Object stories in health and medicine, 1700-1900

In recent years, material culture has expanded its reach through the humanities and social sciences, allowing for new kinds of histories to be written. In the medical humanities, the study of objects is one methodology that has allowed historians to move away from heroic histories of medical innovators and narratives of ‘progress’. Objects offer insights into the histories left out of official medical records: the everyday and quotidian; the actual, rather than ideal; emotion rather than action; and critically, the patient rather than the practitioner.

This one-day online workshop aims to bring together scholars from across the medical humanities working with material objects in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. While work in the medical humanities is expanding rapidly, comparatively little has addressed earlier periods and contexts. Our focussing on the period 1700-1900 aims to address this dearth, as well as offering a longue-durée perspective that crosses conventional periodisations. In doing so, we will explore the rise of medical professionalism, proliferation of specialisms, growth of institutional care, and radically changing theories of the body and mind, within the context of lived experience of health and sickness.

We hope not only to share research but to enrich our practice in working with objects as primary sources. Together, we will explore the methodological pitfalls and possibilities of a material approach when dealing with historical periods, as well as historically marginalised groups. In doing so, the workshop hopes to develop and advance methods for creatively and ethically analysing histories of medicine and health.

The workshop is hosted by Dr Anna Jamieson (a.jamieson@bham.ac.uk) and Dr Rebecca Whiteley (r.k.whiteley@bham.ac.uk). 

Programme

10.00-10.10: Welcome and introductions

10.10-11.10: Wearable objects

• Helen Esfandiary, King’s College London. Straightening Childhood: The Le Vacher Machine and Maternal Regulation of the Body in Georgian England.
• Nida Kibria, University of Leeds. Wrapped in Silence: Material Memory, Emotional History, and the Chaddar (Shawl) as Feminist Archive.
• Harriet Barratt, Durham University. Watchful, Wearable Objects: Health Sector Surveillance and the Sussex Asylum ‘Tell-Tale Clock’.

11.10-11.20: Break

11.20-12.20: Personal papers and domestic health

• Foteini Lika, Independent Scholar. A Medical Object Story from 19th-Century Greece: Emmanuel Roidis’ Notebook as a Fragmented and Dialogical Pathography.
• Katie Dabin, Science Museum. Horse-Riding in the Home: Reconsidering the Chamber Horse in Histories of Domestic Health.
• Zoe Copeman, University of Maryland College Park. Scalpel or Pen? The Art of Cutting within John Syng Dorsey’s Surgical Notebook.

12.20-13.15: Lunch

13.15-14.15: Representing the body

• Natasha Ruiz-Gómez, University of Essex. Seeing Patients, Identifying Illness: An Album from the Musée Charcot.
• Katie Sambrook, Birkbeck, University of London. Wax Bust of Jeanne Marie Le Manach by Jules Talrich, 1876 (Crime of Saint-Ouen).
• Jessica Dandona, Minneapolis College of Art and Design. A New Book of the Body: Friedrich Bilz’s Illustrated Guide to Health.

14.15-14.30: Break

14.30-15.50: Object biographies

• Nouschka van der Meij, Rijksuniversiteit Groningen. Preserving Color: Materiality, and the Anatomical Afterlives of Camper’s skin Specimen A-0500.
• Richard Bellis, University of St Andrews. Trading Philip Kendal’s Heart.
• Allison Morehead, Queen’s University Canada. The Many Lives of a Baby Incubator.
• Margaret Carlyle, The University of British Columbia. Object/ive Knowledge: Sizing up Parturient Pelvises in Eighteenth-Century Paris.

15.50-16.00: Break

16.00-17.00: Summative discussion