Author:Heather Daquino / Date: December 5, 2009 2:20 PM
Heather Daquino December 2009
Final Project
Analysis of Roy Porter’s Works
Roy Porter, who was a prominent British medical historian, was born on December 31, 1946 and died on March 3, 2002. He wrote or edited over one hundred books and articles. Porter also edited the journals “History of Psychiatry” and “History of Science” for many years. His death in 2002 did not mean the end for Porter because about five of his books were published posthumously. His name continues to live strong in the historical community.
Porter’s early publications were on the history of science. The first was The Making of Geology in 1977. Then he started to change his historical focus a bit and published many books on the history of medicine from 1983-2006. The first was The History of Medicine: Past, Present, and Future and the last was Madmen: A Social History of Madhouses, Mad-Doctors, and Lunatics. The topics of these books ranged from a general history to more specifically madness, disease, quackery, the human body, and death.
Madness is the topic of many books so it appears that with each book he added new information as his personal knowledge increased. For example in 1985 he wrote Anatomy of Madness then A Social History of Madness in 1988 then Madness: A Brief History in 2002 and finally Madmen: A Social History of Madhouses, Mad-
Doctors, and Lunatics. I expect that the last book has the most information on madness that Porter was able to obtain in his lifetime. Many of his books seem to be for a general audience like students. In my history of medicine class we used Porter’s book Blood and Guts as our class text and I found it very easy to read and interesting unlike many other history books that can be dull.
In the 1990’s, Porter wrote books on the Enlightenment and on social history. All of those books discuss Great Britain in the eighteenth century. He continued to write history of medicine books during that time too so it was not a distinct time when those were the only topics of his books. Of all the books Porter wrote, I chose three to analyze. They are The Cambridge Illustrated History of Medicine, Madness: A Brief History, and Flesh in the Age of Reason. These seem to show intellectual development in Porter; he ends on a very high note.
Before I get into the books, my own commitment is Presentist on the Presentist-Historicist continuum.. I agree that the present can change our understanding of the past and in effect the present determines the past. Events need to be studied from every angle to determine what the full story is. That is the best way for historians to accurately depict information; if they are on the historicist side then they want the information told as though they are living in that time. The problem with not acknowledging that we are in the future is that the event depiction will be biased. The future teaches us about why certain things happened that those people would not know at the time, causing emotional responses and one-sided stories. Presentists will tell readers the whole story.
My own theoretical perspectives are empirical, sociological, anthropological, and visual. I think the best writing comes from personal experience because you lived it, you would know better than anyone else what actually happened. You become the primary source and this becomes a good situation because you don’t have to rely on others to find out any information. You do not have to worry about inaccurate details or information getting lost because you experienced it. With history that can be difficult because everything you are writing about happened in the past, sometimes the very distant past. Unless the event happened in your lifetime there is no way you could have personal experience so empiricism is not realistic for many historians, but when possible I think that is the best perspective.
Sociology and anthropology have similarities for me; they both study groups of people. Studying people is very interesting to me especially societies that have changed over time and advancements that were made. There is so much you can learn about a group of people by studying their history. Sociological is the best perspective for me that a historian could write in and is a methodology I see in Porter’s work.
Visual is another one of my perspectives because using pictures allows the reader to really connect with the information and imagine what it would have been like to be there or to see something happening. It makes the text less boring and provides a break to the reader’s eye. It is important however to use visuals in appropriate amounts. Too many pictures will overpower the text and too little may lose the reader’s interest. I feel that no matter what the historian is writing about there is always room for a few images and it will not hurt the book to add some.
Any other methodology can be used, it just depends on their historian and what they like to work with. Cliometrics seems like a very difficult branch of history because it uses so much numerical information. Those statistics can be difficult to obtain sometimes and make research harder to do. I would not write in that perspective because it is such a time commitment and I would really have to want to dedicate my life to it. Psychohistory is another method I like because it takes a look at a specific person to study. That can be fascinating especially when that person is a celebrity or very well-known in the culture (ex. Princess Diana).
Non-Western history is interesting because it takes a look at other cultures and broadens the cultural knowledge of the historian and the readers. It is very important for us to be informed about other countries histories because we can learn from their mistakes and adopt their successes. I would not write or read a lot in the Marxist perspective because I do not enjoy those writings and I always get a negative feeling when I think about people who write in that way. Porter does not use that method which is one of the reasons why I feel more connected with his writings.
Before reading Cambridge, I read its reviews which were very poor most notably from the review in “Bulletin of the History of Medicine”. I also initially thought that Porter wrote the entire book because he is the only author listed, but he actually only wrote four chapters of it. A total of seven authors wrote the ten chapters about different areas of medicine in history. They all follow the path of discussing their topic from Antiquity through the Middle Ages and Renaissance to the nineteenth century. This results in some repetition because each discusses their topic in that time path and the book may have been better depicted as an integrated history.
The main methodology used in this book is visual evidence. For everything Porter discusses, he includes an image to go along with it. In this case, the images really enhance the book and are the main focus. The written text is not as strong as the supporting visuals in effect making the text the supporting aid to the pictures. The images are stunning; there are images of patients taking mercury to cure syphilis, old anatomy drawings of females, images of Christ for the religious side of medicine and countless more.
The text in the book is designed to inform large audiences about the history of medicine. It is the basic information that most medical historians already know. Because I am not familiar with every fact in the field of medicine, I am inclined to believe what I am reading, but based on the reviews again, there are many factual errors. “Bulletin” sites that Porter says Pasteur identified certain types of bacteria, but that it was in fact Alexander Ogston who first identified them. Also that open heart surgery began in 1952 when it really began in 1958. There is no way I would know that, so in this case the reviews are very helpful and it also shows the knowledge of the historians in the American Association for the History of Medicine.
This book is also Sociological in methodology because it studies the changes in time of a society (mainly British) and how those changes impacted the world. The early information goes back as far as ten thousand years and the later information goes all the way to the 1990’s. There is an image of a human skeleton with a dog skeleton from 9600 B.C. representing about how long ago dogs were domesticated. Since dogs were spending more time with humans, this began the spread of pathogens from domesticated animals into human bodies (Cambridge, 19).
The information from the 1990’s talks about wiping out diseases, sequencing the human genome, new drugs, robot surgeries, and transplants. All of these things are still being advanced today. It is a shame Porter is not around to see the continued breakthrough’s in medical history (Cambridge, 342).
The book reminds me of an encyclopedia (of medicine) because of the vast amount of topics discussed in this book, when another book could take one of those topics and focus specifically on that. Porter’s chapters are on disease, medical science, hospital and surgery, and mental illness (a topic he does a great deal of research on in other books).
Porter’s chapter on disease uses many written sources and a handful of them were from religious books like The Baptist Tradition and The Church, leprosy and the plague in Medieval and Early Modern Europe. He intended to show how important of a role religion played in early Europe. His chapter on medical science has a handful of sources including a few from William Harvey who discovered the circulation of blood. That information is vital to medicine because no one knew before exactly how the blood moved around; Harvey is an excellent source for that (Cambridge, 381).
Porter’s third chapter on hospitals and surgery uses written sources about 18th century hospitals like Medical education in 18th century hospitals and The nurse and the patient. His sources don’t seem to match the vast amount of information in the chapter. Most of them discuss the Middle Ages yet surgeries in each century are discussed as far back as ten thousand years. His last chapter on mental illness uses a better variety of sources from the 1700’s-1900’s like Observations on Maniacal Disorders (1792) and Electroshock Therapy (1956). His sources cover the range of mental topics discussed in the chapter (Cambridge, 382).
His theoretical commitments for this book probably involved asking questions like important dates involving advancements in surgery, when people got certain diseases, when treatments for madness were developed, and when new information was discovered (ex. Circulation of blood). He would also need to know statistical information about disease in the time period that he is studying. Because Porter seems to rely more on his images than his facts, I consider this to be the lower level in his process of intellectual development. It would be best recommended as a book to reference for pictures of processes described in other books.
Madness: A Brief History is the second book I chose to analyze because its reviews seemed to show a progression in Porter. I found some similar elements in this book as compared to Cambridge. They both use visuals, are sociological, and appeal to a wide audience in the history of medicine field. Although there are similarities, Madness makes a better use of the methodologies and adds more to how they are used.
Porter breaks the book down into different periods: ancient times-where madness is seen as a spiritual possession, the Middle Ages- when madness was considered an imbalance of the humors, the Enlightenment- when madness was treated as irrationality, and the modern era- when the insane were locked up in asylums and then given drugs and psychiatric treatment. He provides all of this information through a mix of facts, literature, and art.
The three methodologies I have identified are visual, sociological, and postmodernist. Visuals are used in this book to aid in the information being presented. There are about three pictures in each chapter which reinforces the strength of the text; unlike in Cambridge where the pictures overshadow the text and the factual errors. The reviews of this book did not identify any factual errors, but had the one critique that Porter does not clearly define madness, he uses the term broadly when there are many types of mental illnesses. It indirectly puts illnesses like schizophrenia in the same context as less serious ones like obsessive compulsive disorder.
“Bulletin”, which gave a bad review to the previous book, gave this one a very flattering review. That shows me a lot about how the same Journal can love a historian’s work at one time and bash it at another. That is a positive attribute because then you know that Journal is not biased toward anyone they are reviewing.
This book is Sociological because Porter studies the evolution of madness across the centuries, going back to ancient Greece and Rome. He discusses how the society felt about madness at the different time periods. Most of it is also centered again around Great Britain and how its attitude changed toward madness from religion to asylums and frightening treatments like electroshock therapy. He also talks about how society places a stigma on those who are mentally ill. It becomes natural for society to judge these people and translates into these people being considered inferior and disgraceful. Polarizing the mad is not going to help them and often results today and in the past in these people living on the streets in poverty if they do not have family (Madness, 62).
Porter also goes into how different societies regarded the mad. In most places all the way back to Greek and Roman time it was the families responsibility to take care of and control the person. In Japan, this was also a domestic responsibility well into the twentieth century. Some families in Christian Europe did not like that they had to control the mad person so they would often keep them hidden in a basement or locked up in a pigpen. They lived in disgusting conditions; it was not until the eighteenth century that asylums or places of segregation for the mad were set up. Religious impulses led to more movement for doing something with the mad (Madness, 90).
German and Austrian psychiatrists came up with the now pseudoscience called phrenology as a justification for why there are mentally ill people. It involved studying the lumps on a person’s head to determine what personality characteristics they have. A bump in a certain area of the head stood for a certain trait. They applied this to the mentally ill saying that mental diseases are brain diseases. This caused a lot of stir in the scientific community and research into the accuracy of this statement. Although phrenology is not a real science anymore, it led the way for others to take a look at the importance of the brain (Madness, 141).
There is a good use of numerical sources in the book that includes a table on Lincoln Asylum in London from 1829-1838. A non-restraint system was put in place to prove that the patients did not need it. It was extremely effective and led to zero instances of restraint after a ten year period. This was a way to fine tune the practices in the asylums. Porter notes that he used archival materials like hospital and institution records to do his research (Madness, 115).
I also consider this book postmodernist in methodology because Porter takes time to discuss debates dealing with the history of psychiatry since the 1960’s. He does this through eyewitness accounts of those treating the patients, writers, artists, and the mad. Porter mentions that he excludes recent literature in women’s and cultural studies and Freudian perspectives about body history because although they may seem like related sources, they are beyond what he wants to portray in this book. He also mentions journals with further information on psychiatry, “History of Psychiatry” and “Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences”. This book does not contain a bibliography or any pages listing sources referenced which is interesting because all of Porter’s other books do. It does give a list of further readings for each chapter though which could be some sources that Porter used. The books he lists as further reading are directly related to what each chapter is about. There are about thirty books listed for each chapter and based on the titles and authors seem to be very valid sources (Madness, 219).
Chapter one which is an “Introduction to Psychiatry” lists A History of Psychiatry as a good reference. Chapter two titled “Angels and Demons” lists Mind and Madness in Ancient Greece.. Chapter three titled “Madness Rationalized” lists Greek Rational Medicine. Chapter four titled “Fools and Folly” lists Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity. Chapter five titled “Locking up the Mad” lists The Discovery of the Asylum: Social Order in the New Republic. Chapter six titled “The rise of Psychiatry” lists Medicine and the Enlightenment. Chapter seven titled “The Mad” lists A Mad People’s History of Madness. Chapter eight titled “The Century of Psychoanalysis” lists A History of Clinical Psychiatry: The Origin and History of Psychiatric Disorders (Madness, 219-232).