1. Barron Lerner,
Bad Attitudes: Thomas Holmes and the Connection of Emotion to Disease (
[email protected])
2. Stephen Casper,
Why We Can No Longer Diagnose What We Discovered: A Genealogy of Traumatic Encephalopathy Syndrome (
[email protected])
3. Johanna Schoen,
Pain and the Premature Infant (
[email protected])
Chair email:
[email protected]This panel explores the changing nature of evidence in the history of medicine, emphasizing the social and cultural factors that have influenced scientific assessment. First, Stephen Casper explores traumatic brain injuries over time, noting how standardization of diagnosis supplanted clinical observations. While providing a uniform diagnosis, a term such as “Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy” may have little connection and meaning for individual patients.
Second, Barron Lerner revisits a forgotten episode in the history of psychosomatic medicine in which a post-World War II psychiatrist named Thomas Holmes developed an elaborate system tying specific emotional states to the development of various diseases. While evolving standards of clinical evidence eventually disproved most of Holmes’ connections, his concept of emotions—and their visual representations—was a patient-centered approach to understanding complicated illnesses.
Third, Johanna Schoen explores the evidence used by physicians to justify the withholding of anesthesia for infants—arguing that they felt no pain. It was not until the 1980s that parents became aware that their infants received no anesthesia/pain control, and it took another decade to change clinical practice.
