The Legacy of Infant Surgery without Anesthesia: Implications for Today

Tuesday, April 1, 2025, 6-7:15pm (Eastern)

~ Jonathon Erlen Lecture ~

Wendy Patrice Williams (Independent Scholar)

In the United States until 1986, it was standard medical protocol for surgeons to operate on infants and children under two without anesthesia or pain control; instead, paralytic drugs were given to keep them still, though conscious, albeit in an altered state. In 1952 at 26 days old, Wendy Patrice Williams underwent surgery for pyloric stenosis, and her memoir Autobiography of a Sea Creature: Healing the Trauma of Infant Surgery recounts the lifelong struggles she has endured with the preverbal trauma which resulted and also details the ways in which she has found to heal. Over many years as a blogger and as a result of the publication of her book, she has encountered numerous other individuals who have had similar histories and struggles, and in fact, anyone currently age 39 and older may be suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) from infant surgery without anesthesia or pain control, a practice largely unacknowledged in medicine and only beginning to be understood by mental health professionals as a source of preverbal trauma.

In her memoir, Autobiography of a Sea Creature: Healing the Trauma of Infant Surgery (University of California Health Humanities Press, 2023), Wendy Patrice Williams shares her story of healing from PTSD that resulted from a stomach surgery at one-month old. She reveals her discovery that pre-1987, it was standard practice that infants needing surgery were not given anesthesia or pain control. Wendy blogs at Healing Infant Trauma and appears in the film Cutdown: Infant Surgery without Anesthesia, produced by Roey Shmool and free to watch at the link. Wendy earned a BA in English and an MFA in Creative Writing at Mills College and taught English at the College of Alameda and Folsom Lake College. She also studied biological sciences at Barnard College and marine science at the University of Miami. More information is available on her author page.

This lecture will be online only. Attendance is FREE. Check back closer to the date for the Zoom link.

The C.F. Reynolds Medical History Society thanks its dues-paying members and the University of Pittsburgh Center for Bioethics and Health Law for its support of the continuing relevance of medical history in our world.

Black Infant Mortality and the American Roots of a Health Inequality

Tuesday, February 25, 6-7:15pm (Eastern)

~ University of Pittsburgh Department of Medicine Grand Rounds ~

Wangui Muigai, PhD (Brandeis University)

Join Dr. Muigai as she traces the origins of one of the most enduring health disparities in the nation: the racial gap in infant survival. Drawing on a range of archival materials spanning the 19th and 20th centuries, this talk explores the ways Black families, health care practitioners, and government officials have addressed the health and survival of Black mothers and their babies. The talk will conclude by reflecting on the legacy of these local and nationwide efforts in the ongoing struggle to improve birth equity.

At noon that day, Professor Muigai will deliver Grand Rounds for the University of Pittsburgh Department of Medicine, a talk entitled "Race-Concordant Care: Historical Insights and Ethical Challenges." For more information, see their website.

A historian of medicine and public health, Dr. Muigai is an assistant professor at Brandeis University. Her research examines the racial, social, and ethical dimensions of health and health care in America across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She is a Class of 2025 Fellow in the Greenwall Foundation’s Faculty Scholars Program in Bioethics and former History Fellow at the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. Currently she is completing a book-length history of Black infant mortality, forthcoming with Harvard University Press, and researching African American views on trust in health care. She earned her Ph.D. from Princeton University and A.B. from Harvard University.

This lecture will be online only. Attendance is FREE. Click here for the Zoom link. 

The C.F. Reynolds Medical History Society thanks its dues-paying members and the University of Pittsburgh Center for Bioethics and Health Law for its support of the continuing relevance of medical history in our world.

History of Engineering Public Health

Tuesday, January 21, 2024, 6-7:15pm (Eastern)

~ University of Pittsburgh School of Public Health Lecture ~

Jennifer Rogers, MS (Southern Association for the History of Medicine and Science)

How has public health been engineered to make modern cities more livable, and why is sanitary engineering no longer something one majors in? Infrastructure such as sewer systems, water filtration, waste removal, and pest control remain under-appreciated bulwarks of health today, but how we train experts in them has changed. Drawing from the Georgia Tech archives, among others, this talk will explore how public health departments, college departments, professional societies, and city planning initiatives all had a part in engineering American public health.

Image credit: Getty

Jennifer Rogers is the Most Recent President of the Southern Association for the History of Medicine and Science (SAHMS). She is a historian of medicine, technology, and science. Her degrees are a BS in the History, Technology, and Society and an MS in the History and Sociology of Technology and Science from the Georgia Institute of Technology. A lifelong educator, researcher, and public historian, Rogers joined the board of SAHMS in 2014, serving as webmaster, registration coordinator, vice president, and two terms as president.

The lecture recording can be found here. The C.F. Reynolds Medical History Society thanks its dues-paying members and the University of Pittsburgh Center for Bioethics and Health Law for its support of the continuing relevance of medical history in our world.

Image credit: Jennifer Rogers, Georgia Tech Archives

Commemorating the 100th Anniversary of the 1st Exchange Transfusion for Icterus Gravis Neonatorum

The C.F. Reynolds Medical History Society has invited Dr. Jon F. Watchko, MD, Professor Emeritus in the Division of Newborn Medicine in the Department of Pediatrics at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine to present a lecture commemorating the 100th anniversary of the first exchange transfusion for severe neonatal jaundice. He will cover the groundbreaking work of Alfred P. Hart and L. Bruce Robertson at The Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto.

Mark your calendars for Tuesday, November 19, 2024, from 7-8pm, via Zoom. Zoom link:  https://ccac.zoom.us/j/95357525424?pwd=cI726bvrv5QgdxSisD9Yfsho9vl9pf.1

Exchange transfusion (ET) is a procedure that couples alternating blood removal (exsanguination) with blood infusion (transfusion) to accomplish its beneficial effect. ET has been a mainstay of treating hazardous neonatal hyperbilirubinemia (severe jaundice) for a 100 years dating back to Alfred P. Hart’s seminal use of the procedure in a newborn with familial icterus gravis neonatorum at the Hospital for Sick Children Toronto in 1924. Its novel application by Hart at that time and at the Hospital for Sick Children was no accident. The history of the development of ET as a viable treatment intervention and its original application to neonatal hyperbilirubinemia by Hart in 1924 is commemorated in this C.F. Reynolds Medical History Society presentation.

Dr. Watchko has a keen interest in the pathobiology of bilirubin-induced brain injury and clinical strategies to prevent kernicterus. His early work focused on unconjugated bilirubin brain uptake and clearance, determination of in vivo neurotoxic central nervous system bilirubin thresholds in the Gunn rat model of acute bilirubin encephalopathy (ABE) and in human neonates with kernicterus, pharmacologic neuroprotection against ABE, and bilirubin-induced cerebellar hypoplasia. More recently he has conducted clinical studies on improving the identification of infants at risk for significant hyperbilirubinemia and bilirubin neurotoxicity. Dr. Watchko is recognized as a world authority on neonatal jaundice, authored more than 200 academic papers, chapters and reviews, and co-edited two books, Neonatal Jaundice (2000) and Care of the Jaundiced Neonate (2012). He serves on the American Academy of Pediatrics National Hyperbilirubinemia Clinical Practice Subcommittee and is a member of the Society for Pediatric Research, the American Pediatric Society, and the Perinatal Research Society.

Image credit: Exchange Transfusion ~ early 1950s. Peter Dunn. Arch Dis Child 1993;69:95-96.

The C.F. Reynolds Medical History Society thanks its dues-paying members and the University of Pittsburgh Center for Bioethics and Health Law for its support of the continuing relevance of medical history in our world.

Donora: A Look Back at the Worst Air Pollution Disaster in US History

Tuesday, November 12, 2024, 6-7:15pm (Eastern)

~ Sylvan Stool Lecture ~

Andy McPhee, RN (Independent Scholar)

Mortician Rudolph Schwerha had already picked up two bodies in the dense fog. When he finally returned to the funeral home he found his wife, Helen, waiting at the door. “Before she spoke,” recalled Schwerha, “I knew what she would say. I thought, Oh, my God—another! I knew it by her face. And after that came another. Then another. There seemed to be no end. By ten o’clock in the morning, I had nine bodies waiting here.”

What was happening? “We didn’t know. I thought probably the fog was the reason; it had the smell of poison. But we didn’t know.”

Schwerha’s gut sense proved sadly accurate. A heavy fog had descended over Donora, a small steel and zinc mill town along the Monongahela River about 30 miles south of Pittsburgh. It was Halloween weekend in 1948, and before the weekend had ended 21 people would perish from the toxins concentrated in the fog, toxins that came mostly from the zinc mill at the north end of town. It was the worst air pollution disaster in US history, and it would prompt the legislation we know today as the Clean Air Act.

Join author Andy McPhee for a presentation about the town, its mills, and the smog that literally changed the quality of our air. Andy McPhee is a retired registered nurse and educational healthcare publisher, as well as the author of six books, most recently Donora Death Fog: Clean Air and the Tragedy of a Pennsylvania Mill Town, published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 2023. The book provides the most complete and comprehensive accounting of the smog ever written. He is working on a book tentatively titled Bloodletting, Body Snatching, and the Doctors' Riot of 1788. McPhee lives in Saint Petersburg, Florida, with his wife and two dogs.

This lecture was recorded. You can find the recording at this link; the lecture proper starts at 15:45 (15 minutes and 45 seconds).

The C.F. Reynolds Medical History Society thanks its dues-paying members and the University of Pittsburgh Center for Bioethics and Health Law for its support of the continuing relevance of medical history in our world.

Medicine’s Culture Brokers: The History of Miami and the Challenge of Diversity in Health Care

Tuesday, September 24, 2024, 6-7:15pm (Eastern)

~ Milton Meyer Michaels Lecture & Hispanic Heritage Month ~

Catherine Mas, PhD (Assistant Professor of History, Florida International University)

After the 1959 Cuban Revolution, hundreds of thousands of Cuban refugees came to Miami. With this influx, the city's health care system was overwhelmed not just by the number of patients but also by the differences in culture. Mainstream medicine was often inaccessible or inadequate to Miami's growing community of Latin American and Caribbean immigrants. Instead, many sought care from alternative, often unlicensed health practitioners. This talk discusses the history of how an exceptionally diverse medical scene would catch the attention of medical social scientists who made Miami's multiethnic population into a laboratory for cross-cultural care and "global health."

Catherine Mas is a historian of science, medicine, and society, whose research and teaching focus on modern American history in transnational context. Her recent book, Culture in the Clinic: Miami and the Making of Modern Medicine, examines the history of health and healing in Miami alongside the rise of medical anthropology. Delving into a period of rapid social and demographic change, she shows how Latinx immigrants transformed American healthcare, as the healthcare system learned to manage a racially and ethnically diverse population.

This lecture will be online only. Attendance is FREE. Zoom link: https://ccac.zoom.us/j/91318349535?pwd=zx3PJ8go1ukPKwyG3bifa65vdYPqpX.1

The C.F. Reynolds Medical History Society thanks its dues-paying members and the University of Pittsburgh Center for Bioethics and Health Law for its support of the continuing relevance of medical history in our world.

Announcing the 41st Lecture Series

The C.F. Reynolds Medical History Society announces its 41st lecture season for the academic year 2024-2025. All lectures are free and open to the public via Zoom. They take place on Tuesday evenings from 6-7:15pm Eastern. Watch this space for the links, or join our email list.

September 24 ~ “Medicine’s Culture Brokers: The History of Miami and the Challenge of Diversity in Health Care” ~ Catherine Mas ~ Milton Meyer Michaels Lecture & Hispanic Heritage Month

A life-long Pittsburgher, Dr. Michaels (1927-2022) practiced Hematology and Internal Medicine and served as President of the Society.

November 12 ~ “Donora: A Look Back at the Worst Air Pollution Disaster in US History" ~ Andy McPhee ~ Sylvan Stool Lecture

Dr. Stool (1925-2004) was a beloved pediatric otolaryngologist at the University of Pittsburgh and Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh.

January 21~ University of Pittsburgh School of Public Health Lecture ~ TBA

February 25 ~ "Race-Concordant Care: Historical Insights and Ethical Challenges" ~ Wangui Muigai ~ University of Pittsburgh Department of Medicine Lecture 

And in the evening: "Black Infant Mortality and the American Roots of a Health Inequality"

April 1 ~ “The Legacy of Infant Surgery without Anesthesia: Implications for Today” ~ Wendy Patrice Williams ~ Jonathon Erlen Lecture

Dr. Erlen (1946-2022) was the history of medicine librarian at the University of Pittsburgh for 35 years, until his retirement in 2019. He was a devoted teacher in the undergraduate, graduate, and health professions schools, winning the School of Medicine Curriculum Committee’s Excellence in Education Award in 2004 for his month-long elective in medical history. He was an active member of the American Association of the History of Medicine, the American Osler Society, and the Southern Association of the History of Medicine and Science (SAHMS). And for decades John was the linchpin of the Reynolds Society as its secretary, treasurer, and (pre-COVID) host extraordinaire. The fact that he is irreplaceable is evidenced by the fact that the two of us (Kristen and Adam) barely fill his shoes. In particular, we remember John as a mentor to students and to up-and-coming scholars such as ourselves, introducing us to the authors of our favorite books and reviewing our papers before we presented them. If you never received an email with a list of recent dissertations that he thought you would find interesting, then you missed out on a unique gesture of friendship. 

The C.F. Reynolds Medical History Society thanks its dues-paying members and the University of Pittsburgh Center for Bioethics and Health Law for its support of the continuing relevance of medical history in our world.