Damaging the Body: Medical and Social Concepts of Harm (event series)

The issue of what exactly comprises damage to the physical body appears in a number of contemporary debates within medicine and more widely, and forms the main topic of the Museum’s Friends’ Secretary’s PhD research. For example, what constitutes modern categories such as “self-harm”, addiction and cosmetic body modification, and how have these been constructed medically and socially in relation to body, mind and self? Such topics have been previously explored by the “Damaging the Body” seminar series, co-organised by the Friends’ Secretary. By adopting a historical perspective, this seminar series has encouraged reflection on medical and non-medical concepts of damage, suggesting that the very idea of “damage” is problematic and unstable. Two forthcoming debates will explore these issues in more detail, providing four very different perspectives on a particular topic before opening up discussion to a public audience.

On Monday 21 May, St Bartholomew’s Hospital Pathology Museum & Gallery will host Foreign Bodies? – Self-Injury, Surgery and Performance, a panel discussion considering the variety of ways in which acts and objects are attributed medical, social, political and aesthetic meaning. Drawing on their own research relating to the topic of so-called self-inflicted injury within history, literature and the arts, specialists will open up broader philosophical and historical ideas for debate with the audience. Speakers are: Emma Spary (University of Cambridge); Louise Hide (Birkbeck Pain Project, Birkbeck, University of London); Mary Cappello (University of Rhode Island) and Dominic Johnson (Queen Mary, University of London). For full titles and event details, visit the Damaging the Body website.

On Thursday 28 June, in conjunction with the University of the West of England Gender Studies Research Group, a debate at the Watershed in Bristol will discuss Eating Disorders and Gender in Culture, Psychology, History and Literature. Discussion will focus on cultural, historical and literary depictions of anorexia nervosa and other eating disorders. It will question how eating disorders are (or have been) perceived differently in relation to gender, thereby interrogating in what ways – biologically, culturally, and symbolically – extreme under-eating has been seen to damage male and female bodies differently and how this damage is described and contextualized in gendered terms. Speakers are: Charlotte Boyce (University of Portsmouth); Helen Malson (University of the West of England); Neula Kerr-Boyle (UCL) and Debra Ferreday (Lancaster University).

Both events will start at 6.30pm, with admission from 6pm. There is no need to book and admission is free. Refreshments will be provided. For more information on the “Damaging the Body” project, visit the website.

Victorian Psychiatrists: Theophilus Bulkeley Hyslop (1863 – 1933)

Theo Hyslop, or “T.B.” as he was familiarly known, was Assistant Medical Officer at Bethlem from 1888 – 1898, when he was promoted to Resident Physician and Medical Superintendent. He remained at Bethlem until 1911.

The young Theo was literally brought up to “lunacy,” as asylum work was often known at the time. When he was two years old, his father William purchased Stretton House asylum, a private asylum for male patients in Church Stretton, Shropshire, where the family also lived. In 1869, the asylum held 40 patients and, like nineteenth century Bethlem, many could enjoy cricket, gardening, billiards, and music, while the richer patients could ride or take ‘carriage exercise’. The grounds were spacious, and the asylum was supplied from its garden and model farm.

Following his early medical training, Hyslop first came to Bethlem at the age of 23, as a clinical assistant. These posts (the name of which changed frequently over the years, in an effort to attract more applicants) were unpaid, resident positions, designed to give qualified medical men first-hand experience in “psychological medicine.” Many of Bethlem’s clinical assistants later became prominent in the field: another such in the late nineteenth century was psychologist and anthropologist W.H.R. Rivers, well known for his treatment of Siegfried Sassoon during the First World War, who will be the subject of a future post.

Hyslop is a particularly interesting character, both from his long involvement with Bethlem, and his widespread interests in art, music, literature and sport, as well as medicine. His publications were extremely varied: he was interested in physiology, philosophy, religion, the common fin-de-siècle fear of “degeneration” and the possible connections between genius, art, creativity and insanity (The Great Abnormals, for example, aimed to show that “the wildest imaginings” were not incompatible with “the highest attainments in the realms of thought and conduct”). Although the variety of Hyslop’s pursuits makes for a fascinating retrospective, it may also indicate one reason as to why he has received little attention in later years: one obituary suggested that if he “had directed all his energies into a single channel, there is little doubt that he would have become a very great man indeed.”

Hyslop at work at Bethlem

History of Psychiatry and Psychology Postgraduate Conference: 19 March 2011

As previously announced on this blog, around forty early career researchers from around the world recently attended a conference at the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at UCL on the history of psychiatry and psychology, indicating the breadth of interest in, and relevance of, the field. Many of these presented their own research, which included the exploration of issues such as gender, citizenship, therapeutics, medication, and the social implications and understandings of mental illness from Ancient Mesopotamia to twentieth century Communist Yugoslavia.

These short presentations showed the pertinence of the topics explored to social, political and medical issues today. Thus, in a paper entitled Disabling Democracy, Rabia Belt from the University of Michigan explored the ways in which categories of mental deficiency entered the constitutions of the forty US states which currently prevent those with any form of mental impairment from voting. Many of these rulings still use the nineteenth century terminology of “insanity” and “idiocy” and, moreover, have been heavily indicated in wider political concerns. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, for example, American Indians, African Americans, and women were at various times regarded as unfit for suffrage and full political citizenship because of alleged mental deficiencies.

Similarly, Yoshiya Makita from the University of Tokyo investigated the ways in which medical notions of mental retardation entered the political arena in early twentieth century Japan, where ideas of disability intersected with those of class, criminality, and citizenship through emerging state control. In a paper which may well be of interest to those who visited our Phantasmagoria exhibition last year, Max Gawlich of the University of Heidelberg described how mescaline intoxication became viewed as a “model psychosis” by researchers in Heidelberg in the 1920s (late nineteenth century experimenters with mescaline had not, it seems, assumed that the hallucinations produced by the drug were necessarily the same as those experienced in a psychotic episode), and the ways in which their experiments were entangled with and embedded into historical, social and cultural contexts.

Participants in the conference indicated a keen interest in setting up a virtual research network, enabling easy communication of information and ideas across continents. This will begin with an H-net list for the history of psychiatry, providing an informal environment for discussion of issues, like those above, which appear of extreme importance to twenty-first century society. More to follow soon…