Monday, March 4, 2024

Inaugural Michaels Lecture: Gender, Race, and Science in Med School Design

 “Forming the Modern Physician: Gender, Race, and Science
in Early Twentieth-Century Medical School Design”
April 2, 2024 ~ Inaugural Michaels Lecture ~
Katherine L. Carroll, PhD (Independent Scholar)

Architectural historian Dr. Carroll has presented widely on medical school design and the intertwined ways in which the built environment influences scientific culture, as well as the ways in which cultural and social priorities affect building choices. As the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine celebrates the one-year anniversary of the opening of the new West Wing of Scaife Hall, tune in to hear thoughtful commentary about how past schools have made other choices.

This will be the first annual Milton Meyer Michaels lecture. A life-long Pittsburgher, Dr. Michaels (1927-2022) practiced Hematology and Internal Medicine for over five decades. He supported the C.F. Reynolds Medical History Society for many years, having also served as its President. We thank the generosity of his wife, Lois Glazer Michaels, and their children, Eric, Marian, and Jacob, for endowing this speakership.


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


Image: University of Pittsburgh School of Dentistry shortly after construction (1912). University of Pittsburgh Archives photograph collection, 1971-2006, item 31735070042936.

Image description: A sepia-toned photograph depicts a long, rectangular building with two stories of tall plain windows and one story of short windows. There is decorative stone work around the entrance portal and a small facade on the roof.

Thursday, February 29, 2024

Virulent: The Vaccine War

Tuesday, April 9, 2024, from 7-9pm
Public Health Building, Room A115


Join us for our last event of the year: a viewing of the documentary Virulent: The Vaccine WarIt's the newest documentary from Laura Davis (Producer) & Tjardus Greidanus (Director/ Editor/ Cinematographer), the makers of Burden of Genius about organ transplant pioneer Dr. Thomas Starzl. The cost is free! Email us at cfreynoldsmhs@gmail.com for the Zoom link. The film is 1.5 hours long. If you can, stay afterwards for a Q&A session with the filmmakers and Peter Salk, son of Jonas Salk and himself an expert on vaccines.

Thursday, February 1, 2024

“Accompanying History: The Journey to Undocumented Physicians”

February 20, 2024, 6-7:15pm Eastern Time
~ Inaugural John Erlen Lecture ~
Mark G. Kuczewski, PhD, HEC-C
(Loyola University Chicago)

Medical history and bioethics are siblings under the rubric of “health humanities.” For this lecture, Dr. Kuczewski will explore the history of undocumented healers in the United States. He has been engaged in bedside clinical ethics issues for more than 25 years. For the last decade, he has also been an articulate spokesperson for the just and equitable treatment of immigrant patients, medical students, and clinicians.  At noon, Dr. Kuczewski will present a Grand Rounds entitled “Caring for Immigrant Patients: Clinical and Institutional Challenges” to the University of Pittsburgh Department of Medicine. 

All Reynolds Society lectures are free and open to the public. This is the link to watch the recording of the evening lecture. You can check back here to see if the Grand Rounds recording has been posted.

Image description: We see the back of a young woman with brown skin and a long dark brown braid pulled forward over her shoulder. Colorful flowers and the words "I am one of those people Mexico sent" in white are painted on her bright red graduation mortar board with tassel. Credit: Bonnie Arbittier / San Antonio Report (2017)

Thursday, November 30, 2023

"Could a situation be more ghastly?": Doctors, Disinfectants, and the Dead After the Johnstown Flood of 1889

Tuesday, January 23, 2024, 6-7:15pm Eastern
~ University of Pittsburgh School of Public Health Lecture ~
Vicki Daniel, PhD (Case Western)

On May 31, 1889, the South Fork Dam located in Western Pennsylvania’s Conemaugh Valley failed catastrophically, sending a torrent of water toward the city of Johnstown and killing approximately 2,200 people. In the wake of the flood, officials from the Pennsylvania Board of Health immediately labeled the decomposing human bodies scattered throughout the valley as a massive health threat and established new protocols for protecting the public’s health. At the same time, survivors grieved the dead as beloved friends and neighbors who deserved proper burial and commemoration. For this reason, the Johnstown Flood represents a moment of conflict between the social and medical conceptualizations of the dead in the era of emerging public health paradigms. In this talk, I will examine the roots of this conflict and analyze how local leaders and state health officials in Johnstown tried to balance between the biological and social imperatives of mass fatality events. I will show how officials deployed public health measures that reflected a compromise between viewing the dead as dangerous material and seeing them as human remains.


Click here to watch the recording of the lecture. A brief business meeting took place before the lecture with reports from the Secretary and Treasurer as well as an election; see the Contact Us page for the current officers.

Image: Anonymous depiction of the flood water surging over the stone railway bridge, which is in the center. Behind it is a pile of burning buildings and trees with orange-yellow flames and gray smoke. There are people rushing about and bodies in the water and on the ground.

Tuesday, November 14, 2023

Putting Science to Work: Women Healers and the Pursuit of Medical Knowledge in Early Pennsylvania

November 14, 2023, 6-7:15pm Eastern Time
~ Sylvan E. Stool Memorial Lecture ~
Susan H. Brandt, PhD (University of Colorado, Colorado Springs) 


The history of women physicians in the United States often begins with the 1850 founding of the Women’s Medical College in Philadelphia. However, mid-19th-century women physicians merely continued the legacies of other women healers from earlier centuries. In this talk based on her book, Women Healers: Gender, Authority, and Medicine in Early Philadelphia (2022), Susan Brandt argues that women not only were essential health care providers but also were on the frontlines of scientific knowledge production.

Dr. Sylvan Stool was a beloved pediatric ENT surgeon at the University of Pittsburgh. All Reynolds Society lectures are free and open to the public. You can find the recording of the lecture here.

Image description: The book cover of Women Healers: Gender, Authority, and Medicine in Early Philadelphia by Susan H. Brandt shows an artfully arranged collection of 18th-century medical artifacts, books, and plants.

Saturday, October 28, 2023

Donora: Clean air started here

When you drive across the Donora-Monessen Bridge, you're greeted by a sign that reads, "Next to yours, the best town in the USA." Although the area has suffered both during the 5 decades there was a U.S. Steel plant along the horseshoe bend in the Monongahela River, and in the 7 decades since then, Donorans are incredibly proud of their hometown, which birthed not only Stan "The Man" Musial but both Ken Griffey, Sr., and Jr. The C.F. Reynolds Medical History Society was there to mark the 75th anniversary of a freak weather event that smothered the valley with the smoke from domestic fires, motor vehicles, trains, as well as industrial toxins from the wire factory and especially the zinc smelter. It became a rallying cry for the environmental movement in the middle of the 20th century.

We were treated to a private lecture by the Donora Historical Society's historian, Brian Charlton, who can talk extensively and extemporaneously about the area.


Above left: "Donora smog" painted into Halloween decorations on an empty storefront window.
Above right: The high school teams are the Donora Dragons.
Below: "After many silent springs, a fatal fall--the Donora Smog" and its victims.


highly recommend this 4-minute video, "A Town Called Donora: A Digital Story." It includes a dramatic introduction as well as a reading of Guenter Kunert's poem "Song of a Small Town" ("Lied von einer kleinen Stadt (Fuer eine Orgel)") published in East Berlin in 1950 after reading this Life magazine article with several black and white photographs.


The green oxygen canister below was used to deliver oxygen to some of the hundreds of residents who sickened on the carbon monoxide, ozone, nitric oxide and nitrogen dioxide, particulate matter, sulfur dioxide and trioxide, volatile organic compounds, and the components of acid rain (nitric acid and sulfuric acid) over the 5 days.


If you would like to learn more about the smog event, you can purchase Andy McPhee's book, Donora Death Fog: Clean Air and the Tragedy of a Pennsylvania Mill Town (2022), the first book-length treatment of the event. McPhee is a nurse and an accomplished writer and will be speaking to the Society during the 2024-2025 lecture season.


We admired the many exhibits of the museum before enjoying lunch at a local diner. We hope you'll join us on our next day trip!


Wednesday, September 6, 2023

The Child Amputee in Post-World War II America


September 26, 2023, 6-7:15pm Eastern Time
~ Annual Ravitch Lecture ~
Lisa Joy Pruitt, PhD (Middle Tennessee State University)

Dr. Lisa Joy Pruitt, PhD (Middle Tennessee University), will give the Annual Ravitch Lecture to kick off the C.F. Reynolds Medical History Society's 40th lecture season. Before 1945, the standard of care for child amputees and/or those with congenital limb differences was to delay treatment and rehabilitation when possible or otherwise to cope with surgical procedures and prosthetic limbs designed for adults. After 1945, practitioners coordinated their efforts, revolutionized the rehabilitation of child amputees, and profoundly influenced the development of pediatric prosthetics.

A recording of this free public online talk can be found by clicking here.



Image description: The first panel of the comic strip reads, "Do Not." In the second panel, a man with light skin and short black hair wearing hospital pajamas lies on a bed with his left leg bent over the edge; his left foot has been amputated. The text reads "...hang stump over bed." In the third panel a similar man is reading a newspaper. The text reads, "...sit in wheelchair with stump flexed." The image comes from A.B. Wilson, Jr., "Limb Prosthetics Today," Artificial Limbs 7 (1963): 1-42, page 13.