Melissa Grafe's blog

By Hannah Darvin, 2024 Ferenc Gyorgyey/Stanley Simbonis YSM’57 Research Travel I first came across Luke Fildes’s The Doctor while visiting Tate Britain as an art history student. I was struck by its size and subject matter. Measuring over 6 feet high and 9 feet wide, it depicts a child on the precipice of death, watched over intently by a physician who is prominently lit and placed at the center of the scene. His elevated social standing is articulated through his clothing, particularly his starched white collar, contrasting starkly with the humble cottage interior where the child lies on a makeshift bed of two mismatched chairs. In the dimly lit background, the child’s father places his hand on his weeping wife’s shoulder as he looks stoically at the scene. Years after my first encounter with this picture, I still found it beautiful and its appeal to my emotions fascinated me; it made me feel sad at the family’s plight but also hopeful that the care and attention from a physician might mean that the little patient might recover. Later, I learned that within art history, maudlin Victorian narrative pictures such as this should be viewed with suspicion and relegated to the category of “bad art.” This was largely due to modernist theorists who identified The Doctor as the height of sentimental Victorian genre painting, with Clive Bell declaring the painting as “worse than nugatory because the emotion it suggests is false.”[1] As a result of this position developed by modernist critics, art historians were long reluctant to critically engage with this picture. From the moment of its creation, however, The Doctor was almost immediately adopted and at times co-opted by the medical establishment to perform an ideological function in both Britain and the United States. Fildes’s portrayal was ceaselessly evoked, reproduced and disseminated well into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and came to function as an idealized vision of modern medicine. More recently, physicians writing in contemporary medical journals have re-imagined this painting to express frustrations and critique the increasing bureaucracy and burnout experienced by physicians at all levels.[2] Other physicians have marshalled reproductions of the painting as a physical token passed from mentor to student, prompting reflection about their own medical practice and highlighting the importance of the physician-patient relationship.[3] Moreover, this image has also been reworked by physicians to acknowledge the limits of medical intervention and to embrace the “human experience” of medical work; for some physicians, The Doctor has come to represent the importance of simply bearing witness to patients’ experiences of illness and death.[4] In medical circles, The Doctor has become synonymous with a professional ideal, underscoring the importance of care, attentiveness, concern, and empathy within the physician-patient relationship and the medical encounter more generally. This past August, with the aid of the Ferenc Gyorgyey/Stanley Simbonis YSM’57 Research Travel Grant I was able to travel to Yale where I had the privilege of conducting archival research for my dissertation, Sentimentalizing Medicine: Luke Fildes’s The Doctor (1891) and the Idealized Image of the Physician-Patient Relationship. This grant supports scholars from Canada and the United States who wish to use the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library’s historical collections. My dissertation focuses on how The Doctor by Sir Luke Fildes, R.A., visually constructed the clinical interaction between doctor and patient. I concentrate on how, from the moment of its creation and subsequent exhibition, reimaginings, and dissemination through reproductions, The Doctor was mobilized to prime British and American medical professionals and publics on what to expect from a rapidly changing physician-patient relationship. My dissertation considers how The Doctor has continued to harness the emotions of nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-first-century viewers, constructing an ideal physician-patient relationship in service of promoting and justifying medical modernity. As the Ferenc Gyorgyey/Stanley Simbonis research fellow, I was able to examine “The Doctor” by Sir Luke Fildes collection (MS Coll 69). This collection is composed of multiple gifts from Bert Hansen, historian of medicine and gift of Dr. William Sherman and holds a wealth of material culture, print reproductions, decorative objects and medical texts related to my dissertation and my interest in how physicians have called upon The Doctor throughout the past 130 years to cultivate their own public and private constructions of professional identity. A particularly potent example from this holding is a miniature sculpture by Prescott Baston mass produced by Sebastian Miniatures between 1938 and 1976 (Fig. 1). The sculpture masterfully distills the original painting to two figures: the physician and patient. The lamp’s shade is tilted slightly, functioning as visual mechanism to direct the viewer’s gaze to the physician’s uninterrupted clinical attention before it moves to the patient. The figures are set on a pedestal, on which the words “THE DOCTOR” are inscribed. Measuring 3 x 2 x 2.5 inches, Sebastian Miniatures also circulated this sculpture as a pen stand and a pen stand paper weight. This series was one of the most popular sculptures produced by the company and it is estimated to have sold quantities in the tens of thousands.[5] It would be easy to dismiss this object as mawkish or kitschy; however, its legibility, portability, and ability to be placed in any space is precisely what makes it a powerful ideological tool. It effectively harnesses the viewer’s sentiment, deftly instructing doctors, patients, and family members on expected roles and behaviours within modern and contemporary medical spheres. As an art historian working on an interdisciplinary project drawing on the histories of medicine and the critical medical humanities, the Ferenc Gyorgyey/Stanley Simbonis research fellowship provided a unique opportunity to discuss my project outside of my own discipline; I was able to have collaborative conversations on how my project might be received by medical historians, particularly at an institution embedded within a medical school which such rich history. Moreover, as a doctoral and early career researcher, I benefited immensely from the support of the administrative staff who assisted me throughout my visit as well as the archival team whose enthusiasm for my project and knowledge of the collection allowed me to explore my interest in the doctor-patient relationship more widely through the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library’s historical collections. [1] Roger Fry, A Roger Fry Reader, ed. Christopher Reed (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 320. [2] In this reimagination, Eberly creates a diptych which physically separates the patient and physician. On the right panel, the patient lies alone on a hospital bed. On the left panel, the physician remains in his engaged, thoughtful pose but leans over a computer screen. John Brewer Eberly, “Modernizing Sir Luke Fildes’ The,” AMA Journal of Ethics 22, no. 5 (May 2020): E437-438. [3] An example of this can be seen in Jane Moore, “What Sir Luke Fildes’ 1887 Painting The Doctor Can Teach Us about the Practice of Medicine Today,” British Journal of General Practice 58, no. 548 (2008): 210–13. [4] Ian J. Barbash, “Silent Space,” JAMA 320, no. 11 (September 18, 2018): 1105. [5] Glenn S. Johnson, The Sebastian Miniatures Collectors Guide (Worcester, Massachusetts: Commonwealth Press, 1980), 82–83.    

The Medical Historical Library in the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library is welcoming applications for a fellowship for the study of medical photographic history. The Stanley B. Burns M.D. Fellowship for the Study of Medical Photographic History supports the study of the history of medical photography at Yale, maximizing the research potential of the Stanley B. Burns, MD, Historic Medical Photography Collection. We welcome applications from all interested researchers, regardless of their institutional association, race, cultural background, ability, sexual orientation, gender, or socioeconomic status. Applications from scholars utilizing traditional methods of archival and bibliographic research are encouraged as are applications from individuals who wish to pursue creative, interdisciplinary, and non-traditional approaches to conducting research using the Stanley B. Burns, MD, Historic Medical Photography Collection and related visual collections at the Medical Historical Library. In any given year the award is up to $2,000 for one week of research. Funds may be used for transportation, housing, food, and photographic reproductions. The award is currently limited to residents of the United States and Canada. A complete fellowship application includes: A research proposal (1,200 words max) that outlines: Significance of the proposed collections research to your larger project Value of your project to your field  Feasibility of completing the scope of research proposed within the fellowship period Please note: If you anticipate consulting other Medical Historical Library materials beyond the Burns collection, please indicate those clearly in your application.  Budget  Curriculum vitae Two letters of recommendation  Please apply through this link. The deadline for applications is midnight, April 28th, 2024.

On view in the hallway and rotunda from February 19th – August 16th, 2024 Curated by Melissa Grafe, Ph.D. and Laura Phillips, Ph.D. Mindscapes tells a story about mental health—its visibility, classification, and treatment—through the archival and visual art collections of the Medical Historical Library. Instead of a sweeping grand narrative of medical progress, Mindscapes presents a constellation of short stories that illuminate shifting cultural attitudes and scientific approaches to mental health over time. At stake in these stories are challenging, contested topics around mental health that intersect with Yale School of Medicine’s own histories. Two additional cases in the Historical Library, curated by Erin Sommers (History of Science, Medicine and Public Health Major, class of 2025) and Krupa Hegde (History of Science, Medicine and Public Health Major, class of 2025) as part of Marco Ramos’s fall 2023 course, Race and Mental Health in New Haven, discuss the Connecticut Mental Health Center’s connections to community and care. All items on display are from scrapbooks in the newly cataloged Connecticut Mental Health Center records, part of the Manuscripts and Archives Repository.   This exhibition is part of a multi-institutional effort to highlight mental health through collections and communities. It stands in dialogue with the exhibition, Munch and Kirchner: Anxiety and Expression at the Yale University Art Gallery (February 16  –  June 23, 2024), and the Yale School of Medicine (YSM) community art exhibition, Mindful: Exploring Mental Health Through Art (foyer of the Medical Library, February 21st – August 2024), which is sponsored by the YSM Program for Art in Public Spaces. Image: Depression, 1935, lithograph  Blanche Mary Grambs, also “Miller Grambs” (1916–2010), printed by George C. Miller (1894–1965)

Written by Michael Ortiz-Castro, Harvard University Ferenc Gyorgyey/Stanley Simbonis YSM’57 Research Travel Grant recipient, 2023-2024 Medicine shows were grand spectacles—among some of the first large scale, public, and free theatrical venues in the United States. The spectacles were incredibly popular in the U.S., particularly in the South and the West, from the 1870s to about the 1930s, when they were displaced by films and moving images. These shoes were designed to sell patent medicines—tonics, tinctures, and creams akin to today’s “As Seen on TV” medicines. These medications were popular throughout this era, until increased regulation in the early 20th century led to the development of properly vetted medications. Medicine shows, in their attempts to sell to customers, borrowed theatrical elements from other genres such as vaudeville and, significantly, minstrel shows. While historians of medicine who write on the history of these spectacles have noted the show’s problematic usage of images of Native peoples, not many have talked about the usage of blackface elements.[1] The collections at the Medical Historical Library in the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library help historians further interrogate the usage of images of the Other in these shows, and, as I argue in my dissertation, help understand how medicine shows “performed” American identity through their linking of race, prosperity, and health. The 1930 film “The Medicine Man” tells the story of Dr. John Harvey, a traveling salesman who lands in a nameless American town and falls in love with young Mamie, who is abused, along with her siblings, by their domineering German father.  Harvey’s traveling circus attracts the attention of Young Mamie, and the film details their romance and his rescue of Mamie from her father’s plans to marry her off to a rich older German.[2] [3] The movie’s plot is lifted from the traveling show of the same name, which was used to market Pawnee Pepto—a patent medicine that promised to cure all kinds of ailments in its consumers. While the film spends more time on the romance between Dr. Harvey and young Mamie, an informed viewer will see vestiges of the original source within the film—a short scene of Harvey’s presentation in the town, and other characters’ acknowledgement of the impressive “Indian” traveling with him. Consider the film’s official movie poster, which features Jack Benny in the titular role front and center. He is flanked by a motley crew of characters—two women in Hawaiian inspired costume, a man dressed as the devil, and the “Indian”. The film poster, however, when juxtaposed with a shot of the live medicine show, reveals a critical occlusion: a blackface character, who flanks Dr. Harvey on the stage. From the scant archival record, it’s hard to say what role these characters played in the medicine show. Scholars who write on medicine shows have claimed that Native characters associated with patent medicines often served as “verification”—as symbols of unvarnished nature that could speak to the efficacy and “healthiness” of the medicine.[4] What role, then, might have the blackface character have played? Historians of the minstrel genre note that blackface characters allowed white Americans to both reinforce their racist perceptions while also allowing a comical outlet for anxieties and fears over difference and equality (given that minstrel shows became incredibly popular following the Civil War).[5] Positioned alongside the Native figure, the audience might have read the blackface character as “verifying” much like the Native chief. But what did this figure verify? Consider the context of the photo of the live show. The shot captures the climax moment—where Dr. Harvey convinces the young protagonist to run away with him. The characters flank him, like ghosts, reminding the viewer of all the medicine has given him: good health, good morality, and good prosperity. The selling point of the patent medicine was not just that it was good for you—but it could deliver proper health, proper morality, and wealth, the hallmarks of the American “good life”. Other ephemera from the Medical Historical Library’s collections allow us to see how blackface/minstrel characters figured into the cultural life of patent medicines. These advertisements for patent medicines used blackface characters to appeal to white customers’ ideas of domesticity and health. The first ad, for Beecham’s Pills, depicts a black domestic worker, jovially dancing as she holds a small tincture box. The ad’s caption—“What Am Good For De Missus Am Good For Me”—is the ad’s selling point: the black woman’s recognition of the medicine’s value, in her role as the caretaker of the home (the “Mammy” figure), is how the customer comes to understand the value and efficacy of the medicine. Though, as historians have noted, Native peoples were used as symbols of nature that could “verify” the medicine, the deployment of Black bodies as imagery here instead relies on the peculiar domestic relations developed in slavery. That is repeated in the ad on the right, where the prosperous consumer is quite literally “fed” the medicine (here, Sanford’s Ginger) by his stereotypically depicted black servant. The customer’s trust in the medicine comes from the relationship between the white character and his black servant –the servant’s duty and joviality ensure the viewer that the medicine is, indeed, reliable—like the enslaved. These images suggest that patent medicines, medicine shows, and their associated visual ephemera are best understood not merely as deceptive medical ads, but as cultural forms that, like minstrel shows and vaudeville shows, served to make clear certain cultural ideologies of difference and health operative in late 19th century U.S. Patent medicines were attractive as objects precisely because they spoke to some of the major anxieties at play: economic security, good health, and prosperity to come. Though medicine shows remain undertheorized among historians of medicine, these collections allow us to begin to uncover the genre’s relation to other problematic cultural productions active during the era. [1] Tomes, Nancy. 2005. “The Great American Medicine Show Revisited.” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 79 (4): 627-63. https://doi.org/10.1353/bhm.2005.0173.; Armitage, Kevin C. 2003. “Commercial Indians: Authenticity, Nature, and Industrial Capitalism in Advertising at the Turn of the Twentieth Century.” The Michigan Historical Review 29 (2): 70–95. https://doi.org/10.2307/20174034.; Price, Jason. 2011. “'The Best Remedy Ever Offered to the Public': Representation and Resistance in the American Medicine Show.” Popular Entertainment Studies 2 (2): 21–34. [2] The Medicine Man, Directed by Scott Pembroke (Tiffany Pictures, 1930). [3] While the record trail is scant on the medicine show from which the movie derived, historian Irina Podgorny’s “‘Please, Come In’: Being a Charlatan, or the Question of Trustworthy Knowledge” speaks of the show as separate from the film, which implies the existence of the show prior to the movie. [4] Armitage, “Commercial Indians”. [5]“Blackface: The Birth of an American Stereotype.” National Museum of African American History and Culture, November 22, 2017. https://nmaahc.si.edu/explore/stories/blackface-birth-american-stereotype.        

We are pleased to announce awards for our first Ferenc Gyorgyey/Stanley Simbonis YSM’57 Research Travel Grants since 2019, to two recipients, Michael Ortiz (Harvard University) and Jiemin (Tina) Wei (Harvard University). Ortiz’s proposed project, “American Nature: Life and Political Community in Post-Reconstruction United States, 1877-1927,” shifts the debate on citizenship away from strictly legal and social conceptions, focusing on a new concept of biological citizenship, a consequence of developments in the life sciences, that was operationalized in everyday society. As part of his research at the Medical Historical Library, Ortiz will examine holdings that reflect the cultural life of medical knowledge, such as the Cancer “Cures” Collection and the Medical Trade Card Collection; the Bert Hansen Collection of Medicine and Public Health in Popular Graphic Art; and the William Helfand collection of medical ephemera, as well as archival collections in Sterling Library. Wei’s project,” Ameliorating Fatigue at Work: Workplace-Management, Mind-Body Medicine, and Self-Help for Industrial Fatigue in the U.S., 1910s-1940s” asks not how stress came to be, but how stress-adjacent disorders and the worker came to be subsumed as such under scientific investigation. Wei aims to rethink received notions about the relationship between work, fatigue, and its resolution, particularly focusing on the mediating role played by emergent or evolving scientific subdisciplines at the turn-of-the-century. During her research at the Library, Wei plans to examine the Harvey Cushing papers, Stanley B. Burns, M.D., historic medical photography collection, Pamphlets on public health issued by state government agencies, 1905-1942, and the Spa and Mineral Waters Collection, as well as archival collections in Sterling Library. The Medical Library also awarded its inaugural Stanley B. Burns M.D. Fellowship for the Study of Medical Photographic History to Amadeus Harte (Princeton University). Harte’s project, “How Medical Images Produce Objectivity,” investigates how historical medical images were used to designate objective ideas of "normal" and "pathological" physiology cross-culturally. Please join us in congratulating our newest cohort of fellows at the Medical Historical Library!