HSMT Research Seminars MT 2022 – Week 2

Seminars are held on Mondays at 16:00 at the Maison Française d’Oxford in Norham Road.

Seminars in the History of Science, Medicine, and Technology

Cora Salkovskis (Birkbeck University of London)

“We cannot help laughing”: reflex, discomfort, and the comic in late-Victorian mental science

Laughter sits uneasily within the history of mental health and the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century British asylum; a space more commonly associated with pain and distress than humour and the comic. Finding, thinking about, and writing about laughter in this space and context raises important questions of methodology, meaning, ethics, and practice. How can laughter be found in asylum records or translated into text? Does laughter always neatly map onto emotion or humour, and when the doctor (or the historian) does find something funny, what does it mean to laugh?

Using the extraordinary (and newly discovered) transcribed interviews of patients in Richmond Asylum (Dublin) and contemporary medical and lay texts, this paper explores the curiosity and ambivalence with which the laughter of both doctors and patients was viewed and experienced in the physical and conceptual spaces of mental science. Laughter is explored as an expressive, disruptive, and creative phenomenon; a complex constellation of movements often ambiguously situated between reflex or automatic action, emotion, and social practice. This paper unpicks what role the familiarity and recognisability of embodied expression in how we relate to other human beings, asking why laughter is more uncomfortable or unexpected in some places than others.

HSMT Research Seminars MT 2022 – Week 1

Seminars are held on Mondays at 16:00 at the Maison Française d’Oxford in Norham Road.

Seminars in the History of Science, Medicine, and Technology

Dr Janelle Winters (University of Oxford)

A risky business: hydroxychloroquine, global health politics, and the bureaucratization of clinical trials

The clinical trials governance landscape has evolved dramatically since the 1980s. With the wide adoption of the International Conference on Harmonization’s Good Clinical Practices (ICH-GCP) internationally, private actors have arisen to help researchers meet the demands of such “document-based accountability” mechanisms. Contract research organizations, clinical trial database and validation companies, insurance brokers, and methodology consultants have proliferated in a growing global clinical trial marketplace, as they offer the promise of global recruitment and risk mitigation.

In February 2020, just weeks after the first publications on the COVID-19 virus, the Mahidol-Oxford’s Tropical Medicine Research Unit (MORU)’s team discussed re-purposing the widely used anti-malarial chloroquine/hydroxychloroquine for COVID-19. MORU researchers quickly received funding for a large, multi-country randomized controlled trial of chloroquine/hydroxychloroquine as a prophylaxis for COVID-19, the “COPCOV trial”, with results expected by the end of 2020. Yet, the trial quickly faced political fallout from “hydroxy hysteria” in the media and a fraudulent paper published in The Lancet; authorization hurdles related to ICH-GCP and other bureaucratic entanglements; and delays due to various actors’ risk aversion.

This talk draws on Dr. Winters’ ongoing postdoctoral research as the “COPCOV trial historian”. She focuses on a broad research question: What does the COPCOV experience illuminate about clinical trial political influence, “epistemic monopolies”, marketplaces, and global governance in the modern era?

Black History Month 2022

Black History Month 2022 Logo

To mark Black History Month, we would like to highlight some recent publications available at the History of Medicine Library related to the experiences of Black communities. Published last year, Sean Morey Smith and Christopher D. E. Willoughby’s edited volume, Medicine and Healing in the Age of Slavery, was praised for ‘[decentralising] Western medicine in the lives of slaves’, engaging with case studies from across the Americas from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries and emphasising the survival of African medical practices. Also from 2021, Rebekah Lee’s Health, Healing and Illness in African History was recently described as ‘essential and rewarding reading’ for students. It provides a survey of existing scholarship while foregrounding less studied topics, such as mental health in colonial societies. Students wishing to know more about why ‘race’ became a central concept in medical practice within various imperial or transnational contexts can consult recent titles like Markku Hokkanen and Kalle Kananoja’s edited volume, Healers and Empires in Global History (2019), and Suman Seth’s Difference and Disease: Medicine, Race, and the Eighteenth-century British Empire (2018). Other recent publications available at HML have also focused on specific issues, attracting the attention of contemporary health practitioners, scholars, and media. Charles Jones’s The Organ Thieves (2020) analysed the traumatic history of how the heart of a deceased Black man was used in Virginia’s first heart transplant, without the donor’s or his family’s consent, illustrating the realities of 1960s segregation in the American South. Richard D. deShazo’s edited volume, The Racial Divide in American Medicine (2018), further explained past and present racial disparities in American healthcare, while also noting the contributions of Black Mississippi physicians to the Civil Rights Movement. All of these works take a multi-disciplinary approach to histories of medicine and race, which will be of interest to students.

 

Referenced book reviews:

Arriola, Kimberly Jacob, ‘The Organ Thieves: The Shocking Story of the First Heart Transplant in the Segregated South’, American Journal of Transplantation, 21/3 (2021), p. 1339.

Humphreys, Margaret, ‘Medicine and Healing in the Age of Slavery. Edited by Sean Morey Smith and Christopher D. E. Willoughby’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 53/2 (2022), pp. 340-341.

Messac, Luke, ‘Rebekah Lee. Health, Healing, and Illness in African History’, Isis, 113/1 (2022), pp. 116-117.

Ohles, J.A., ‘The Racial divide in American medicine: black physicians and the struggle for justice in health care’, Choice, 56/6 (2019), p. 769

October Opening Hours

The History of Medicine Library will be open Monday-Friday, 2-5pm, with the exception of the 5th-7th of October, when the library will be unstaffed.

To make an appointment, please email historyofmedicine@bodleian.ox.ac.uk

September Opening Hours

The History of Medicine Library will be open Monday-Friday, 2-5pm, with the exception of the 7th, 26th, 28th, and 29th of September, when the library will be unstaffed.

To make an appointment, please email historyofmedicine@bodleian.ox.ac.uk

Summer Opening Hours

During the Long Vacation, the History of Medicine Library will be open 2-5pm on the following days:

July – Thursday 7th, Tuesday 12th, Thursday 14th, Tuesday 19th, Thursday 21st, Tuesday 26th, Thursday 28th.

August – Thursday 18th, Tuesday 23rd, Tuesday 30th.

To make an appointment, please email historyofmedicine@bodleian.ox.ac.uk

June Opening Hours

The History of Medicine Library will be open Monday-Friday, 2-5pm, with the exception of the 2nd, 3rd, 10th, and 20th of June, when the library will be unstaffed.

To make an appointment, please email historyofmedicine@bodleian.ox.ac.uk

April Opening Hours

The History of Medicine Library will be open Monday-Friday, 2-5pm, with the exception of Friday the 8th, and from Wednesday 13th to Wednesday 20th of April inclusive, when the library will be unstaffed.

To make an appointment, please email historyofmedicine@bodleian.ox.ac.uk