F6. Nineteenth-Century U.S. Medical Education: The Urban Poor, the Janitors, and the Students Chair: Dominic Hall, Harvard University - Jessica Leigh Hester, Johns Hopkins University: Rethinking “Stiff Doctors”: How Nineteenth-Century Dissecting-Room Janitors Worked Toward Mobility
- Christopher Willoughby, University of Nevada: Medical Motley Crews: Anatomy, Monopoly, and the Urban Crowd in the U.S., 1765-1860
- Courtney Thompson, Mississippi State University: The Medical Student Has Two Faces: Interpreting Emotion in Nineteenth-century Medical Student Diaries
This panel explores responses of varied Americans to the institutionalization of medical education in the long nineteenth century. Specifically, we examine three distinct perspectives on medical education: the applicant/student, the non-faculty staff, and the urban poor. Together, these three groups reveal how “medical progress” had different meanings to various classes and ethnic groups in the United States.
For applicants and students, as Courtney Thompson explains, medical schools were not only sites of class production and attainment: young men had to grapple with the emotional work of practicing medicine. Would their work change them? Could they handle the emotional labor? For the janitorial staff, as Jessica Hester unpacks, working in the medical school meant a steady wage in exchange for performing a variety of repulsive acts, including facilitating the procurement and preparation of bodies for dissection. Negotiating this stable but demeaning work was riddled with difficulties—and opportunities for social and economic mobility. Likely, these workers shared some discomfort towards dissection with the urban poor who took to the streets in “motley crews” to protest corpse theft, as described in Christopher Willoughby’s paper. Willoughby recontextualizes an old history of crowd action against medical schools by situating it within a larger context of urban protests against impressment into the British Navy. Unlike the banning of impressment, urban protests led to the legalization and, ultimately, legitimization of dissecting the friendless poor.
Together, these papers reveal that the institutionalization of medical education was a tumultuous and contested process. The proliferation of medical schools dramatically expanded opportunities to join a professional, managerial class, novel for its rapid growth during this period. On the other hand, for janitors, these sites provided stable work that was also degrading, and could strain community ties when these laborers helped steal and dissect the bodies of their neighbors. The poor experienced medical schools as another entity attempting to force labor from their unconsenting bodies, and they responded accordingly. In considering these varied perspectives, we begin to reformulate the nineteenth-century medical school as not simply about student-teacher relationships and pedagogy but as a larger, mushrooming institution, whose maturation carried mixed consequences for Americans of different classes and ethnic backgrounds.
