2 Nov 2019
Until the post-war period, health care policy played a minor role in presidential politics. Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s plans for national health insurance remained incomplete when he died in office in 1945, and every subsequent president from Harry Truman to Donald Trump has wrestled with the unfinished business of health care reform. Lyndon B. Johnson passed […]
22 Oct 2019
Pillbox (Edward William John Hopley), Quack: An Ignorant Pretender, [1838], Courtesy of the National Library of Medicine Why do we call a person who promotes fradulent or harmful medicine under the guise of medical expertise a “quack”? The term comes from the 17th century Middle Dutch kwaksalver: a combination of kwaken (to brag, boast, or croak) […]
2 Oct 2019
The threat cholera posed was not limited to the population’s health, but extended into political and social concerns of the era. When cholera arrived via Britain’s harbors and waterways in 1832, the disease swept across a nation agitated by political unrest and a deeply divided class system. The working population, disenfranchised and without democratic representation, […]
7 Sep 2019
This post will serve as a primer for a series of posts about a 19th-century disease that thrilled and terrified the globe: Cholera. Cholera is an acute bacterial infection of the small intestine that is spread through the fecal-oral route of transmission. In order to contract the disease, one must consume food or water contaminated […]
1 Sep 2019
There are many punchlines to which cartoonists would return time and again when addressing the topic of medicine, but “doctors differ” was without doubt the most popular. We see an early version of it in the background of the penultimate entry in William Hogarth’s series Harlot’s Progress where the famous patent medicine huckster of Covent […]
19 Aug 2019
James Gillray was a contemporary of Thomas Rowlandson, and he could be every bit as biting in his representations of medicine. For example, in 1801 he satirized the craze from the US to Britain for Perkin’s Tractors, a device whose “inventor,” Elisha Perkins, claimed it cured all manner of disease through electric force. Gillray skewers […]
10 Aug 2019
Where Hogarth brought a fierce skepticism to the topic of English medicine of his time, Thomas Rowlandson was positively brutal in his caricatures of the profession. In this early caricature, for example, Rowlandson represents a gaggle of surgeons pinning a man down to amputate what appears to be a perfectly healthy leg. The terror in […]
7 Aug 2019
William Hogarth was more intimate with the profession of medicine than many other early cartoonist. In 1734, Hogarth, upon hearing the St. Bartholomew’s Hospital’s board of governors intended to hire an Italian painter to produce a mural, offered his services gratis. As a result, Hogarth secured his election to the same board of governors. While […]
27 Nov 2019
Cholera: A Panoply of Useless Remedies
Without a thorough understanding of how the disease worked, treating cholera and preventing its spread proved extremely difficult. Treatments were ineffective at best or actively harmful at their worst. If the cholera didn’t kill you, then a visit to the doctor just might. Still, with no better remedies at their disposal, desperate people were driven […]
More