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History of Medicine: Mary Hague-Yearl
31 Plays3 months ago
Dr. Mary Hague-Yearl is the head librarian at the Osler Library of the History of Medicine at McGill University. Listen to Mary discuss ongoing programs at the Osler Library, the importance of studying the history of medicine and the ethical legacy of historical physicians.
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Transcript
Introduction to 'The Wound Dresser' Podcast
00:00:09
Speaker
You're listening to The Wound Dresser, a podcast that uncovers the human side of healthcare. I'm your host, Jon Neary.
Guest Introduction: Dr. Mary Haig-Gurell
00:00:21
Speaker
My guest today is Dr. Mary Haig-Gurell.
Osler Library's Mission and Collections
00:00:24
Speaker
Dr. Haig-Gurell is the head librarian at the Osler Library of the History of Medicine at McGill University. She frequently researches and presents on a variety of topics, including medical ethics and the history of medicine, and has particular expertise in medieval medicine.
00:00:40
Speaker
Dr. Mary, hey, you're welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. um So can you just tell us a little bit about ah the work that the Osler library of ah of the history of medicine, the work that that the library does and ah kind of the mission and values that ah guide your organization?
Rare Books and Medical Artifacts
00:01:00
Speaker
Sure. I mean, we're we call ourselves one-stop shopping for the history of medicine because we do have a circulating collection that has modern scholarship on the history of medicine to support sir that aspect of work. And then we're best known for our rare and ah rare and special collections. So we have a considerable collection of rare books, about 70,000 titles. We have about half a kilometer of shelving of ah archives, archival material, and also an artifacts collection of ah think about getting close to 800 medical artifacts. And so really anything to do with the history of medicine, you can come here and spend time at the library and we support that.
Supporting Global Research and Students
00:01:42
Speaker
And so what are are some kind of ongoing projects and research you guys are working on there at the Osler Library?
00:01:50
Speaker
I would say we support research above all so it's the people who come here who really do the the research i I do it when I have time but that's not very frequent. So although I am going to be spending my sabbatical year starting in September, working on the history of the library so that will be a library based research project of my own, but in terms of what happens here.
00:02:09
Speaker
um Now it's we're recording this in the summertime. We have a lot of researchers who come in really from around the world to do research. We have three named research travel grants. We give to usually about six researchers total um every summer to come here and use our resources. We have an application process where we see you know we think about whether or not our materials are so are are a good fit for the projects that they have. um And that really can be anything. We've had people looking at our Arabic manuscripts, our Sinhalese Olas. um Right now, you know, we have some people looking at early 20th century public health in Montreal, ah someone else looking at sort of the long 18th century
00:02:53
Speaker
medicine and literature. And we do a lot. A lot of people come here to look at the Wilder Penfield archive. And for those who don't know Wilder Penfield, he was the founder of the Montreal Neurological Institute. We have hundreds of boxes of archives. And so it's a really comprehensive collection. People look at all sorts of things, like not just the biography of Penfield, but how he was teaching, what we was he he was teaching, maybe his medical networks, international.
00:03:20
Speaker
um And then we also have an artist residency, which I'll mention just very briefly every year. Our applications for that are nearly due for this year, which is to encourage artists to sort of also reach out into the medical world and sort of figure out how they can use this historical medical material in a way that really is going to to reach audiences both in the arts and to medical sciences. um And that was endowed by Dr. Michelle LaRoz.
00:03:46
Speaker
And then finally, of course, maybe what you're really interested in here are the initiatives we have for medical students. And so we have the Pam and Orlando Del Master of Family, William Osler Medical Student Research Essays, as well as the Molina Foundation Research Scholarships. um The essay is like a cash prize for the top three participants. And anyone can take part in that who's a medical student at McGill. and We support people getting a mentor to really You know, because a lot of people coming into medical school in Canada might not have said that the undergraduate um um an undergraduate degree beforehand or they might not have a lot of experience in writing papers. So we help
Utilization by Academics and Clinicians
00:04:26
Speaker
guide them through doing research paper and the humanities.
00:04:29
Speaker
um The top three, as I said, get cash prizes, and then we also help them get support to maybe present at the American Osler Society meetings. And then for the Molina scholarships, that's a bursary of $5,000 to do to support a major research project over the summer that we hope will read lead to an article or something like that.
00:04:53
Speaker
That's really cool. And and the the researchers who are coming to you, are they generally folks who are more interested in kind of um just diving deeper into the history or are they clinicians or or both? Like who who kind of comes to you to really ah seek out resources?
00:05:08
Speaker
So we don't limit who's eligible. and we We really judge it based on the quality of the application and the the project. But it's it is mostly academics who do come, or sometimes and independent scholars. Or of course, we give priority to, say, graduate students or early career scholars um you know for weighing between someone who's very established.
00:05:29
Speaker
um Certainly, clinicians are open or are welcome to apply if they have, you know but it it would be a fairly academic um research project that they're doing, something that would be appearing in a peer review, probably more humanities-based journal. um But yeah I don't want to limit it by saying that. I don't want to discourage anyone. We're open to anything.
Role of History in Medical Education
00:05:52
Speaker
Yeah, kind of bridging that, though, to like the the clinical world. ah Do you think um you know there's a real space for for the history of medicine and in medical training, medical education, and so forth?
00:06:04
Speaker
I do. I really do. And I think that was, yeah i I sort of, I didn't mention the mention ah the mission of the library when I first opened up, but I think that's a big part of the mission is to encourage um the medical profession as a whole to really reflect upon the importance of the humanities and the foundation of good doctors. um I think Osler was really, Sir William Osler, I think was very clever and realizing that, you know, you can't really change your peers, you know, you can't criticize your peers, you can't tell them what to do, but you can educate new generations to sort of do things better or do things in a way that you think is better. And he really, you know, he was always opening his own library when he was alive to students to come in and he thought that people should have a good grounding in terms of
00:06:49
Speaker
having a sense of where they came from um and that the medical profession should have access to the resources that you know formed its foundations. I think it it helps make people a little bit more reflective and for Osler, maybe he thought that it you know enhance that sense of humility and humanity. I mean, maybe if you can sort of look back in time, we frequently have people coming in and they're looking at maybe you know a 16th century anatomy book and or something describing a surgical technique. And they're often amazed at
00:07:21
Speaker
You know how present it seems you know it it it doesn't look necessarily all that old and of course the printing might be the visual parts of it might but they can recognize it and they realize that's still medicine that's your humanity and you they realize how much hasn't changed despite all the progress we've had and I think sometimes that it it really does encourage reflection on you know the fact that they're part of something as well.
Historical Context and Ethical Reflections
00:07:46
Speaker
And even if medicine is always looking forward in terms of trying to get new treatments, trying to figure out better ways to to to to heal people, um it's still, I think, important for that perspective to to have a sense of where we came from.
00:08:03
Speaker
In terms of um you know studying the history of medicine, um can you talk more about like like how can that can affect like present-day practice? I'm not sure I'm qualified to answer that question, i mean because i'm not I'm not a medical doctor. my My doctorate's in history of medicine, so ah in fact, medieval history of medicine. so i am quite far removed from for modern practice. But I think, again, some of the way that it affects it is in,
00:08:34
Speaker
um you know certainly, as I said, that that sort of human aspect of really contemplating the person who's in front of you. I'm pretty sure that there are certain instances and again this is where am I not really being a clinician where I can't recall any but i've I've seen people look and you know and look at a textbook from say like even Osler's textbook from which was published first in 1892 and sort of say you know make connections to what they're doing today and I do wonder if maybe in certain instances if there's a sense of sort of a long clinical history not for an individual but for for the disease itself or an ailment
00:09:13
Speaker
and thinking about how people approached it, or maybe there can be someone in the past who's described certain symptoms or a certain case that was unusual. You never know what you might get from that, right? um But the thing is, you know, in studying history, you're not necessarily trying to make you're not necessarily trying to make the connection of that one case that is going to sort of give you that eureka moment of, wait a minute, that's what's going on here. But I feel like if you have a broader perspective of realizing, I think in history, it's not necessarily the fact that you're learning, but it maybe it's the flexibility of thought.
00:09:48
Speaker
and so maybe you're more open even in the clinical environment to thinking outside the box and to try to to figure out more ways of getting to a solution and maybe that's just one of the ways of the sort of the mental exercise I think that history can do. um You know in the library too we're interested in issues of ethics and I think sometimes when we we it's very obvious sometimes when we look at the past, what's ethical and unethical, um you know certainly a lot of practices that were by today's standards, highly unethical. But then when we get these conversations going about how those ethics might not have existed in the time that you know that experiment was done or that dissection was
Sir William Osler's Influence
00:10:30
Speaker
done and start talking about when these ethics came in and why, and you realize that some of these things change. And so you maybe encourage people to think that
00:10:38
Speaker
you know if there's something that maybe doesn't feel right when they're doing it today, just because something is... not declared unethical today doesn't mean it won't be tomorrow. And so that's another way I think that history can help in terms of that reflective process is just to remind people to think about what they're doing, why they're doing it, whether or not there's whether there or not there's intentional or unintentional harm involved. um And I guess, you know, thinking in a Canadian context, and this certainly applies in the States as well, you know, there are significant groups of people who have
00:11:14
Speaker
you know over time been harmed by the medical community and again maybe it wasn't always deliberate but if we look at say indigenous communities and in Canada and sort of you know medical racism and things like that we can definitely use history to look back and say you know those doctors weren't necessarily aware of what they were doing sometimes they were that's another conversation um But I think to help people when they go and say, wait, you know, am I prejudging this patient? Am I making assumptions that aren't true? Am I i maybe maybe be making some of the mistakes that people in the past made as well in terms of presuming something about this patient's lifestyle or their circumstances just because of who they are?
00:11:57
Speaker
No, I think a lot of what you said, um the the word I hear often used in this context is like humility, right? Like you can think about medicine is just something that's constantly evolving and looking back to the history of medicine, looking back at like bioethical issues and stuff. It gives you a sense of humility that like, ah we're still in like, you know, a developmental stage of of those sorts of things.
00:12:17
Speaker
um How do you as like a historian um Think about I know you you know we look back at things and and we could see like the the ethics better than they may might have been able to see um in terms of like kind of building that person's legacy and kind of framing them as a as a whether it be a practitioner or or a professional in the health care space like how do you I hate to boil it down this way, but how do you kind of consider them like a hero or a villain within the the the field of medicine based on like those ethical conversations?
00:12:53
Speaker
I mean, it's it's highly contextual, I think, is the first thing. It really depends on who are we talking about, what sorts of things that they did. um you know There are various spectra, I think, or you know there's certainly a spectrum. And does it matter where someone is on it? I mean, everyone is going to have flaws, that's for sure. um One of the ways that I think about this today is thinking, you know I do think it's important to think about the context that someone was working in, and not as an excuse necessarily, but to try to understand, you know Is, are they doing something that really nobody that they couldn't have expected any of their other peers to have had an issue with, like, you know, it if they're doing experimentation on certain
00:13:37
Speaker
um on people in society who don't have any power. Now, now we know that that's absolutely not accessible today, but there's certainly times in the past when maybe doing experiments on criminals was okay.
00:13:51
Speaker
right And so, you know is that someone who was operating in that sense that worked within the moral or ethical framework of their time period or not? So, I mean, I do think that that's a question, but then the questions that come later it's not necessarily asking that to say, oh, it's okay then because it's just not okay. But I think especially when we talk about racism, there's some people who really did a lot of active harm in terms of how they they maybe they were experimenting with certain groups of people or maybe they were, okay, if you have a doctor who is experimenting on certain classes of patient and he's doing real harm that is sort of based in his own, say, scientific racism, right? I think that's a little bit different than someone who
00:14:36
Speaker
maybe you can't see any history in their practitioner of having directly harmed other people, but you can maybe sometimes see in their writings, they might say something that you're like, wait a minute, that's really racist. Or maybe every once in a while on their correspondence, but it's a generally limited amount. I think that's different. I think if you have sort of a record of actually actually hurting people directly, that's a different conversation maybe than the systemic racism. And so I guess that's where I'm getting with that is that I think it'd be very helpful to look at someone like Osler, for instance, who is mostly teaching. There's very little in his teaching that has to do with with sexism or racism, but we have things that are there that make history, quite frankly, very uncomfortable.
00:15:27
Speaker
But for him, it doesn't necessarily seem to be, and you know maybe more work has to be done on this. I'm willing to have someone argue with me about it. It doesn't seem to be so much about his character or what kind of person he is as extremely representative of this sort of British colonial context that he's coming out of.
00:15:45
Speaker
And so I think it's important for us to realize that if someone who says so many inspirational things, who like is reminding people to treat other people as human beings, who's reminding, um who just you know seems to have everything that we want um in terms of positive messages, you know still has writings that we now realize are harmful, say, to Indigenous women. And we say, OK, what do we do with that?
00:16:13
Speaker
um
00:16:16
Speaker
For me, living in Quebec right now, I see that as in his sort of and an inability to see that that's causing harm. You can't necessarily expect someone to realize that certain levels of his st joking, for instance, were harmful. But these days, we might see that that they are. It's to say, you know if someone who is such a model has that in them then probably we all do right and so maybe it's again part of this reflection of realizing that if someone who's so inspirational on so many levels also sort of has these aspects of I mean there is sexism and racism that is so finely woven into the fabric of the society that he was living in that there's
00:16:56
Speaker
You can't really expect him to have escaped it. We might wish he would did, but I don't think it's realistic to expect it. And so just to realize that it's it's kind of everywhere. And if we start to sort of see that in him, we can say, well, you know, what is it that we're doing? Because we're sure, you know, you just have to realize you have to listen to people who are saying, you know what, maybe that's not the right way to talk about something and maybe give people who are harmed to the benefit of the doubt when they say that something makes them feel uncomfortable.
00:17:21
Speaker
um So then it's a matter of not necessarily using it to attack the person, but to realize how important it is or how that person can be a lesson about how pervasive some of those ideas are.
00:17:34
Speaker
So if we're ever gonna tackle those issues of of the systemic racism, I think it's probably helpful for us to look at some of our heroes in the past and say, look, you know this is something that is just part of society and we have to sort of realize that and educate ourselves about it if we're gonna move forward and even see it in ourselves.
00:17:52
Speaker
exactly what you mentioned, like Osler's legacy has come up in my own medical education where it's been, on one hand, his his amazing inspirational quotes and and practices have been celebrated, but then on the other hand, it's been mentioned that there was some um some sort of racism and and racial racial things involved in his kind of history. And then it's it's kind of, yeah, I think the overwhelming um you know sentiment I've gotten is basically what you're saying, that that it was probably very contextual, that was just part of his time.
00:18:22
Speaker
And I think, yeah, that's just what makes, you know, history so interesting. You get the all these like nuances and you can kind of like look back and see like, you know, what was this person thinking? What were they really like in that that time and place? um I was going to say the other thing that I sort of the I guess meant like Harler game, I guess, that we play sometimes, um although that that's not to make light of it, is to think if you really look at that person's record and Osler somewhere for whom we have such an extensive record that basically we can find all of his warts and we're we're also at the library we're digitizing a lot of his material so people will be able to look at his correspondence and say okay you know how is this affecting his relationship with other people or not um but as a sort of thinking about if you really look at someone's record their public record how they taught people you know are they teaching these negative views or not
00:19:14
Speaker
and thinking, okay, well, if this person were here with us, do we think that they would be an ally? Do we think that they would try to learn enough to sort of get past some of what they had? And it's very clear that some people in our past are not gonna do that. And so I think those are the people where we can really see some of those negative qualities as being part, like almost intrinsic to the person. You know, that person is is just, you know, racist and they're,
00:19:41
Speaker
maybe their colleagues at the time 100 years ago are calling them out on it, and they are still doubling down. That's a little bit different, I think, from someone like Ozer who is reflective, who definitely has it in, and we have to acknowledge that. But we also can see his more inspirational part since i I think it's likely that if he were here with us today, he would have maybe rethought some of the views he'd had from decades earlier and and realized that, OK, maybe he has to change the way he thinks about things.
00:20:11
Speaker
Can you talk about the collection ah Sir William Mosler had of of different books and things that eventually kind of morphed into the the library and and what sort of things he was you studying back back when he was ah educating medical students?
00:20:25
Speaker
Yeah, sure. um I mean, it's one of the really interesting parts about the library when we talk about you know legacy and stuff like that is that Osler basically choose chose what was going to be in his library. So he started collecting it not too long after he arrived in in Oxford. So he was he was made Regis Professor of oxford in oxford of Medicine in Oxford in 1905. And the first book bills that we had from when he started buying books to create this library for McGill is from 1907. So it's really not that long.
00:20:54
Speaker
and And so as a library that's curated, rather than just being, say, all the books hanging around at his house when he died, you can start to interrogate what he thought was important as well. And so he really started choosing books that he saw as laying the foundations for the history of medicine and science. And so we have you know key works from the Scientific Revolution. you know Astronomers, we have the only copy of Copernicus is David Revolutioni, the first edition in Canada.
00:21:22
Speaker
um as well as, you know, anatomical works. And, you know, it's interesting to me that Copernicus's book is the same year as Vesalius' De Fabrica. So you have the revolution in the microcosm and in the body, in Vesalius, and then the micro ah macrocosm, the universe with Copernicus. and So he's really seeing this sort of bigger and bigger intellectual argument. You're not going to have the revolutions in medicine without these bigger revolutions in science, right?
00:21:47
Speaker
um And so he's he's collecting, you know, and he also organizes it. So those are in his so-called prima section where these are the absolute most important books to lay the foundations. And he begins those actually with, you know, what he calls the older civilization. So he sort of looks at what's happening and, you know, ah what we talk about is Mesopotamia. He looks to Eastern Asia, um mostly though he's collecting within a European context because he knew that's what he knew. That's what he studied. That's what he taught.
00:22:18
Speaker
And I think he also was very aware of his own competencies and lack thereof. um So he wasn't really collecting about things he didn't he wasn't confident that he knew about. It's only after he goes to Egypt that he starts actually getting Arabic texts in Arabic. But before that, he was collecting a lot of them, like the early editions in Latin. But he's using help of his colleagues who know Arabic to get works in Arabic. So in terms of what he has,
00:22:47
Speaker
um He's really trying to tell the story of Western medicine and the foundations of it, while acknowledging that even you know the Western intellectual context is influenced by by outside.
00:23:02
Speaker
Um, this, this might be ah a reach of a question, but I'll ask it anyway. What do you, what do you think Osler would say about our, our healthcare system today? Obviously we're in different contexts. I'm in the United States, you're in Canada. So, but, but generally speaking about the nature of healthcare in 2024, what do you think like Osler would, would say?
Osler's Perspective on Modern Healthcare
00:23:20
Speaker
um Honestly, I think in terms of what I know of the American context, I think both contexts actually you would probably find quite frustrating. um Because as someone, at least, you know, certainly from what I hear, you know, you have doctors who go into medicine because they really do want to do the best for their patients. um They really care about them. And especially say in the United States, if you have so much pressure from insurance companies telling you what you can do, what you can't do, or if you have a situation you know in a lot of more government-ru systems maybe you have
00:23:53
Speaker
more you know maybe you're also encouraged to say spend less time with patients, right? Because if you have to certain see a certain number of people or have a certain number of patients on your rosters, um I think he would probably be worried about the lack of discretion that practitioners today have to really spend the time they need with their patients to get to know them um and also to maybe prescribe in ways that they thought was best. I think he definitely would say that you should defer to the doctors. I mean, this is their expertise.
00:24:27
Speaker
It's interesting what you you mentioned there, like the the idea of, because you're saying Osler might say we should we should trust our um our physicians more. Yeah, I think so.
00:24:41
Speaker
Yeah, because I feel like in a lot of ways there's been like like before medicine was kind of like paternalistic and then now patients have had like more of a voice, but it's almost like that it's gonna the it's it's it's the pendulum has gone one way, but it's coming back a little bit because the the doctor-patient relationship can be so frustrating when you're constantly contending with a patient who has looked up things on the internet and has looked up, you know, and it's just like, head wants almost like equal footing in the relationship when uh, you know, they haven't had any formal training. but That's a really good point. And I actually wasn't thinking of that aspect of it. I was thinking more of, of doctors who really have to spend a lot of time advocating for their patients to the insurance companies in order to get coverage for them. But you're right. ah You're right about that aspect too. And actually it it reminds me that this is another reason to know history, right?
Insights from Historical Medical Practices
00:25:31
Speaker
Is because you've actually sort of had this back and forth for a long time. I mean, you know, in the 19th century, it was kind of notorious for having, um,
00:25:40
Speaker
a lot of suspicion of the medical pre profession. And Osler is definitely coming out of a very paternalistic um part of that sort of academic profession, at least. But you have part of the reason that patent medicines became really, you know, sort of, we can say that know they were regulated because they were dangerous. But then you have to wonder, you know, why did they even become so popular? And we still have these things today, right? You have various supplements that are being peddled and whatever, and some of them might be really good.
00:26:09
Speaker
but some of them might be really harmful. and so there's always that For a long time, I think there has been this aspect of to what extent do people have agency over their own medical care, and to what extent can they be their own doctor even. and this is this is This is something that really hasn't gone away.
00:26:27
Speaker
um um it It just sort of changes over time and maybe what people have access to. and There was actually a conference here a few years several a few years ago now, um essentially about removing I think it was even you know removing the doctor as a mediator, but things that we would never think of as requiring doctor mediation were part of that movement. So ah we have here the first home pregnancy test kit, the predictor that was developed by Margaret Crane in New York, but it was test marketed in Montreal. And you know at that time, that was pretty revolutionary, this idea. you know Doctors were really opposed because you know certainly a woman's gonna need to be with their doctor to find out if she's pregnant because
00:27:12
Speaker
you know she might respond badly or something, you know what I mean? Like you have to be able to, and it was a very paternalistic attitude, of course, but to realize that also some of these aspects of giving patients more power might include certain developments that we would never even think of today as being developments that move something from an exam room into someone's home.
00:27:34
Speaker
How has ah being like an expert on that the history of medicine ah affected you as like a patient and consumer of healthcare? Do you feel like you have this ah deep skepticism of, you know, like you're saying the people peddling different supplements or or different interventions that they that there might be, you know, 100 years from now viewed as like unethical or, or you know, quackery?
00:27:56
Speaker
I'm not sure if it affects my attitude as a as a patient. I think I'm probably a ah reasonably good patient. I'm not a Dr. Google patient, um but you know I feel like I have to have a certain level of trust.
00:28:13
Speaker
But I suppose, I think I probably respond like a lot of people, and that is kind of on a human level. You know, if I don't have a good feeling about someone, or if I don't get a, you know, if if there's something that kind of doesn't feel right, then you feel like you don't trust that person as much. And I do think, again, that's maybe somewhere where we can get back to some of the positive messages of Osler, you know, a lot of his is about how you is about bedside manner, right. And you know I think you're more likely to, but you know it's I think that that's one of the dilemmas for a doctor, right? How do you have enough authority that people trust you? So you kind of be authoritative, but how do you do that in a way that's also human? And so that people will sort of feel at ease with you. So you have to sort of build trust and respect while also putting people at ease. I think that's a really hard thing to do.
00:29:03
Speaker
You've obviously been studying that the history of medicine for a long time. What are some of like the most impactful ideas that ah you know things you've learned about in the in medicine's past that people should know about?
00:29:17
Speaker
I'm not sure if I can talk about what people should know about, but in terms of what I like to, some of the books that I like to pull out, I mean, obviously we bring out Vesalius, and I probably should have talked about that more, I could get back to it. um But one of the favorite ones that I show, I actually often show it next to Vesalius, is Kethin's Vescos Phyllis Midikina, which is first published in around 1491.
00:29:41
Speaker
And it's basically a compendium of medieval medicine. So already people might be like, oh my gosh, no, this is just a nightmare. We know that that's all dark ages and it's awful. um But there are a few aspects of it that I find really interesting. um Just sort of briefly, the reason I show it with Salius is that it has this dissection scene that's really interesting for talking about how medicine was talked. You have this visual hierarchy where you have the professor up at a podium reading from a book with a demonstrator pointing and the barber surgeon doing the cutting of the dissection and what 50 years later you have the salient anatomy where there's this sort of much more involved scene where it's like you're just in there doing it yourself basically. um that's That's a very superficial way of describing it. um But one of the other images in there that I really, actually there are two more, I'll i'll get to the the one I was about to in a minute,
00:30:33
Speaker
The other one is the title page, actually, which essentially shows which authors were most important at the end of the Middle Ages. And you have, you know, three Greek authors, you have Aristotle, Hippocrates, Galen, and then you have all Arabic authors, pretty much, you know, you have Avicenna, Ibn Sina, you have Rossi, Meswe, and I think is a good reminder, maybe, of the intellectual exchange of medicine. it's just it's ah It's a good reminder that even in our very Eurocentric library, there are very important contributions that come from the Arabic world. and so when we And these days, we try to look a lot more at connections that were made in medicine through trade, for instance. So we have to look at you know connection with medical connections that were made between the Dutch and the Japanese. We recently purchased several Japanese texts that were translated from Dutch, for instance.
00:31:25
Speaker
um But then getting back to the other one that I think is is just interesting for maybe getting back to those aspect but ideas of maybe humility, um and not just for doctors, I think for all of us, of realizing that you know people in the past aren't stupid.
00:31:41
Speaker
First of all, they're, they're human, they're relatable, but they also really are trying to figure out the world. That's what we're always doing. And so the one that I like for this is actually zodiac man. And again, this might get some laughter because it's, it's, you know, the human being with the signs of the zodiac, which of course are constellations along the ecliptic going down the body. So you start with Aries at the head and you sort of go down Capricorn at the knees, you have, you know, Aquarius at the ankles.
00:32:09
Speaker
And partly it's a reminder of how people really did used to see their bodies as being, if your body's a microcosm, the universe is a macrocosm, but how they really are sort of connected and how what's going, you know, maybe you can make some connections with what's going on. yeah the the environment around you to what's happening in your body. So maybe if you're being bled in the spring to avoid illness, it's because you're looking and you're seeing you know that the rivers are flooding. And you know maybe if you take some blood, you're sort of avoiding some of that flooding and damage within your body. right But also you think that people are making observations. If Aries is the one at the head and you're thinking about these sort of head ailments and Aries,
00:32:54
Speaker
Well, there are a lot of people who every time Aries is prominent in the sky, which is in the spring. That's why it's the one for the head. every time you see Aries there, your eyes are watering, your nose is like, you know, you're having a congested head. Well, why not think that Aries is partly responsible for that? I mean, it's kind of reasonable to think that every time that constellation comes around, you feel that way. Now, the modern medicine medical world would say, okay, seasonal allergies or something like that. But it makes sense, right? It makes sense in a different worldview. And so I think that's,
00:33:27
Speaker
part of why it's also just, you know, important to realize. And maybe when your patient comes in today and has some kind of a theory that just sounds outlandish, maybe there's a reason for it. You know, maybe they've actually made pretty reasonable observations and led them to that conclusion. Maybe they come from a cultural context where there are stories that support it. It might not work in a sort of scientific, clinical way, but it doesn't mean that person is stupid or foolish or ignorant, like,
00:33:56
Speaker
Well, maybe they're ignorant literally in terms of not knowing, but it's a different way of knowing, I think. um And so I think that's that's part of what we like to do with the sources we have to is just look at different ways that people
Lightning Round: Personal Insights of Dr. Haig-Gurell
00:34:08
Speaker
were taught. We do look a lot at the evolution of medical education, but also think about how people could understand the world differently. And that that happens today, too. I mean, people just see things and interpret them differently.
00:34:24
Speaker
With that, it's time for a lightning round, a series of fast-paced questions that tell us more about you. So what's your favorite ah artifact at the library? Oh, I think my favorite artifact would have to probably be our our set of glass eyes. We have a set of, actually 51, it should be 50 glass eyes from the late 1880s. They're striking and beautiful. What is your favorite condiment?
00:34:52
Speaker
Oh, I don't do, I don't play that game.
00:34:58
Speaker
What do you dip your french fries in? Mayo. Mayo. Okay. Yeah. Do you have any, do you have any fun hobbies? Um, I do play horn in the medical faculty orchestra in E Medici. And that's fun. I stopped playing after I graduated from college. And so I stopped for like a couple of decades and came back when I came to McGill. So that was nice.
00:35:21
Speaker
What is your go-to wellness habit? I just love being outside. I do like running. um And I guess my my well wellness habit, if it has to be a habit, is that if I am taking the bus in in the morning rather than say the metro, I get off a few stops early so that I can walk over the mountain. It only costs me five minutes, but I get i get that piece of nature and I get a walk. And lastly, what's one change you'd like to see in healthcare?
00:35:47
Speaker
ah Universal coverage. All right, Dr. MaryHae Ural, thanks so much for joining the show. Thanks so much.
00:36:05
Speaker
Thanks for listening to The Wound Dresser. Until next time, I'm your host, John Neery. Be well.