Thomas Henry Huxley
Feature: Darwin’s spin-doctor, or opportunistic and ruthless self-publicist? – by Keith Williams
Cartoon engraving of Huxley, 1870. Wellcome Library
The acceptance of evolution and the development of Darwinism during the 19th century have been attributed largely to the activities and influence of Thomas Henry Huxley. This view holds that without Huxley’s pugnacious defence and vociferous promotion of Darwin and his view of evolution, On the Origin of Species might well have had no greater an impact or influence than the ideas of previous writers on evolution. This version of events, however, de-emphasises the importance of the roles played by other contemporary Darwin supporters such as the botanist Joseph Hooker, the geologist Charles Lyell and the American botanist Asa Gray, and ignores the considerable benefits that accrued to Huxley directly as a result of his championing of Darwin and Darwinism. Undoubtedly, if Origin made Darwin, then the defence and propagation of Origin made Huxley.
Indeed, that so much of the success of Darwinism in the 19th century has been ascribed to Huxley is testimony to Huxley’s own great ability as a self-publicist, and is a theme which was then reinforced, and embellished, by later biographies of him that were little more than hagiographies. Certainly, by the time that Huxley wrote his autobiography in 1890, he had achieved such a position of power and influence in the scientific community that others contradicted his version of past events at their peril. Such rewriting of history has led to significant obfuscation about Huxley’s part in the acceptance of Darwinism.
Thank you and goodbye
Editor’s farewell – by Sanjoy Bhattacharya
It is ten years since I was invited to take over as editor of Wellcome History. Working on this project has been great fun and instructive – it has allowed me to learn many new things, while also making new friends all over the world. It did, of course, help that the Wellcome Trust’s Medical Humanities and History team have been fully supportive of new ideas and innovations, and that I was backed by an absolutely first-class group of colleagues located within the Trust’s Communications department. However, the time has now come for me to move on to other editorial responsibilities and new challenges.
Wellcome History needs an infusion of fresh ideas that will take it forward in new directions, as it continues to help stoke discussions and debates about medical history, historiography and humanities globally, as well as acting as an effective outlet for engagement that links academic work with that of medical practitioners and the general public. Dr Elizabeth Hurren of the University of Leicester, who has been invited by the Wellcome Trust to take control of Wellcome History’s editorial reins, will provide this leadership in the coming years. I would like to take this opportunity to welcome her and I have no doubt that Wellcome History will flourish in her care. This is also an appropriate moment to convey my heartfelt gratitude to everyone who has worked with me on this publication over the course of a decade. Thank you for all your work, and goodbye.
Sanjoy Bhattacharya is Director of the Centre for Global Health Histories, and Reader in the History of Medicine, at the University of York.
Queen Mary, University of London – by Colin Jones
The Centre for the History of the Emotions, drawing its members from a range of schools and departments at Queen Mary, University of London, was established in 2008. Its founders were all recent appointees at QMUL: Dr Thomas Dixon (who continues to serve as the Centre’s Director), Dr Rhodri Hayward and I from the School of History and Dr Elena Carrera from the School of Languages, Linguistics and Film. Dr Fay Bound Alberti, as Wellcome Trust- funded Senior Research Fellow, also contributed significantly, before recently leaving for a position at the Trust. The Centre’s activities came to focus on the histories of passions and emotions in the contexts of science, medicine, psychiatry, education, drama and performance. Its projects and events in London now attract national and international attention. And its interdisciplinary History of Emotions email list has almost a thousand subscribers (primarily research scholars) worldwide.
By Elena Carrera
Etching of angry man by W Hebert, c.1770, after C Le Brun. Wellcome Library
In The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), Robert Burton refers to anger only as a mental perturbation, endorsing the much-quoted Horatian dictum that it is a short-lived form of madness and Areteus’s view that if it is excessive, it produces insanity. Yet this notion of anger stands in contrast to the much more complex and nuanced views which emerge from medieval and early modern medical works. My work highlights enlightening but understudied references to anger in Galenic medical treatises, surgical handbooks, plague tracts and popular regimens of health circulating in Latin, English, Spanish, French, Catalan, Italian and German between 1250 and 1700.
In these medical sources, anger is discussed as one of the factors of health and disease related to lifestyle, and as a movement that arises from a mental image or cognitive judgement and manifests internally in the body, altering it even before it becomes manifest externally, and before any action is taken. The most standard medical approach was to describe anger, like all other ‘accidents of the soul’, as a movement of natural heat and vital spirit (the subtle vapour in the arterial blood which was thought to mediate between mind and body). As Arnald of Villanova (d. 1311) explains in his influential physiological account of anger (based on Avicenna, and still echoed in Nicolas de la Framboisière, d. 1636), spirit first moves towards the heart, building up the courage to attack, and making the heart heat up and expand and contract very fast. This produces a rush of heat to the surface of the body in preparation for revenge.
From the archive (this feature originally appeared in Wellcome History issue 29, summer 2005) – by Fiona Hutton
In the late 18th century, the knowledge of anatomy was increasingly accepted as the linchpin of medical training, which therefore relied on a supply of cadavers. Large numbers of bodies were required by growing ranks of medical students, as there was no satisfactory method of preserving bodies. The Anatomy Act was introduced in 1832 to remove the taint of body-snatching from the profession. It allowed anatomists to request so-called unclaimed bodies from workhouses.
Burke and Hare suffocating Mrs Docherty for sale to Dr Knox. William Heath, 1829. Wellcome Library
Midwifery in colonial India
From the archive (this feature originally appeared in Wellcome History issue 28 [PDF], spring 2005) – by Dr Supriya Guha
In 1902, the first Midwives Act was passed in England to restrict practice by unlicensed midwives. In 1903 the creation of the Victoria Memorial Scholarships Fund in British India sought to restrict the practice of untrained birth attendants in India and create a category of trained midwives.
From the beginning, the numbers of women trained were very small and the results were not encouraging, with the doctors who undertook to implement the scheme reporting gloomily on the unresponsiveness of their pupils.
The Fund had an extremely limited catchment area, since it deliberately restricted itself to the training of women who were already practising as Dais or traditional birth attendants and offered stipends as inducements for training. The scheme, which deliberately excluded women not from traditional midwife castes, bore the imprint of H H Risley, a member of the committee established to make recommendations for the Fund. Risley, as a Bengal Civilian, had written a comprehensive ethnography of the tribes and castes of greater Bengal, which included detailed accounts of customs of childbirth. As with many scholars, his knowledge was to provide certain idées fixes, chiefly relating to the immutability of caste-related practices. There was also political sensitivity to the question of domestic or ritual customs.
Luigi Sacco, ceroplastic and early smallpox vaccination in Italy
Feature: The use of media in early vaccination campaigns – by Fabio Zampieri, Alberto Zanatta and Maurizio Rippa Bonati
“Tables should be prepared with well coloured drawings or, even better, two arms made by wax, one with pustules of real vaccine, another with spurious and anomalous pustules. Those representations should be multiplied and sent to every chief town.”
Luigi Sacco (1803)
Luigi Sacco (1769–1863), who has been referred to as the ‘Italian Jenner’ and the ‘apostle of vaccination’, was the protagonist of the first vaccination campaign in Northern Italy. In September 1800, two years after the discovery of Jenner’s vaccination, Sacco identified the pus vaccine in a group of cows near Varese; as a result, the government of the Cisalpine Republic appointed Sacco executive chief of vaccination in 1801. Sacco’s vaccine was used all over Italy – and in Eastern Europe and Asia – after this date. Sacco was active until the 1820s, and he headed the vaccination campaign through three different Northern Italian governments between 1801 and 1809: the Cisalpine Republic, the Italian Republic and the Kingdom of Italy.
Rhetorics of pain: a history of pain in Anglo-American worlds from the 18th century to the 1960s
Work in progress – by Louise Hide
Pain is one of the most influential forces in history. Yet we know remarkably little about how people experienced it in the past. Arising out of culturally governed interactions, embodied consciousness, and theories of the body and mind circulating within any particular period, pain is located within the corporeal self but takes on its meaning through personal narratives, cultural understanding and societal classifications. By exploring the complex phenomenon of pain – including its biomedical, neurological, psychological, cognitive and sensory aspects, as well as the interaction between bodily sensation and cultural understanding – we can advance our comprehension of the complex interaction between corporeality and culture.
Irritable bowel syndrome: the history of a modern epidemic
Work in progress – by Val Harrington
Given modern-day sensibilities over ‘one’s bowels’, I had expected that the topic of my Wellcome-funded postdoctoral fellowship, the history of irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), would produce embarrassed silences among friends and colleagues. To the contrary, I’ve found that almost everyone has some story to tell, about either their own experiences or those of someone close to them. And although these stories rarely touch on the more intimate and embarrassing details of symptomatology (e.g. abnormal stool form or frequency, straining or urgency of defecation, abdominal bloating and feelings of incomplete evacuation), almost all contain references to two key elements: pain and stress.
'You are never alone with an irritable bowel'. Linda Smith/The IBS Network
In retrospect, this is perhaps not surprising. The reported incidence of IBS has increased to almost epidemic proportions over recent decades, and it is now estimated to affect up to 10 per cent of the population at any one time, and four in ten people over their lifetime. Despite this, it occupies a highly ambiguous position within medicine. It is one of an ever-increasing number of functional gastrointestinal disorders (so named because symptoms occur in the absence of any clear and identifiable pathology), and although reports of such disorders first appeared in the medical press as early as the 19th century, there are ongoing debates about their nature, aetiology and meaning, particularly regarding the role of psychological factors. Thus, whereas some IBS sufferers complain that psychological models devalue their all-too-physical experiences of crippling pain and abnormal bowel movements, others openly discuss how their symptoms are exacerbated, if not directly triggered, by stress; and whereas some clinicians and researchers direct their attention to the microphysiology of gut motility or endogenous pain modulation, others regard IBS less as a ‘disease’ and more as an expression of psychological or social ‘dis-ease’.
Medical history in Japan: recent developments
By Akihito Suzuki
In the past couple of decades, research into the history of medicine in Japan has greatly expanded, attracting young and promising scholars who have pioneered new questions. As in Britain and other countries, students of the humanities and social sciences are becoming increasingly prominent in the new demography of medical historians. Here, I can introduce only a few of the young students who have just finished or are now completing their PhD thesis.
Their diverse backgrounds, problems, and analytical frameworks promise interesting developments in the field of history of medicine in Japan.
- Portrait of a scientific Shintōist: Akashi Hiroakira (1839–1910) – by Daisuke Okumura
- Traumatic neurosis in Modern Japan – by Masahiro Sato
- Medicalising the mouth: the professional oral care structure in postwar Japan – by Rie Hogetsu
- Public health experts on Yokkaichi asthma – by Tomohisa Sumida
Akihito Suzuki is Professor of History at Keio University and the author of Madness at Home (2006) and Reforming Public Health in Occupied Japan (with Chris Aldous, forthcoming).
