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Historical Thinking and Teaching

History teaching has its own history, and this week’s readings on the evolution of teaching history is even more important today. History teaching is in a precarious position as some states are trying to censor the teaching of history as it pertains to slavery and harkens back to a memory type of history teaching associated with nationalism. Key concepts for historical thinking include an in-depth analysis of the range of primary sources around the event, or person, or historical period.

“Stretch our imagination and embrace ideas that are an anathema.” [1] This is a crucial concept about learning how to analyze primary sources within their context. Teaching how to read primary sources and analyze primary sources, like journalism and media, within the context of the time is essential. This type of historical thinking does, at times, feel like science, as proposed by Ranke. [2]Reviewing as many primary sources as possible and not reviewing any secondary sources for twentieth-century events is somewhat impossible and untenable. Historical thinking can be directed depending on the level of the student. What works for a middle school student will not necessarily be the same as a college student. Teaching historical thinking can be directed by research questions. [3] This technique can be tailored and helps the student.

Three questions I have about historical thinking and teaching include: How do I develop historical empathy for the side I don’t agree with? Like the anti-suffragist movements by women? I am not sure how to answer that question, but with the research of the primary sources of the period, I hope to figure it out and present their side from the primary sources The second question is an easier one, how do we not return to the memory tradition in history teaching? The disciplinary practice of researching multiple primary sources and critical research questions to students helps teach how to think historically rather than the memory tradition. The third question is how to help people question the narratives already written and get excited or interested in topics that have been reviewed or known in USA history?  Digital humanities can be a way to add a new way to teach in a topic that people have a basis of knowledge like the declaration of independence or the abolition of slavery.

[1] Sam Wineburg. “Thinking about Historical Thinking.” Interview.

[2] Lévesque, Stéphane. Thinking Historically. 35. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008

[3] Lévesque, Stéphane. Thinking Historically. Chapter 6. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008

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Introductions for 689 Digital Humanities

  • who you are;
  • key skills and interests, including questions from prior course(s) in the certificate program;
  • learning goals for this course;
  • professional role you have/hope to have related to teaching and learning history and how this course can help; and
  • a photograph of yourself (for blog post)
At NAMH Asking for the Vote! _upscale

I am a second career-seeking student in applied history. My concentration focus is USA history before 1877. I have interests in indigenous history, the impact of colonization, and military conflict. Over the last year, I have expanded into medical history, and my digital projects have been about medical history. I am excited about this class as it is about teaching history. I want to develop a digital project on something that appeals to high school or AP USA History students. My last project was very specialized, and since this is a short semester of nine weeks, I may have to be limited to an expansion of some information I learned in that project about women’s suffrage. After getting this degree, the professional role that I hope is to have anything related to history. I am open to almost any career I can find, so I hope this helps expand my teaching knowledge. Questions I have from prior courses are about network word analysis. Is this a common for these projects? And are they helpful for teaching or just primary source analysis in a different way? My skills, I would say what I have learned so far, are Omeka, Audacity, and Davinci Video Editing and sound mixing. Definitely, feel like I need to go back and do some refresher on making maps and some of the intro skills like with Kepler, as I like interactive maps and would like to include it as a learning goal for this class

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FINAL PROJECT URL

The Forgotten Branch of Medicine in the Gilded Age · Forgotten Eclectic Medicine of the Gilded Age (shumanmss.com)

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Reflection on final project for Spring 2022

The journey to this final project was a circuitous one. It was a road trip drive to see family I had not seen in years due to Covid. My stay involved a Victorian decorated B and B in a small town, St. Paris, Ohio. In this house were old medical textbooks in one of the rooms. The titles of authors I had never heard of in medicine. I was confused even further when I opened the book, and the words eclectic medical institute stood out underneath the author. What was eclectic medicine? I wanted to answer that question for myself due to my interest in medical history.

 I quickly realized after polling people that interest in what was eclectic medicine was mine alone. It would not interest the public, nor would a dry textual website about their medical textbooks and how they were different.  As an allopath and as a historian, I was asked the tricky question that I am still trying to answer, how do you separate your knowledge and interests as a doctor from the primary source analysis and writing of a historian? I still working on that process. I figure due to Covid, people are interested in medical history more than normal right now so why not do a medical history website?  The other interest I could draw on was medicinal plants and the art of old botany texts, with a tie in to Lloyd Library. Eclectic medicine believed in plants as medicine. Medicinal and herbal plants could draw an audience of women and men who like to garden. The history of plants used by Native Americans was incorporated by homeopaths and eclectics alike. While I did not get to develop this train of historical inquiry for eclectic medicine fully, I asked women and men that were part of this initial audience.

The audience that I interviewed did change that initial focus away from plants and more to the history of medicine for the time. The Gilded Age is a current show on HBO and tying that in with the peak of the Eclectic Medical Institute felt like a way to appeal to the audience of historical fiction.  My audience was also curious about the cost. How much did treatment cost? Were eclectic doctors similar to alternative herbalists of today? Cash only and expensive usually? This led me to ask the Lloyd Library for later cases of Dr. John King and how much he charged. I narrowed the focus to just female cases as I knew he was also a professor of obstetrics and gynecology for many years. Once I got the images, this helped the website planning even more. Cases about female nervousness and chronic self-abuse were amusing, but how do I put them in historical context?

              The advice given by my professor was to ask three nonmedical people what they would like to see on the internet; well, the short answer was almost always sex. The website then became more geared toward the treatment of women and the sexual morals of the time.  One of my classmates also asked about hysteria as a common female diagnosis of the time and how did they treat hysteria? The eclectic physicians believed it was due to a malposition of the uterus like regular physicians. There is a significant misconception about people thinking that hysteria was due to the beliefs of a wandering uterus, but by the gilded age, all physicians knew human anatomy. There are 10 to 15 percent of women who have a standard variant of the uterus tilted backward instead of forward. The uterus can also change positions due to tumors or cancer. To fix the uterus back to its “correct” position, eclectic physicians would push the uterus up from the vagina, and they learned this from traditional allopathic physicians. Hysteria may have been due to epilepsy, anxiety, or other medical disorders, but whatever the underlying psychological or medical condition, hysteria was definitely not caused by a uterus tilted backward!  I included a page on hysteria due to the interest and a picture from an allopathic physician textbook showing to put the uterus back in place. Complete quackery.

              The cost for these treatments was expensive in today’s dollars. Using an inflation calculator, the costs were substantial in the cases that discussed cost. Dr. King was a prominent physician and people paid a lot of money and traveled to him for treatment as there were women from multiple locations around Cincinnati. I learned that there were eclectic physicians all over the country, and they developed their own eclectic medical associations within states and nationally, like the American Medical Association of today. This was intentional to fight for recognition as a legitimate type of medical care.

              Overall, the experience was humbling over the semester as my website design skills with classic Omeka needed some work. My time constraints also limited me to a website that leaned toward entertainment and the history of quack medicine and sexuality in the Gilded Age. As a historian, I want to learn more about the female graduates as there were more women who graduated from the Eclectic Medical Institute than from traditional medical schools.   Learning how to tailor the website due to audience input was the most helpful part of the process and evaluation of my own work and others helped me improve my reviewing skills.

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Assignments Graduate Work

You will write a blog post that explains the argument of your final project and the intellectual and practical justifications for the choices you made in creating it. How will you evaluate your work?

When I started this project, I was initially focused on learning who the eclectic medical doctors were. I stumbled upon their textbooks, which is another story to tell, but needless to say, I opened them, and inside were pictures that looked like any other medical textbook from the late 1800s. I googled eclectic medicine and went to the Wikipedia page as anyone else would do. The men who wrote the most texts, Dr. John King and Dr. John Scudder, were two prominent physicians of the largest medical school, the Eclectic Medical Institute in Cincinnati. Dr. John King wrote the over 1400-page American Eclectic Dispensatory detailing how to make different plant-based compounds for diseases. These physicians prided themselves on being experimenters and following science to help bring people back to health. The history of medicine as being behind the other sciences is a very true story. People do not realize that the ancestors of physicians today were still taking lancets to make patients bleed and giving them mercury and poisonous compounds even into the gilded age. The eclectic physicians were not homeopaths, but plant-based medicines from the Americas were used in complex formulas similar to homeopathic medicine. My argument for my final project was to shed light on who they were, examples of their treatments, and cost. The practical justification for limiting to a few female cases was strictly the access to what I had received from the Lloyd Library Archives. I wanted to know more about Dr. John King since he was a professor in obstetrics and gynecology for thirty years and had asked the archivist if I could have some pictures of a few interesting female cases later in his career that also showed cost. With those parameters, I built the website around those three cases to teach who the eclectic medical doctors were and how they treated women. My final argument was while they claimed to be scientists, Dr. King did not escape the moral standards of the time. Female symptoms were treated as nervousness (when a woman could not even walk), a widow who now masturbated needed treatments to counteract sexual feelings. A complex case with symptoms similar to a coronavirus was treated for over three months with various complicated regimens requiring her to drink a wineglass full of mixtures and pills. Of course, the patient gave it up.
Interestingly, Dr. King would have taught many female medical students compared to other medical schools of the time. Dr. Haller lists these graduates in his work and many women went but did not necessarily graduate. The first female physician from the institute subscribed to the same eclectic beliefs as did many regular medical doctors of the gilded age, who taught that masturbation would lead to insanity and even death. As a historian, visitor traffic will be essential to ongoing interest and success in evaluating my work. I think the website will appeal to people interested in quack medical history, but I may not get much interest from the general public. It is a very specialized subject with a significant amount of text, plus the background knowledge of medicine of the 19th century will make it less accessible to the general public. Medical historians who know how slow medical science was to catch up to the rest of science will understand the website.
As far as website design, the omeka foundation theme has a better mobile experience than the other classic templates. It has some issues on iPhones but not on android. The other problem is getting a secure web address, and I may need to change the attribution on the site, so people do not take the images without attribution to the Lloyd Library. Without the help of the archivist, the website’s argument and the story would not have come to fruition. When I had polled non-medical audience members, the history of female sexuality and hysteria helped change this website and argument. The other evaluation of my work is the education piece. Why did these people matter? What is the answer to the So What? The women of the 19th century who paid a significant amount of money for these medical treatments show that they were not unlike anyone of today. Hope for a cure for a medical illness and will try complex herbal therapies to achieve health is no different than modern medicine. Eclectic physicians recommended exercise, walking, or hiking as the best way for women to stay healthy, and if health faltered, only then would intervene. These physicians were part of the history of alternative medicine that has not gotten much attention from historians. Dr. John Haller is the exception, and I hope getting this information onto a website will drive more interest into this branch of medicine that was in existence for almost one hundred years.

John S. Haller, Jr. | History | SIU

Welcome to the Lloyd – Lloyd Library

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Assignments Graduate Work Software Tools

Progess Report on Website Production

This is a quick update after our class meeting last week. Suggestions from class, I need a throughline like a podcast with the same name for my website. I am working on the concept of women in medicine and how they were treated in the gilded age. The pages outline is there but still working on getting images and the textual discussion. I plan to do work on the history of what was eclectic medicine and how the largest medical school of eclectic medicine had textbooks that rivaled allopathic medical schools. Within this history is the history of these professors and how they treated women patients while also accepting more women in their ranks than in traditional medical schools.

Technically, I downloaded a different Omeka theme that is bright and more consistent with the Gilded Age. I want to continue the transcription of the case notes while putting in the images of some plants and information about the history of women as patients. Interestingly, the cost of medicine for the time was high and was paid per the ledgers without difficulty.

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Assignments Graduate Work

Progress Report on Digital History Exhibit

I have updated a full page on one of the medical cases of Dr. John King. This entailed transcribing the note and looking up the different plants he listed to increase knowledge for myself and the reader. Several of the plants are still used today and one of the ingredients interestingly was used as a drink, similarly to tonic water of the past, it included cinchona. Cinchona bark has been credited with the early cure of malaria as quinine is extracted from true cinchona bark. I added an interesting website where someone had revived the drink. The remainder of this page is about some of the ingredients used and discussed in King’s American Dispensatory.

I played around with different colors and themes for the website for technical updates. I ended up ditching the Thank you, Roy theme from Omeka. Even though I did find an excellent green color scheme, I tried the Foundation theme instead due to expanded options for mobile use. I need to learn this new theme as I go and continue to fill the other pages out.

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Assignments Graduate Work

WEBSITE PROPOSAL, DREAM VERSUS REALITY

Eclectic Medicine and Cases of the Gilded Age

From 1852 to as late as 1939, eclectic medical doctors claimed to be the adopters of all medical theories, including homeopathy, but at strengths of medicines shown to help the patient. Eclectics contended that regular physicians were the quacks that used lancets for bleeding and poisonous mercury.  What was eclectic medicine, and how did these doctors define eclectic medicine compared to medical doctors of homeopathic and allopathic medicine?  My small digital history website will focus on one of the professors, named John King, MD and the plants he recommended for women’s diseases and some men’s complaints.  Dr. King taught at the Eclectic Medical Institute of Cincinnati. The institute itself has its own history and a large contribution to this history about eclectic medicine.

This proposed website will strive to answer the following questions. Who were these men that wrote seemingly standard medical texts with additional plant therapies? Who was John King, who wrote King’s obstetrics, diseases of women, and more importantly, The Eclectic American Dispensatory? Specifically, what were some of the more popular medical treatments? What did these professors and doctors charge for these treatments, and were they like today’s medical dollars? Who were their patients, and did they belong to upper-class society, or could anyone afford these treatments?

I plan to use Omeka to build the website. There will be a small exhibit of John King’s discoveries that are used today. Of course, there are many more poisonous plants and quack medicine that can also be displayed that are not effective for specific conditions.  As an example, he recommended Cannabis Indica to prevent bleeding in miscarriage as one of the many other treatments for this condition. Additional content will be actual cases and notes from John King supplied by the archivist at Lloyd Library that have not been displayed on any other website. This is important to show how eclectic physicians charge for medical care, their prescriptions of these compounds of plants, and treatment regimens. Digital technology within the website will be relatively limited to a collection of images, images of text, and interpretation.

In a larger dream prototype, I would have an interactive website about the more extended chronology of eclectic medicine, showcasing the more significant number of female graduates than traditional medical schools. The proprietary eclectic medical institute also accepted more Jewish students than professional medical schools.   The prototype design would include these individuals who achieved their physician credentials that allopathic medical schools had shunned due to discrimination and antisemitism.  For the people interested in the history of herbal remedies, there would be an interactive quiz on diseases and a matching of plants from the American Dispensatory.  There were professional societies of eclectic physicians from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to Guthrie, Oklahoma. Maps of these doctors who practiced this kind of medicine in the gilded age could also be illustrated from accessing eclectic medical newsletters and placed in interactive popup maps. Other future proposals would include a more extensive database of the papers of the different professors and physicians.  Currently, the National Library of Medicine and the Lloyd Library in Cincinnati have digitized the textbooks.  Most of the personal and professional papers are not digitized. On my actual website, since I do not know how to make games on websites, I will stick to what I know. It will be images from John King’s notes, pictures, and information about eclectic medicine.

The target audience will be people interested in quack medicine, herbal medicine, and medicine in the late 1800s. Another target audience will be people interested in offbeat medical history and the use of plants in North America, tied to indigenous knowledge of plants, like Cannabis indica. Historians and fellow graduate students working on their digital history projects will be the secondary audience. My personas were both women as a representative audience for the general public, and these personas are to be extrapolated to a large age group for men and women. Women interested in medical history and quack medicines will be more interested in the current small, proposed website, focusing on Dr. John King’s female cases and his herbal remedies.

Secondary Sources:

John S. Haller. A Profile in Alternative Medicine: The Eclectic Medical College of Cincinnati, 1845-1942. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, (1999).

John King, “Introductory Lecture Before the Eclectic Medical Class, in Greenwood Hall.” Cincinnati, Eclectic Publishing Office, (1852). Digitized National Library of Medicine. http://resource.nlm.nih.gov/9516547.

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Assignments Graduate Work

The Relationship Between Audience and Public History Website Content

Graduate students in history are a distinct audience for public history projects that do not always reflect what the public would like to see in a history website or museum website. Tailoring your public history project based on your historical research interests does occur because of the enthusiasm to share the knowledge with others. But I also recognize that my research in the history of medicine may bore the public or people not interested in medical history. How do I increase an audience for these topics of history? Not everyone will be interested in your research. Everything has a history, but not everyone will care to learn about it.

The relationship between academic historians and public historians can also be evaluated as analogous to this conundrum of interest for the public.  The discourse about what is important content for graduate students versus everyone else was discussed by Ronal Grele in 1981. [1] Unfortunately, for myself being in an academic environment may also limit my perspective and limit my project to a monograph-style blog of information. The discourse between academic and public historians can and has been evaluated in different areas of the profession. In Denise Meringolo’s work, “Museums, Monuments, and National Parks,” she has assessed the public historian as a government worker whose role is fundamentally an interdisciplinary one.[2] Digital public history projects with a larger audience are traditionally interdisciplinary between computer scientists, website designers, historians, and even social media influencers. For a regular graduate student, with a lack of capital, the audience is relatively limited even with a Twitter presence, as influencers will pay to have their tweets and websites promoted that a graduate student cannot afford. That being noted, public historians can promote their work on social media for free and increase public history websites’ visibility among the public.

Historians have a duty to fellow historians and the public to bring facts and their interpretation into all types of work, whether the academic journal or the public history Twitter feed or website. Audience evaluation to tailor content for a primary and secondary audience has been done for digital history projects that continue the role of interpretation of the primary sources. An example of this work is the website, Mallhistory.org. On their website of how this project was built, is a page about who the primary and secondary audience was. The secondary audience was fellow historians and fellow enthusiasts. [3] Using this example and description of the process is an open dialogue of how the team built the website and the sources used. This is not unlike a traditional academic paper, that cites the work in a way that any fellow historian can follow to check the validity of the argument from the sources.

With the historical content and method secured as fully transparent for the reader of any academic historical work, so should the public history project. The public history project has the added caveat of evaluating its end-users for the project and design. This gives an added challenge and dimension for the sole producer of public history projects. Unlike the solitary academic journal article, interdisciplinary work is a more common pathway to successful digital projects. Website designers evaluate their audience before total production and storyboarding with this work. Helpful articles about audience-directed content are by website designers. There are multiple helpful guides to research for a primary audience, including interviewing and persona development. The interview advice given by Erika Hall in 2013 holds true for today. Avoid leading questions and get out of the way when conducting interviews with your primary audience. [4] Doing the interviews, research, and developing personas took ample time. Persona development was something I had never learned about nor done. [5] In this exercise, you make up people who would be your audience. While I interviewed men for the audience, I made my two personas into two women from two different demographics and careers that reflected who I thought best represented my primary audience for this website.

[1] Grele, Ronald J. “Whose Public? Whose History? What Is the Goal of a Public Historian?” The Public Historian 3, no. 1 (1981): 40–48. https://doi.org/10.2307/3377160.

[2] Meringolo, Denise D. Museums, Monuments, and National Parks: Toward a New Genealogy of Public History. 154. University of Massachusetts Press, 2012. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt5vk1kt.

[3] Brennan, Sheila and Sharon Leon.” Audiences” in “Building Histories of the National Mall: A Guide to Creating a Digital Public History Project.” Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media. October 2015

[4] Hall, Erika. “Interviewing Humans.” A List Apart. Published on September 10, 2013. Published in Just Enough Research. A Book Apart, (2013).

[5] Goltz, Schlomo. “A Closer Look At Personas: What They Are And How They Work (Part 1).” Smashing Magazine. August 6, 2014. 

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Assignments Graduate Work

Website Research for Spring Semester 2022

For Spring Semester 2022, I am working on a small public history project on the professors and textbooks of an alternative medical school in the late 1800s called the eclectic institute of medicine. These textbooks illustrated the competition with allopathic medical schools and used multiple quack herbal drugs from North American plants.  Developing a project for medical history for this semester expands on the knowledge I learned in my Intro to Digital Humanities course. In this work blog post, website audience research included interviewing representatives of my primary audience. In these interviews with primary audience members and even some secondary audience people, I learned that interest in medicine ties into living during a pandemic.  All of the target audience is interested in the medical history of the past as we recognize that we are also living in a moment of medical history. The nineteenth-century saw a considerable shift in knowledge in medicine towards the end of the century with the discovery of bacteria, vaccinations, and pasteurization.  Despite the trend towards scientific knowledge and professional education, competing medical schools existed in the United States. The history of medical therapeutics that did not honestly treat the relevant disease but were used anyway as quack medicine is relevant today. The people interviewed seemed to want to see the relation to covid pandemic or vaccine hesitancy tied into today’s issues which I had not considered doing. The eclectic medical school was shut down in 1939, but this school trained thousands of doctors impacted many people. Did they help people or hurt people or accidentally kill anyone? While I plan to make a traditional sourced history, it is done through the lens of our time. So, living during a pandemic with people grasping at straws for treatments instead of vaccination is not unlike the past of homeopathic medicines. Did these doctors hurt more than help by using different plant compounds? Or did they know enough, or was the placebo effect powerful enough to make a difference?
Their textbook on plant medicines has a mixture of homeopathic remedies and plants that became actual medications, like digitalis and podophyllin. The primary audience also wants a story or a scandal drama to make the website more engaging. For the medical historian, the drama is already in the story of competing students for medical education during the gilded age, with professionalization occurring for one group of physicians but not for others. The eclectic medicine institute and professors seem to be between homeopaths and allopathy. The pictures in the texts are not unlike what you see in regular medical textbooks, but after discussing the website and topics with my user research, I hope to add pictures that draw the audience into learning about these late nineteenth-century professors of eclectic medicine. The works include diseases of women and children and how to treat them. While the anatomy and surgical pictures are similar to allopathic texts of the day, the significant difference is the multitude of plant compounds suggested for treatment in warts, venereal diseases, and cancers. The basis for some of these remedies did have inspiration from Native American plant-based medical practices. The textbook is a primary source for a medical historian and is also a snapshot of physician attitudes about women of the late 19th century. The audience is less interested in this aspect and more focused on how it ties into today’s issues. Users agreed that pictures or existing plants used today to connect to today’s medical use would be fascinating history to learn. Living in a pandemic increases interest in medical history and how it relates to medicine today, but it has to also be immediately engaging. You only have four seconds to engage a user for a website per my professor’s advice, so I plan to strive for a little longer, the equivalent to qualify in a bull riding competition.

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