Approaching Logan Airport
Cardinal Cushing Memorial Park
Named for Richard Cushing (1895-1970), Archbishop of Boston (1944-1970) and Cardinal (1958-1970)
Old West Church
The first weekend in May I flew to Boston for the American Association of the History of Medicine conference. I arrived early enough on Thursday morning that I had time to work in a cafe over breakfast before treating myself to the Paul S. Russell, MD Museum of Medical History and Innovation. I spent an hour among the exhibits that, true to their name, displayed both the history that had been made at Massachusetts General Hospital (like the first successful surgery under ether anesthesia) and the history that is still being made there (such as imaging technologies I might want to study in a future project).
The museum is named in honor of a pioneer in the field of transplant surgery and chair of the Mass General History Committee. Below: busts of Drs. James Jackson and John Collin Warren, who co-founded MGH in 1811 with Reverend John Bartlett under the motto "when in distress, every man becomes our neighbor." The first building opened its door ten years later in 1821 and quickly affiliated with Harvard Medical School.
Surgeon's kit (1854)
I don't think I knew that "limb replantation" was a thing until Thursday morning, and then Saturday morning I heard a talk by a plastic and cosmetic surgeon who had made that one of her specialties! This example was
a 12-year-old boy whose pitching arm was sheared almost completely off by a bridge on 31 May 1962 while he was hanging onto the outside of a freight train.
Portable apothecary kit c. 1870
Dr. James Jackson once wrote, "A physician need not always declare his prognosis [to the patient], but he should always try to make one for himself--it decides the treatment--the greater the danger, the bolder may be the treatment, if any reliance is to be placed on treatment."
This quotation nicely sums up 19th-century medical practice, in which the (male) physician possesses knowledge that he may or may not choose to share with the patient. The diagnosis presumably results from the combination of the patient's subjective symptoms and the objective signs collected by the physician. Unlike humoral medicine, in which therapeutics were tailored to the individual patient, in scientific medicine, there are specific disease entities that appear similarly in all patients, so no matter the patient, once the physician knows (or guesses) the diagnosis, he [sic] can choose the treatment. "Bold" treatments recall the "heroic" medicine of lancing, bleeding, purging, etc., while the reluctance to rely on treatment hints at the therapeutic nihilism that many physicians adopted once there was more accurate diagnosis but not yet effective therapeutics (especially drugs like the ones in the apothecary kit, as surgery was advancing thanks to anesthesia and anti-sepsis).
Lobotomy tools in front of MRI slices through a brain
I practiced my laparoscopy skills, moving rubber rings from one set of dowels to another with hand-held graspers while looking only at the screen. I dropped the first one into the patient's "abdomen," and I imagined the surgical attending yelling at me while I fished around for it.
They had nursing history (above and below).
Ida Cannon and Richard Cabot founded the first medical social service in 1905.
And both old and new technology. Above: iron lung from polio epidemic, below: a computer on wheels aka COW with the computer program Epic on it.
They had a section on COVID, too, including masks that were sterilized and re-used and individual baggies of ashes for Ash Wednesday that had been donated by Palliative Care practitioners.
Then it was time to take the T to the conference hotel, where I washed up before the Executive Council meeting. Thursday evening after the first plenary and the opening reception, I went out for dinner/dessert with an old friend from graduate school who has since moved and is now shifting from environmental into medical history.
Click here for Part 2
