Public Lecture Series

Every year Historical Collections hosts a public lecture series sponsored in part by the Section on the History of Medicine and Public Health. Events are free and open to the public, and lectures begin at 6:00 p.m., with refreshments available at 5:30 p.m. Advance registration for section events is strongly encouraged but not required.

For further information about medical history programs at NYAM, please call Historical Collections at 212-822-7313, Christian Warren, PhD, at 212.822.7314 or email history@nyam.org

2011-2012 PUBLIC LECTURE SERIES

THIS WINTER: SPECIAL THREE LECTURE MINI-SERIES ON CIVIL WAR MEDICINE

To mark the 150th anniversary of the start of the Civil War, the New York Academy of Medicine’s Section on the History of Medicine and Public Health presents a three-part miniseries of lectures by prominent historians of Civil War medicine.

The American Civil War proved as much a turning point for American medicine as for the nation as a whole. Treating the wounded, the sick, and the dying, as well as improving the living conditions for the three million soldiers in the fight brought a small army of medical professionals and volunteers into service—in the camps, in hastily erected field hospitals, and in the hospitals, clinics, and homes of towns great and small, north and south. Four years of mortal combat and their aftermath presented a unique laboratory for testing new theories of medicine and public health; provided unprecedented experience for a generation of surgeons; and introduced thousands of women to a calling that (despite daunting obstacles) promised a new path toward the professions.

Wednesday, February 29, 2012
Please note: This is a rescheduled date for this lecture
"Of Wards and War": The Importance of Good (and Bad) Medical Care in the American Civil War
Margaret Humphreys, MD, PhD, Duke University

During the crisis following the Haitian earthquake of 2010 one physician commented that "we're practicing Civil War medicine here," referring to the absence of supplies and primitive environment of care. Actually, the well-run Civil War hospital offered superior care to that possible in quake-ravaged Haiti. This paper will outline the components of the best and worst of Civil War medicine, and argue that the conditions in southern hospitals were so far inferior to those of the north that it probably made a difference to the war effort. In the northern hospitals men shot rats as a target practice game; in the south they roasted them for lunch. Important aspects of the best care were nutritious food, medicines such as chloroform, quinine, and opium, and sufficient staff to ensure cleanliness and care of the weakened or wounded body. It is difficult to assess hospital outcomes due the quality of the data, but what information is available indicates that the disparities between northern and southern hospitals were a factor in the manpower issues that dominated the war’s final years.

Margaret Humphreys is the Josiah Charles Trent Professor in the History of Medicine at Duke University, where she holds appointments in the Departments of History and Medicine, and edits the Journal of the History of Medicine. Her classes include the history of medicine, public health, global health, and evolution. She received her PhD in the History of Science (1983) and MD (1987) from Harvard University, and is the author of Yellow Fever and the South (Rutgers, 1992) and Malaria: Poverty, Race and Public Health in the United States (Johns Hopkins, 2001), books that explore the tropical disease environment of the American South, and its role in the national public health effort. Her current research concerns the impact of the Civil War on American medicine. The first book to emerge from that project, Intensely Human: The Health of the Black Soldier in the American Civil War, appeared in 2008.

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Thursday, March 15, 2012
Hired to Care: Civil War Nurses and the Military Body
Jane E. Schultz, PhD, Indiana University-Purdue University-Indianapolis

“Hired to Care” explores women’s relief work during the American Civil War in its social, political, and medical contexts. Although the majority of surgeons and nurses identified themselves as elites, each group spoke of having established more intimate bonds with the working-class men under their care than with one another. At the bottom of the military hospital hierarchy, female nurses related easily to their charges who like them, experienced subordination as soldiers. While the events surrounding the war would bring dignity to middle-class women’s labor, volunteers who were able to work without wages compared themselves favorably to paid workers whose patriotic motives they questioned. Professor Schultz uses her analysis of the social demographics of military medical workers to explore the sites of personal conflict that inevitably arose in the theater of war, as well as the political implications of those struggles. The talk emphasizes interaction between the Union nursing and surgical corps, but it also addresses Confederate medical workers insofar as their experience was distinct from that of Union workers.

Jane E. Schultz is Professor of English and Director of Literature at Indiana University-Purdue University-Indianapolis (IUPUI), the urban medical campus of Indiana University. She comes to the medical humanities by way of an interest in narrative forms and the hospital as a site of social and political interaction. Women at the Front (University of North Carolina, 2004), her study of gender and relief work in Civil War military hospitals, was a finalist for the 2005 Lincoln Prize. In 2010 she published This Birth Place of Souls (Oxford UP), an annotated edition of one of the last extant nursing diaries from the Civil War. She is also the editor of Cancer Stories, a special issue of Literature and Medicine [29:2 (Fall 2009)] devoted to framing the field of critical cancer studies. A new project on Civil War medical history, Lead, Blood, and Ink, puts soldiers and the public health movement at the center of the story.

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Thursday, April 5, 2012
The Annual Friends of the Rare Book Room Lecture
Something Borrowed, Something Blue: The Strange History of Aristotle's Masterpiece
Mary Fissell, PhD, Johns Hopkins University

Mary Fissell explores the history of one of the most important popular medical books in English. First published in 1684, Aristotle's Masterpiece was still for sale in the 1930s, largely unaltered. Neither by Aristotle nor a masterpiece, the book offered advice to women about pregnancy and childbirth, spiced up with a racy poem and sensational images of monster babies. The NYAM collection includes a number of editions of this work, which will be on display in the Malloch Rare Book Room during the special post-lecture reception for Friends of the Rare Book Room.

Mary E. Fissell is Professor in the Department of the History of Medicine at the Johns Hopkins University, where she also co-edits the Bulletin of the History of Medicine. She received her BA and PhD from the University of Pennsylvania. Her scholarly work focuses on how ordinary people in the past understood health, healing, and the natural world. She is the author of 2 books and many articles, and has won a range of grants and fellowships, including NIH, the Davis Center at Princeton, and ACLS. She is currently writing a social and cultural history of Aristotle's Masterpiece, an extraordinarily long-lived popular medical book about sex and reproduction.

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Wednesday, May 16, 2012
The Lilianna Sauter Lecture
Escaping Melodramas: Historical Thinking and the Public Health Service Studies in Tuskegee and Guatamala
Susan M. Reverby, PhD, Wellesley College

The U.S. government has now apologized for Public Health Service studies in both Tuskegee (1932-72) and Guatemala (1946-48). This talk will argue that much of the literature on these studies treats them as object lessons on what not to do, casting the doctors as monsters, and turning the studies into historical relics attributable to "racists" from a distant time and place. Professor Reverby will investigate how we can think of racism, scientific certainty and ethical malfeasance outside a melodramatic framework, if this is even possible.

Susan M. Reverby is Professor of Women's Studies at Wellesley College and a historian of American women, medicine and nursing. She is the editor of numerous volumes on women's history, the history of medicine and the history of nursing. Her prize-winning book, Ordered to Care: The Dilemma of American Nursing (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), is still considered one of the major overview historise of American nursing. She is a former health policy analyst and women's health activist. From 1993-1997 she served as the consumer representative on the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's Obstetrics and Gynecology Devices Advisory Panel.

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For information about past lectures sponsored by the Section on the History of Medicine and Public Health, click here.