Medical Historical Library News

Discover how mathematics, theology, art, and medicine converge through the lens of “similarity” in this unique historical exhibition. On view in the Cushing Rotunda through August 20, 2025 Curated by Laura R. Phillips, Ph.D., Curator for Visual Arts Imagine a world in which similarity is the foundation of everything. That idea, inspired by the writings of cultural theorist Walther Benjamin (1892–1940) and Yale Professor Paul North, is the basis for the new exhibition in the Cushing Rotunda: A Cosmos of Similarity. Showcasing lesser-known works from the founding collection of the Medical Historical Library, this captivating new display charts a rich intellectual history in which mathematics, theology, natural philosophy, art, and medicine intertwine. It outlines a history of similarity and knowledge production in Europe between 1482 and 1700, connecting diverse disciplines through their visual and material traces. At the center of this story is a remarkable array of artifacts from The Edward Clark Streeter Collection of Weights and Measures and the personal library of Harvey Cushing (1869–1939). Curated constellations of objects from these collections—and more—bring together a cosmography of similarity, in which geometrical diagrams, body parts, musical intervals, and architectural forms illustrate abstract concepts, such as harmony, proportion, and time. At stake in this assembly of images and ideas is ultimately a larger claim about measure, in its many forms, as an art of likeness. 

The Medical Historical Library of the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library is pleased to announce its sixteenth annual Research Travel award for use of the Historical Library. The deadline is April 27th, 2025. The Ferenc Gyorgyey/Stanley Simbonis YSM’57 Research Travel Grant is available to historians, medical practitioners, and other researchers outside of Yale who wish to use the Historical collections of the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical 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 limited to residents of the United States and Canada.  The award honors Ferenc A. Gyorgyey, former Historical Librarian, and Stanley Simbonis, M.D, a 1953 graduate of Yale College and a 1957 graduate of Yale School of Medicine, who graciously gifted an endowed fund in support of the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library. For application requirements and the link to submit application materials, please refer to our fellowship page. View research from past recipients: Hannah Darvin (2024) Michael Ortiz (2023) Tina Wei (2023) Jonathan Jones (2018) Jaipreet Virdi (2018) Thomas Ewing (2017) Erin Travers (2016)

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 is pleased to announce a new gift of the José Manuel Rodríguez Delgado papers. His papers are a gift of Caroline Stoddard Delgado, wife of Dr. José M. R. Delgado, and children José Carlos and Linda Delgado, 2024. José Manuel Rodríguez Delgado (1915-2011) was a Spanish physician, researcher, and professor who specialized in neurophysiology of the brain. He captured the world’s attention in the 1960s with his experiments using electrical stimulation of the brain to control the actions of mammals, primates, and human subjects. Delgado earned his medical degree and a doctorate in physiology from the Universidad Central in Madrid. He came to Yale in 1946 as a fellow in the laboratory of John Fulton, a neurophysiologist, chair of the Department of Physiology, and one of the Medical Library’s founders. By 1953 Delgado was an assistant professor and became director of research following Fulton’s death in 1960.  He returned to Spain in 1974 to organize a new medical school. In 2004, Delgado returned to the United States, settling in California. Delgado published hundreds of articles throughout his career, in multiple languages, several books, and was an inventor, pioneering methods for the implantation of electrodes to treat neurological disorders. The items in the gift document Delgado's professional life and include correspondence, manuscript and published writings, lectures, research, interviews, photographs and photographic slides, audio visual materials, original drawings for scientific publications by Santiago Ramón y Cajal (1852-1934), scrapbooks, clippings, and neural stimulation equipment built by Delgado. For access to the collection, please contact the Medical Historical Library at historical.library@yale.edu.

Written by Jiemin Tina Wei, Ferenc Gyorgyey/Stanley Simbonis YSM’57 Research Travel Grant recipient, 2023-2024 December 29, 2023 What is the relationship between work and medicine? It may seem obvious, especially amidst this year’s wave of unionization of medical residents, that medicine is a form of work. But just as medicine can be work, work can be (and has been, in certain historical moments) medicine. My dissertation and book in progress, “Ameliorating Fatigue at Work: Workplace-Management, Mind-Body Medicine, and Self-Help for Industrial Fatigue in the U.S., 1900-1950,” investigates the history of attempts to ameliorate workplace fatigue in the first half of the twentieth century. It traces how scientists from industrial medicine, occupational health, physiology, ergonomics, industrial psychology, psychiatry, psychoanalysis, and economics struggled to and succeeded in making work and workers into objects of scientific study. For the scientists I study, labor dynamics gave context to their discoveries—providing the backdrop, for instance, to their gendered division of labor, as well as their differential compensation and recognition of work done by women. Focusing on the labor dynamics implicit in the production of science resonates with recent calls by scholars to study “a labor history of science.” A group of historical subjects that I study, clustered around the social networks of physician E.E. Southard, first Director of the Boston Psychopathic Hospital prior to his death in 1920, was interested in this problem in its inverse—looking not at how labor can yield insights into science, but how at how science can yield insights into labor. These psychiatrists and psychiatric social workers collected data and biological material from their mental hospital patients to study the neurological and psychopathic roots of myriad workplace dysfunction, such as refusal to work and tendency to unionize. Oriented, as many of them were, around the eugenics movement, they aimed to socially rehabilitate patients they classified variously as feebleminded, insane, nervous, and psychopathic. Refitting as many individuals as possible to productive work, they sought to resolve the growing social problem of their time, militant labor uprisings. In their medical practice, work was part of disease and cure. Through the generous support of the Ferenc Gyorgyey/Stanley Simbonis YSM’57 Research Travel Grant, my dissertation took me to the Medical Historical Library in the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University. My visit focused on the collections of the esteemed neurosurgeon Harvey Cushing, a namesake of the Library. Cushing and his colleague and assistant, pathologist Louise Eisenhardt, were collaborators of Southard and his colleague and assistant, pathologist M.M. Canavan. Due to limitations of surviving materials about Southard and Canavan, Cushing and Eisenhardt’s repositories provide a crucial point of contrast and help populate modern scholarship with details about the social-professional world of these physicians. The gems of this collection give material reality to this cohort’s medical work. Cushing, a draftsman in addition to a surgeon, littered his Harvard Medical School lecture notebooks with drawings, leaving behind a kind of illustrated textbook of early-twentieth-century medical education. See for instance, his sketches for a lecture on the kidney.­ Left: Harvey Williams Cushing Papers, Histology and Embryology, 1891-92, H.M.S., pp 13a-b. The Robert Bogdan Disability Collection also held striking visual material documenting the life of workers and patients at state mental hospitals and related institutions. Among the collection’s fifteen enormous three-ringed photo albums, Book 6 features postcards and other images from "Institutions: Insane, Feeble minded, Epileptic, Deaf, Blind, ca. 1900-1930." At the State Hospital in Gowanda, N.Y., for instance, postcards show the kitchen, laundry, operating room, superintendent’s residence, staff house, and nurses house.   Above: Assorted photos from State Hospital, Gowanda, N.Y. From the Bogdan Disability Collection, Book 6. Other photos showed “Breaking of Ground for Assembly Building” at the New Jersey State Village for Epileptics at Skillman; Field Day at State Hospital in Willard, NY; and dining rooms in the Massachusetts Hospital in Palmer, MA, and at the State Hospital in North Warren, PA. Above: Assorted photos from the Bogdan Disability Collection, Book 6. Numerous images showed nurses in posed group photos and while recreating, such as at the Asylum in Middletown, NY, and the State Hospital in Gowanda, NY. Above: Front and back of postcard, Middletown, NY, Asylum Above: Assorted photos from the Bogdan Disability Collection, Book 6. The postcards even featured several institutions dedicated to vocational rehabilitation in the U.S. and abroad, such as the State Industrial School for Girls in Mitchellville, IA. These photos, one of which appears to be taken by “Richard the Druggist,” shows these so-called troubled girls gathering outdoors and in their orchestra. In collections such as these, the rich visual and print material at the Medical Historical Library captures the labor required to carry out medical research and care, as well as the correspondence networks of medical professionals using medicine to respond to crises of labor. Left: Jiemin Tina Wei is a PhD candidate in Harvard University’s Department of the History of Science. Her dissertation and book in progress, “Ameliorating Fatigue at Work: Workplace-Management, Mind-Body Medicine, and Self-Help for Industrial Fatigue in the U.S., 1900-1950,” investigates the history of attempts to ameliorate workplace fatigue in the first half of the twentieth century. This research has been generously supported by the Ferenc Gyorgyey/Stanley Simbonis YSM’57 Research Travel Grant, and by the wonderful staff at the Medical Historical Library in the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University, especially Melissa Grafe, Chris Zollo, Kathi Isham, and Christine Bailey.