Physicians' Gallery

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...

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) Twitter: twitter.com/RCPEHeritage Instagram: instagram.com/physiciansgallery/ Facebook: facebook.com/PhysiciansGallery TikTok: https://www.tiktok.c...

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 assume...

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 asy...

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...

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...

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 bei...

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 ill...

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 s...

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 imagi...

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 wha...

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) Twitter: twitter.com/RCPEHeritage Instagram: instagra...

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...

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 incr...

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 Twitter: tw...

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 reduc...

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...

This fortnightly podcast presents stories from the history of medicine. We examines some of the different ways that doctors have thought about health and illness over the past two thousand years, exploring a range of eye-opening subjects and intriguing events from antiquity. Twitter: twitter.com/RCPEHeritage Instagram: instagram.com/physiciansgallery/ Facebook: facebook.com/PhysiciansGallery TikTo...