Situating Medicine: New Directions Conference, 5-6 June 2014
Centre for the History of Medicine, University of Warwick
Panel: Invisible Technicians, Medical Expertise
and Practice
ABSTRACTS
Dr Catherine Cox, School of History and Archives, University College Dublin
‘J. Connolly, Taken from Nature’?: Patient Portraiture and the Pathological Society
of Dublin, c.1830-1870
From 1830 to 1870, the artist J. Connolly, under the direction of leading Irish surgeons
and physicians, produced over a thousand paintings for the newly established Dublin
Pathological Society, of pathological specimens and of patients treated in Dublin’s House
of Industry Hospitals. His illustrations were displayed in medical schools and museums in
Ireland, and reproduced in treatises and journals internationally. The images were
viewed and discussed alongside detailed clinical records, specimens and models, which
were intended to provide ‘a faithful record of the history, diagnosis and treatment in every
case’. Connolly became part of an army of ‘invisible technicians’, operating alongside
doctors, druggists, and other medical practitioners within the nineteenth-century medical
marketplace.
In contrast to the scholarly engagement with photographic representations of diseases
and patients, medical portraiture and medical museums, research examining this genre
of illustrations is sparse. Yet before photography, artistic representations of the bodies of
‘diseased’ patients were intrinsic to nineteenth-century medical education and, through
display, were pivotal to the exchange of medical ideas. Drawing on this underutilised
collection of drawings, and focusing on Connolly’s illustrations of patients, this paper
explores the role of the ‘non-medical’ artist, not only in the production of these
illustrations, but also in supporting the work of the Dublin Pathological Society which had
as its aim the ‘practical application of the truths of pathology’.
Tania Anne Woloshyn, Centre for the History of Medicine, University of Warwick
Women with ‘Flare’: Snapshots of Light Therapy’s Invisible Operators, c.1895-1945
As an understudied and largely forgotten historic medical treatment, light therapy has no
shortage of dead ends for the scholar wishing to access the material remnants of its past.
Archival holdings are scattered and varied across the UK, full of unattributed and
undated photographs featuring equipment, rooms and terraces, adult and child patients,
and mostly female operators. This talk will discuss the unknown operators of light
therapy: its female nurses and doctors, but also the photographers - technicians in their
own right - standing behind the camera to enable these snapshots of overlooked
contributors to the therapy’s development and reputation.
One photographer in particular, the Austrian émigré Edith Tudor-Hart (1908-1973),
stands out from this ‘invisible,’ female crowd. Quite aside from the simple fact that we
know her name and can attribute specific photographs of light therapy to her (a rarity in
itself), Tudor-Hart is a case study cloaked in layers of invisibility: she produced
photographs of heliotherapy and phototherapy that did not in fact circulate within the
standard light therapy literature; her presence is, like any photographer’s, always erased
in the production of her photographs by virtue of her position behind the lens; and while
taking on various commissions during the 1930s and 1940s in the UK, including
photographing children being exposed to therapeutic light, she acted as Comintern spy.
Her clandestine contribution to the development of light therapy exemplifies the ongoing
dead ends the researcher must face if she is to engage with a thorough examination of
its history, and through Tudor-Hart’s photographs the talk will explore the myriad
numbers of light therapy’s ‘invisible’ women.
Claire Jones, University of Leeds
Over the Counter and On the High Street: Commerce and Condoms in Britain, c. 19201960
By 1960, Britain was home to a profitable industry of a range of mechanical contraceptives,
including condoms, pessaries and douches. Yet, while there has been much historical
debate about the role of contraceptives in early twentieth century demographic transitions,
religious and moral debate and changes in sexual and familial relationships, the significance
of those involved in aiding the commercialisation of these products and making them more
accessible to consumers has largely been overlooked.
This paper thus examines hitherto neglected historical actors in the early twentieth century
development of the trade in mechanical contraceptives in Britain. In particular, it focuses on
the growing importance of the high street chemist, the surgical store shopkeeper and the
vending machine operator in rapidly increasing the visibility of these products on high streets
in towns and cities across the country. It examines the ways in which these historical actors
both drew on and rejected aspects of medical expertise in order to shape the medical
marketplace and to appeal to a wide range of consumers. Despite their scholarly neglect
then, this paper will argue that chemists, shopkeepers and vending machine operators
became crucial for the dissemination of sexual knowledge and practices among married and
non-married couples of all ages, social classes and geographical location and formed a key
focus in early twentieth century British debates over sexual health.