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.
