Medical Historical Library News

Our first 2018-19 Ferenc Gyorgyey fellow, Jaipreet Virdi, Ph.D., shares an aspect of her research on disability technology through photographs and postcards, with little help from Twitter… Picturing Disability Technology Written by Jaipreet Virdi* In a 2014 article, historian Katherine Ott expressed: “Both the artifacts owned and used by people with disabilities and those that are used upon them or that are encountered in life create possibilities, impose limits, assert political and ideological positions, and shape identity.”[1] This statement has guided my research on the material culture of disability and the nature of disability as both an individual experience and a collective one. By examining how disabled people created, modified, and used technologies, tools, and machines as a medium of social interaction, my work aims to conceptualize how such objects shaped the meanings and management of disability – to understand, as Toby Siebers has written, the ways in which objects are “viewed not as potential sources of pain but as marvelous examples of the plasticity of the human form or as devices of empowerment.”[2] My research also examines representations of disability technologies: how did disabled people ascribe meanings and values to their objects? Wheelchairs, canes, walkers, braces, spectacles, hearing aids, prosthetics, and etc., all color various interactions with disability. Since most of these technologies are essential for navigating (sometimes literally) the world, visual representations of disabled people with these technologies provides us with valuable insight for understanding people’s lived experiences of disability. In photographs, for instance, everything from poses, dress, props, and the inclusion of disability technology, are visual evidence of conscious decisions to frame an image of disability. Such images enable us to perceive the kinds of technologies people used, how they adapted them to their bodies, and how they personalized them to reduce the stigma of “otherness”[3] or “freakery.”[4] The Robert Bogdan Disability History Collection at the Medical Historical Library (in the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University) contains over 3,500 photographs and ephemera representing disability. Since the 1980s, Bogdan had collected such representations, ranging from the 1870s-when photographic images became popularized—to the 1970s at the heights of the disability rights movement. Bogdan’s 2012 collaborative book with Martin Elks and James A. Knoll, Picturing Disability: Beggar, Freak, Citizen, and Other Photographic Rhetoric (Syracuse University Press), provides a broader historical context of the collection, including a history of different types of citizen portraits. The carte de visite was the most common photographic format from 1860 to 1885, with each photograph printed from a negative and mounted on a piece of thin cardboard; some people chose to have the photograph on a postcard, so as to send messages to family and friends. Cabinet cards were also popular at the end of the nineteenth century, though they were three times larger than the carte de visite. Citizen portraits were often taken at a local studio, positioning subjects to “echo family visual rhetoric, not disability conventions”—there is no obvious attempt to conceal the disability, for it is part of the family reality as conveyed in the photograph.[5] Other photographs also use props and positioning of people to convey “normal life” within an inconsequential setting to frame an image’s ordinariness, instead of using disability to define the situation.[6] Disability technologies and other visual indicators of disability are prominently present in many of these photographs. As Bogdan points out, “their presence is not so intrusive as to change this picture’s place in the category of atypical family photograph.”[7] In this wedding portrait, for instance, the two women in wheelchairs are part of the wedding party and positioned to provide balance—the same way a photographer will arrange individuals according to height to obtain symmetry in portraits—without drawing much attention to their wheelchairs.   Wedding party with 2 women in wheelchairs, from the Robert Bogdan Disability Collection MS Col 61, Book 1: Wheelchairs.   These photos also do not tend to specifically feature the disability object, rather positioning the people within normal portraiture conventions, whether it is to show romance or familial ties. The use of additional props, moreover, were used to further confine the photographs within portraiture traditions – the disability technology, though consciously included in the photos, are not the subject of the portrait. Rather, it is the people and their relationships with each other. As Bogdan asserts, “Although some of the images were shared, even sent through the mail, they were distributed privately to intimates, family members, and friends. They were not produced for commercial public relations, to solicit money, to sell, or for personal or organizational gain.”[8] Through these images, we can see most assuredly that people with disabilities were “too busy living to be restrained by our post-structuralist worries over the cultural contingencies of what they did or who they were,” as Ott has remarked.[9]   Assorted photographs of women in wheelchairs accompanied by other people, from the Robert Bogdan Disability Collection MS Col 61, Book 1: Wheelchairs. Assorted photographs of women in wheelchairs accompanied by other people, from the Robert Bogdan Disability Collection MS Col 61, Book 1: Wheelchairs.   Assorted photographs of women in wheelchairs accompanied by other people, from the Robert Bogdan Disability Collection MS Col 61, Book 1: Wheelchairs.   One series of photographs piqued my interest: of individuals outdoors in wheelchairs that have chains attached to the wheels. This design feature appears in different styles of wheelchairs, but I have never previously encountered it in my research, either in manuscripts and archives, or in material culture collections. Inspecting the photographs, I took an educated guess: would these be for raising or hoisting the individual from the chair? My guess didn’t seem right to me, so I took my question to twitter.     As historians have discussed, crowdsourcing on social media is useful for harnessing participatory knowledge. It blurs the boundaries between specialist and non-specialist knowledge, offering new insights for working with primary sources. What seemed to me to be a questionable, confusing design feature was quite obvious to others – the wheelchair is a hand-crank, with the chains fixed to move the wheels the same way that a bicycle pedal moves a bicycle. Now, since I don’t own or ride a bicycle, chain gears were not something I was familiar with, but others have shared their knowledge to enable me to paint a better picture of how this design feature was useful for wheelchair users. The exchange on twitter formed a conversation about self-propelled wheelchairs that governed my research through the Bogdan collection and the broader history of the wheelchair. Litters, swings, cradles, carts, carrying-chairs or sedan chairs were used prior to the formation of the wheelchair as we know it, and individual chairs were not mass-produced until the mid-twentieth century to assist the increasing numbers of soldiers surviving from spinal cord injuries. Wheelchairs became associated with disability and thus, users were stigmatized and perceived as unable to contribute to society. These photographs, however, reveal the extent to which disabled people governed their own lives and sought to be self-sufficient, even taking an action pose in their studio portraits to represent their maneuverability. Man in wheelchair formed like a cart, from the Robert Bogdan Disability Collection MS Col 61, Book 1: Wheelchairs.   As Penny Wolfson has shown, users relied on their own craftsmanship or that of others to shape a mobility device for their own needs.[10] Wheelchairs could be made by adding cart wheels on dining or library chairs, by repurposing motorcycle engines, or adding gears for hand-cranked wheelchairs. While most nineteenth-century wheelchairs were manufactured by furniture makers prizing comfort, adaptability, and mobility, some users repurposed from household furniture and included crafted additions for comfort: home-sewn cushions, crocheted blankets or feet mats, and trinkets attached to spokes. These features provide us with clues into the personalized relationship between user and technology, presenting experiences of disability that were not always negative or exclusive. Moreover, photographs of disabled wheelchair users in various settings—in a field, in the streets, on the porch—indicates the challenges of maneuvering within the built environment, especially of navigating on unpaved streets. The wheels, cranks, and other design features that are visible in the photographs additionally reveal variants of disability experience. By the 1970s, wheelchairs became markers of disability as well as symbols of activism, leaving behind intimate traces of their owner(s). And those hand cranks aren’t simply designs of the past; old designs can always be made new again.   *Jaipreet Virdi is a historian of medicine, technology, and disability. She is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the University of Delaware. Her first book, Hearing Happiness: Fakes, Frauds, and Fads in Deafness Cures will be published by The University of Chicago Press. The Ferenc Gyorgyey Research Travel Grant generously supported this research; special thanks to the grant selection committee and to Melissa Grafe. Photograph images from the Robert Bogdan Disability Collection MS Col 61, Book 1: Wheelchairs. You can find Jai on twitter as @jaivirdi.   [1] Katherine Ott, “Disability Things: Material Culture and American Disability History, 1700-2010,” in Susah Burch and Michael Rembis (Eds.), Disability Histories (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2014), 119. [2] Toby Siebers, “Disability in Theory: From Social Constructionism to the New Realism of the Body,” in Lennard Davis (ed), The Disability Studies Reader (New York & London: Routledge, 2006), 177. [3] Catherine Kudlick, “Disability History: Why We Need Another ‘Other,” The American Historical Review 108.3 (June 2003): 768-793. [4] Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997). [5] Robert Bogdan, Martin Elks and James A. Knoll, Picturing Disability: Beggar, Freak, Citizen, and Other Photographic Rhetoric (Syracuse University Press, 2012), 145. [6] Bogdan, Elks, and Knoll, Picturing Disability, 146. [7] Bogdan, Elks, and Knoll, Picturing Disability, 154. [8] Bogdan, Elks, and Knoll, Picturing Disability, 145. [9] Katherine Ott, “The Sum of its Parts: An Introduction to Modern Histories of Prosthetics,” in Katherine Ott, David Serlin, and Stephen Mihm (eds.), Artificial Parts, Practical Lives: Modern Histories of Prosthetics (New York: New York University Press, 2002), 1-42; 3. [10] Penny Lynne Wolfson, “Enwheeled: Two Centuries of Wheelchair Design, from Furniture to Film,” MA Thesis, Cooper-Hewit, National Design Museum, Smithsonian Institution and Parsons the New School for Design (2014).  

We are delighted to share a report on the work of our first Simbonis intern, Emma Brennan-Wydra, who joined the staff in the Medical Historical Library at the end of May 2018.  Emma offered the following glimpses into her life and experiences as our intern: I graduated from Yale College in 2015 with a double major in Chemistry and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, focusing on the multiple intersections of science, education, gender, bodies, and power. During my time at Yale, I also played flanker for the Yale Women's Rugby Football Club, designed lighting for theater and dance productions, organized a truly astounding number of LGBTQ-related events, and served as the producer of the Fifth Humour, Yale's oldest (and best) sketch comedy troupe. After college, I moved to the Boston area, where I worked as a ballroom dance instructor, played bass in an alternative rock band, and volunteered with the Massachusetts Transgender Political Coalition. I'm now a master's student at the University of Michigan School of Information, where I've mostly been taking classes relating to libraries, archives, and the preservation of information, but I've also dabbled in data science, programming, and survey research methodology. In addition to my coursework, I work as a research assistant at the University of Michigan College of Engineering, where I'm part of a multidisciplinary group studying engineering education, and in the fall, I'll be a teaching assistant for a master's level introductory course in statistics and data analysis. (I also try to find the time to go out salsa or swing dancing, when I can!) After I finish graduate school next spring, I'm hoping to get a position in an academic library. I had visited the Medical Historical Library and the Cushing Center a few times for class as an undergrad at Yale, but to be honest, I didn't know very much about medical libraries before I started my summer internship. One of my personal learning goals for the summer was to learn more about different facets of academic and medical librarianship, both through direct experience and by talking to other librarians, in hopes of developing more specific career plans for myself. In my six weeks at the Medical Historical Library, I've had the opportunity to get to know librarians from every department of the Cushing/Whitney Medical Library and hear more about the work they do, and I've also gotten to work on a number of different projects in and around the Medical Historical Library for myself. Unfortunately, I'm not really any closer to identifying a “dream job” because everything has been so interesting! My first project for the summer was processing a recently acquired collection of medical illustrations drawn by Mildred Codding for our library's benefactor and namesake, neurosurgeon Harvey Cushing, along with photographic reprints, notes, correspondence, and other materials that Cushing used in the preparation of his books and articles. Archival processing, I quickly learned, is all about decision-making. As I was planning out how I might want to organize the collection, I found it helpful to imagine what kinds of questions future researchers might be asking. Would the researcher need to find all of the materials from one specific publication, for example, or might they be interested in Cushing's editorial process more broadly? If the materials are organized one way, it might make it easy to answer one type of research question, but other kinds of information or functionality may be lost in exchange. Most of the time with archival processing, there isn't one “right” answer. After I physically organized the materials into new folders and boxes, I began entering information about the collection into ArchivesSpace, an archives-specific information management application that is used across the Yale Library system. This facilitated the creation of a finding aid, which is a document describing an archival collection, designed to help researchers find materials of interest. You can view the finding aid I made here. After I finished the finding aid, I began planning a small exhibition to display some of the beautiful surgical illustrations by Mildred Codding that are part of the new archival collection. The scope of the exhibition quickly broadened to include not only Mildred Codding but also two of the other women who worked with Harvey Cushing: secretary Madeline Stanton and pathologist Louise Eisenhardt. Cushing, like many doctors of the time, employed a large team of female assistants whose work was often uncredited and whose names have been largely forgotten. But these three women—Codding, Stanton, and Eisenhardt—went on to have distinguished careers of their own that extended decades past Cushing's death in 1939. As I began cobbling together a plan for my exhibition, I drew on a variety of sources, including biographies of Harvey Cushing, obituaries and tribute articles, birth and death records, reports from the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital, photographs from the Harvard Medical School Archives, and collections of correspondence and diaries held here at Yale. I also had conversations with others who had some curatorial experience so I could learn more about how to create a strong, cohesive exhibit, and I tried to select items, images, and stories that capture some of what made Codding, Stanton, and Eisenhardt so special. My exhibit, titled Not a "Harem": Codding, Eisenhardt, Stanton, and the Lives and Legacies of Dr. Harvey Cushing's Female Associates, is currently on display in the Cushing Center and also available online. It has been such an honor and a delight to have the opportunity to learn about these exceptional women, and I'm so excited to share what I learned with the public. One of the things that excites me most about my future career as an academic librarian is the day-to-day variety of the work, so having the opportunity to experience a taste of that in my internship has definitely been a plus! In addition to processing an archival collection and curating an exhibition, I've also updated and migrated an online exhibition about the Yale School of Nursing to the new Omeka platform, cataloged glass plate photographic negatives of Harvey Cushing's patients, written and edited labels for an exhibit about tobacco advertising, and more. I've learned so many new skills and technologies through this internship, but I've also gotten to do work that employs my preexisting interests and strengths. Although I previously thought I might want to work as a librarian in a subject specialist role for chemistry or another science field, I've thoroughly enjoyed both the medical and historical aspects of my work here.

    Easy Victims to the Dreaded European Visitor: Using Digital Humanities Tools and Archival Documents from Yale University and New Haven to Explore Local Knowledge during a Global Influenza Epidemic, 1889-1890   Wednesday, May 30th, 2018 11 a.m.   Historical Library, Cushing/Whitney Medical Library 333 Cedar Street, New Haven   Please join us for a talk that combines digital humanities and deep research on a global influenza epidemic, drawn from Yale’s libraries and archives! Tom Ewing, Ph.D. is a professor in the Department of History at Virginia Tech. Dr. Ewing is the 2017-2018 Ferenc Gyorgyey Research Travel Grant recipient at the Historical Library, Cushing/Whitney Medical Library, Yale University.  His research on the Russian influenza epidemic is also funded by a bilateral digital humanities grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.  

(by Deborah Streahle, doctoral student in the Program in the History of Medicine and Science) The Medical Historical Library is pleased to announce a gift of the papers of 19th century physician, obstetrician, and gynecologist Dr. James Henry Etheridge.  The papers are a donation from the estate of Margaret Grant Young, 2017. Dr. Etheridge (1844-1899) was a distinguished Chicago physician in the late 19th-century. He graduated from Rush Medical College in 1869 and, after a brief sojourn in Europe, taught there for the rest of his life. As a professor of Materia Medica, Medical Jurisprudence, and Gynecology, Dr. Etheridge was passionate about medical education and highly regarded by his peers and students. Reflecting his dedication as an alumnus, his papers feature commencement programs, newsletters, and newspaper clippings related to Rush Medical College. In addition to teaching, Dr. Etheridge practiced as a general physician and later specialized in gynecology. He advocated for this model of medical education for his students, arguing that a specialist must work from a solid foundation in general practice lest he become “a lamentably narrow physician.”[1] Dr. Etheridge’s papers reflect his expertise with reprints of his many lectures and journal articles on gynecology, as well as casebooks and ledgers recording his patient interactions in private practice. Beyond his local responsibilities, Etheridge also traveled to attend the meetings of several professional organizations, among them the American Medical Association and the International Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. Included in his papers are conference ephemera like invitations, welcome booklets, banquet menus, and travel guides. After his sudden death from “aneurism of the heart” in 1899, his personal physician remarked, “He was a man of commanding presence and polish and popular with all whom he came in contact.” Upon hearing the news, his students at Rush adopted a set of formal resolutions in his honor. The resolutions officially memorialized his death and reflected his esteemed place at the college. Dr. Etheridge was survived by his wife, Harriet Elizabeth Powers, and their two daughters. Five letter files contain his and his family’s extensive personal and professional correspondence from the 1850s-1920s, as well as a beautiful baby book. As a whole, the acquisition offers insight into the life and afterlife of a scholarly physician practicing in the late-19th century. Please view a small exhibition featuring Etheridge’s papers in the Medical Historical Library, curated by Deborah Streahle, doctoral student in the Program in the History of Medicine and Science. [1] J.H. Etheridge, “The Gynecologist as Specialist,” Chicago Medical Recorder, 1898.  

(by Melissa Grafe) Yale University’s Medical Historical Library is pleased to announce the acquisition of an important collection of ephemera, photographs, and rare books related to disability, the Robert Bogdan Disability Collection. Professor Robert Bogdan compiled an archive guided by the ideas of the field of Disability Studies, an approach that focuses on “disability” as a social, cultural, and political phenomenon. Bogdan, an early pioneer in that field, has taught courses related to it since 1971. He started collecting disability ephemera in early 1980s in order to advance his research and writing. As Bogdan began collecting he realized that although there were archives and collections related to specific aspects of disability and particular disability-related organizations, none took a broad Disability Studies approach. The collection is unique in being both broad in scope yet deep in particular areas. For example, there are over four hundred photo postcards of people with a range of disabilities participating in regular life, pictures that might be found in family albums. The people are photographed as family members, friends and loved ones, not as clinical types. There are over one hundred pieces related to begging, ephemera used by people with disabilities to solicit money. There are close to three hundred items related to charities soliciting money for people with disabilities. In addition, there are hundreds items associated with institutions where people with disabilities were confined.  As Bogdan explains, “The collection expands our understanding of the social history of disability as well as contains images that are esthetically challenging and engaging.” There are over 3,500 items in the collection. It covers the period from approximately 1870, when photographic images became widely available, through the 1970s, when the disability rights movement became an important force for social change. Most of the items are contained in 14 large three ring binders organized by topics.  Their format varies but the great majority of the materials are postcards, and most of those are photo postcards. Other photo formats include carte de visite, cabinet cards, as well as other larger photographs. These are complemented by pamphlets and other printed materials.  Please see the preliminary inventory of the collection.  The Medical Historical Library created this finding aid of the collection, which researchers can use to request materials to view in the Library's secure reading room. Bogdan’s work Freak Show is a classic in the field of disability studies, as are a number of his other publications. His most recent book, Picturing Disability, draws on images in the collection. Bogdan has received many honors and awards for his contribution to the field of disability studies.  He is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus in Social Science and Disability Studies at Syracuse University. For questions concerning the collection, please contact Melissa Grafe, Ph.D, John R. Bumstead Librarian for Medical History: melissa.grafe@yale.edu