Hunter's artist, could have used his imagination to create some of the plates for the Atlas: a contemporary midwife thought he did, but Mr Shelton, a professional art historian, disagrees. However, to accept that Hunter could not have obtained so many subjects without foul play does no more than acknowledge what is already known, that murder for dissection was not uncommon in nineteenth-century Britain.
Mr Shelton's further claim that Hunter was aware that some of his subjects were murdered rests on less sure ground. It was well known in the nineteenth century that the legal supply of bodies fell far short of the number dissected in medical schools, and it is indisputable that anatomists and those in authority turned a blind eye to the illegal trade in resurrected bodies. Many bodies destined to be dissected were never buried, but were sold to anatomists by family, undertakers, sextons and others who placed profit before morals. Given that anatomists knew their suppliers were breaking the law, it would have been fruitless to ask questions. While it is scarcely possible to refute the claim that Hunter and his colleagues were aware, or strongly suspected, that some of the corpses they worked with were those of murder victims, the evidence falls far short of proof of guilt. Mr Shelton's extensive study of statistical data relating to maternal mortality in the mid-nineteenth century does however offer a valuable resource for readers interested in further exploring the historical prevalence and significance of murder for dissection.
In an effort to convince us that John Hunter knowingly harmed his patients, Mr Shelton focuses on Hunter's own descriptions of his experiments. For example, Hunter writes:
"What makes it very probable that in recovering persons drowned, the principal effect depends upon air being thrown into the lungs, is what happens at the birth of children, when too much time has intervened between the interruption of that life which is peculiar to the foetus and that which depends on breathing; they then lose altogether the disposition for this new life; and in such cases there being a total suspension of the actions of life, and by such means the first principle of action restored."
Which Mr Shelton presents under the heading "experiments on unborn babies" as a description of "the interruption of the life of a mother during a Caesarean experiment." The following text:
is interpreted as a description of "transfusions of dog's blood direct to a human baby"."Death in persons drowned has been accounted for by supposing that the blood, rendered unfit for the purposes of life by being deprived of the action of the air in respiration, is sent in a vitiated state to the brain and other vital parts, by which means the nerves lose their effect upon the heart, and the heart in consequence its motion. This, however, I am fully convinced is false; first, from the experiments on the dog, in which a large column of blood so vitiated ... was again pushed forward without any ill effect having been produced; and next, from the return to life of persons drowned and children still-born, which were such a supposition true, could never happen unless we imagine a change of the blood to take place in the brain, prior to the restoration of the heart's motion."
These interpretations seem to conflict with the natural meaning of Hunter's text, and much of the argument for Hunter's guilt depends on similarly tendentious readings. While the thesis that Hunter knowingly connived with murderers is not impossible, I do not find the evidence presented sufficient to render it at all probable. Nevertheless, Hunter's writings do reveal areas where his indifference to suffering bordered on cruelty. For a modern reader the vivisection experiments described in Hunter's own words make disturbing reading, and Mr Shelton is more than justified in his claim that these argue for a gross lack of moral sensibility on Hunter's part.
Though the evidence suggests that maternal mortality under man midwives was insufficient to account for the cases in Hunter's Atlas, Mr Shelton nevertheless characterizes it as excessive and blames poor technique: "in the 18C, a surgeon-apprentice was instructed by a physician to whom bleeding was a key treatment, who prescribed potions made from strange ingredients, who paid little attention to cleanliness, and had little or no knowledge of midwifery." Female midwives come in for less criticism, apparently because as women they possessed a special understanding of childbirth: "[m]idwives had usually been delivered of their own children, knew the discomfort of menstruation, pregnancy, the pain of childbirth, the care of babies, and the menopause, but those experiences were all genetically alien to man-midwives". Medical readers may feel that the time honoured argument that a physician who has not experienced a medical condition cannot understand or treat it has been shown by experience to be a non sequiteur.
For this review, I read the book on a computer screen and not a dedicated e-book reader, which latter may well have provided a better experience. As it was, prolonged reading was something of a strain, and the many well chosen illustrations often looked pixellated. Frustratingly, the references in the text (there are over a thousand of them) had links to jump to the corresponding endnotes, but not back again. The frequent quotations from primary sources, often pages long, might be better placed as endnotes, provided the latter could be fully linked to the text.
As the biography of Sir Anthony Carlisle that it ostensibly is, this book is a significant achievement. The full range of Carlisle's accomplishments is presented, and one is left with the impression that he deserves to be better known. Unfortunately, the length and complexity of the book make it difficult to navigate: an introductory chronological summary of Carlisle's life would have helped in this respect. The analysis of Hunter's Atlas and its sources seems to belong in another, more controversial work that does not always compel agreement: the reading of Hogarth's Four Stages of Cruelty as an allegory of Hunter's career is fascinating and brilliantly argued, and his lack of compassion is convincingly exposed, but the attempt to draw from Hunter's own writings descriptions of crimes fit for Grand Guignol seems to me over argued. Readers of this compendious and intriguing work can decide for themselves. They will find much to enjoy along the way.
Ronald M Cyr (transl.) and Thomas F Baskett (ed.) £25, ISBN 978-1-906985-34-9, 144pp, Hardback, Published August 2010 by RCOG Press, (www.rcogbookshop.com).
Review by Dr Janette Allotey (Midwifery lecturer and historian of childbirth, University of Manchester and chair of the De Partu: History of Childbirth Research Group). Email Janette.allotey@manchester.ac.uk
The new English edition of the original 1581 classic French text, 'Traitte nouveau de l'hysterotomotokie ou enfantement Caesarien' was due to a serendipitous find when Thomas Baskett, a Canadian professor of obstetrics and gynaecology, was visiting the RCOG library in London. While Baskett's helpful commentary provides readers with contextual information, the French to English translation was completed by Ronald Cyr, who is a French-speaking Canadian associate professor of obstetrics. Rousset's treatise is fascinating, and will appeal to obstetricians, midwives and a wider medical history readership.
Rousset expressed grave concern in his text about the number of reputable physicians and surgeons who refused to acknowledge the role of the caesarean operation as possibly life-saving in extreme circumstances. He advocated the operation only as a last resort and with certain provisos, such as the mother being in a reasonable physical state to withstand the procedure, to avoid the operator being blamed for her death. He also encouraged use of the operation to save women's lives in cases where the fetus had almost certainly died in utero, while also referring to a few cases of women surviving following retention of a dead fetus.
Although the original treatise was written over 400 years ago, it is very easy to identify with Rousset's descriptions, particularly of the surgical procedure, in which incidentally, the uterus was left unsutured. Along with some case studies he had collected of previous successful operations, including cases in which women had successfully given birth by caesarean on more than one occasion, Rousset attempted to allay some of the common fears of dissenters. For example, concerns about future fertility of women, and of uterine surgery causing fetal abnormalities in subsequent pregnancies. He claimed that the caesarean operation was no more dangerous than certain other types of surgery, such as lithotomy for the removal of bladder stones. The text also discusses gynaecology, namely the management of prolapsed uteri (about which he apparently wrote another text in Latin, on account of the 'indelicate' nature of the discussion), along with the management of hernias, abscesses, ascites, and kidney stones. Overall, the book is well worth a perusal. Together, Cyr and Baskett have succeeded in making this seminal French work available to English readers in a very convenient and accessible format.
BSHM home page - Earlier newsletters
Copyright 2012 British Society for the History of Medicine,
prepared by David Hawgood,
20 January 2012