May 6th 1870 Sir James Young Simpson, the Scottish physician, died.
James was born the seventh son and eighth child of poor baker on 7th June 1811 in Bathgate, West Lothian. He was apprenticed to his father, but spent his spare time working on scientific matters, and, thanks to a scholarship and help from his elder brother, he entered the arts classes of the University of Edinburgh in 1825, at the age of fourteen, an began the study of medicine in 1827.
He studied under Robert Liston and received his authorisation to practice medicine – licentiate of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh – in 1830. He was then 19 years old and subsequently worked for some time as a village physician in Inverkip near Wemyss Bay on the Clyde. Two years later he returned to Edinburgh where he received his medical doctorate in 1832. The professor of pathology, John Thomson entrusted him with some lectures, and in 1835 he was made senior president of the Royal Medical Society of Edinburgh.
Following hard efforts, Simpson in 1839 at the age of twenty-eight years, was appointed to the chair of obstetrics at the University of Edinburgh. Lecturing in obstetrics had been somewhat neglected at the university, but Simpson’s lectures soon attracted large numbers of students, and his popularity as a physician reached such proportions that he could soon count women from all over the world among his patients. Besides his activities as a scientist and teacher he had a very busy – enormous, really – practice.
Simpson was president of the Royal College of Physicians in 1849, in 1852 he was elected president of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and one year later was elected foreign member of the French academy of medicine. He received several honours and awards, in 1856 the golden medal from the Académie des sciences and a Monthyon prize. In 1847 he was appointed one of the Queen’s physicians for Scotland. In 1866 he was knighted and that year also became doctor of honour of law at the University of Oxford. In 1869 he received the freedom of the city of Edinburgh.
That’s the qualifications out of the way, ordinarily this would be enough for any leading man of medicine to be remembered by, but Simpson was no ordinary man, let’s get down to the nitty gritty.
Simpson combined intellectual brilliance with compassion. Distraught after witnessing the practice of surgery without anaesthesia, Simpson wrote of “that great principle of emotion which both impels us to feel sympathy at the sight of suffering in any fellow creature, and at the same time imparts to us delight and gratification in the exercise of any power by which we can mitigate and alleviate that suffering.”
So he started working on ways to deviate the pain felt in the neglected world of obstetrics, namely childbirth. At first this seemed a forlorn hope. Simpson tried mesmerism, but the hypnotic method brought only limited results. After trying other medical means like ether he read about chloroform being used in dentistry and surgery in the US, yes it had been used before, but never in in his field, and it was he who pioneered it’s use. In these days religion played a big part in everyone’s lives, and the belief that women were meant to suffer pain in childbirth was the main argument against his work.
It has been written there was a savage religious response, especially in Presbyterian Scotland, to his use of chloroform – in reality the attack on Simpson’s enthusiastic promotion of chloroform was brief, sporadic and of little moment. Simpson’s carefully constructed counter to criticism of anaesthesia, drawing on considerable theological and linguistic expertise, reveals a complexity at odds with the simplicity of his faith. Simpson was a great orator and by all means a charismatic man, his arguments for it’s used won over the vast majority of it’s critics, the rest, as they say, is history.
I’m not one to usually member honours bestowed on people by royalty, but you have to admit in this case it was merited, In 1866 Simpson was the first man ever to be knighted for his services to medicine.
I’m goin’ to play a lot of good music at Brunkullan Brasserie tonite. Funky beats, soulful grooves and some old school hiphop! #dj #deejay #djlife #music #nomusicnolife #reggae #dancehall #afrobeats #hiphop #soul #rnb #rap #boogie #funk #disco #pioneer #pro #xdjrx #hdj70 #brunkullanbrasserie #brunis #östersund (på/i Brunkullan Brasserie)
It’s goin’ to be a soulful night at Republiken Bar & Kök. Just love, love and more love! #dj #deejay #djlife #music #nomusicnolife #reggae #dancehall #afrobeats #hiphop #soul #rnb #rap #boogie #funk #disco #pioneer #pro #cdj2000 #djm2000 #hdj70 #republiken #östersund (på/i Republiken Bar&Kök)
Music is the movement of sound to reach the soul for the education of its virtue. #dj #deejay #djlife #music #nomusicnolife #reggae #dancehall #afrobeats #hiphop #soul #rnb #rap #boogie #funk #disco #pioneer #pro #cdj2000 #djm2000 #urbanears #republiken #östersund (på/i Republiken Bar&Kök)
FollowingPioneer DJ’s corporate name change to AlphaThetalast year, the gargantuan DJ equipment titan company has once again undergone change, this time being sold to Japanese photo-processing tech company Noritsu. Assuring consumers that this will not affect the company’s operations, Pioneer DJ released a statement explaining, “Our business, operations, brands, including brand names, will not…
You don’t mess with Mary Pickford, film pioneer and undisputed Queen of the Movies. She would go on to become the world`s most famous citizen and the second woman to win an Academy Award, in 1930! - talk about a lengthy career!
“Everything was source material for him, he [might] walk across the room and see a paperclip and maybe that would inspire him, inspire something.”
His extraordinary ability to see the artistic potential in an idea or object speaks to Basquiat’s creativity and keen intellect. Some critics frustrated themselves trying to draw connections between the elements of his work, unable to fully decipher his distinct process and methods. When Basquiat painted, he was known to keep piles of open books around him while music played in the background. He read all manner of texts and was deeply curious. The books scattered around his studio could range in topic from poetry to art history.
The music that soundtracked his painting was also varied, ranging from classical music to his favorite genre, bebop. And as if that wasn’t stimulation enough, he would sometimes have the television on as well. This confluent mixture of media was a source of inspiration that would permeate his thoughts as he worked, and elements would sometimes find their way onto the canvas as words or images…”
A Female Mason Perched High above Berlin (c. 1910). With the rise of industrialization, the number of German women who worked outside the home also increased. This usually meant factory work. But in some families with their own businesses, daughters also learned a trade so that they could help out: here, we see a master-mason’s daughter during the renovation work on the old city hall tower in Berlin. via GHDI . #victorianchaps #oldphoto #berlin #goodolddays #vintage #edwardian #pastlives #mason #history #1910s #retro #nostalgia #pioneer #germany (at Berlin, Germany) https://www.instagram.com/p/CdaRRMZgWl6/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=
The content we consume and its authenticity are called into question on a daily basis. But just 50 years ago, this was far from a common way to engage with art, culture and literature. That all changed with Barbara Christian.
From a young age, Christian was an avid reader, questioning why there were no African American or Afro Caribbean women included in the books she read. Born and raised in the U.S. Virgin Islands, she dedicated her life to changing ideas about race, gender and class, particularly around the representation of black women in American literature, ultimately asking, “who gets to tell their stories?”
While pursuing a graduate degree in literature at Columbia University, Christian became friends with Langston Hughes and was introduced to the works of many black writers. Her exploration of these writings would be realized later in her career — she was one of the first scholars to bring the works of Toni Morrison and Alice Walker to the attention of academia.
In 1972, two years after graduating from Columbia, Christian became an assistant professor at UC Berkeley. She was pivotal in creating the university’s African American studies department and, in 1978, was the first African American to be granted tenure. “She was a path-breaking scholar,” said Percy Hintzen, chair of the UC Berkeley department of African American studies. "Nobody did more to bring black women writers into academic and popular recognition.”
For so long, the majority of representations of black women in literature were crafted by white writers. Christian wanted to change that. Her theories provided a foundation for black women to assert control over their own image in American literature. Her 1980 study, “Black Women Novelists: The Development of a Tradition,” was the first of its kind to look at black feminist literature from the nineteenth century to contemporary times. In her lifetime, Christian truly pioneered the birth of black women’s literary criticism and theory.
“I can only speak for myself. But when I write and how I write is done in order to save my own life. And I mean that literally,” she noted. “For me literature is a way of knowing that I am not hallucinating, that whatever I feel/know is.”
Hysteria. The vapors. Penis envy. Homosexuality as a disease. Dementia praecox.
There’s no shortage of outmoded or discredited theories in the field of psychology. For the late Joseph White, professor of psychology and comparative culture at UC Irvine and “godfather of black psychology,” the most pressing issue in the field in the late ‘60s and 70s was the representation of African Americans — or lack thereof.
“It is vitally important that we develop, out of the authentic experience of black people in this country, an accurate workable theory of black psychology,” wrote White in his groundbreaking Ebony piece “Toward a Black Psychology.”
His argument was not simply that notions of black inferiority — a predisposition to a lower IQ, for example — were wrong, but that the way psychology evaluated mental health and development, particularly in poorer neighborhoods, was based on biased frameworks that perceived only deficiency, not difference, and invalidated the lived experience of its subjects.
Joseph L. White speaks to students at UC Irvine in 2013.
White critiques, for example, the white researcher who enters a home looking for a copy of the New York Review of Books as evidence of of an intellectually stimulating environment when a black preschooler is nearby reciting several songs from memory. He also takes researchers to task for their reduction of black family life to a series of deficiencies — family unit with a missing father — when a highly engaged extended family often plays a substantive role in the development of a child. And he writes that certain attitudes cherished by white culture do not hold the same significance in black culture because their outcomes are not the same — a dynamic we see in today’s racially divergent perceptions of law enforcement.
A strike against cultural deprivation theory, White argued for a strength, not deficit, based psychology.
Joseph L. White, UCI professor emeritus of social sciences, is known as the “father of black psychology.“ Steve Zylius / UC Irvine.
White’s piece cemented his status as a pioneer, a role to which he was no stranger. White was only one of five black Ph.D.s in psychology when he earned his doctorate in 1961. He became one of the founders of the Association of Black Psychologists in 1968 and produced “Toward a Black Psychology” in 1970, while at UC Irvine.
In addition to paving the way for a multicultural psychology, White was also committed to mentorship, establishing the Educational Opportunity Program, which has provided access for more than 250,000 disadvantaged students in California, many of them the first in their family to college. He personally mentored more than 100 students who went on to become psychologists from diverse backgrounds — African American, Asian American, Latino, Native American and women.
White passed away in late 2017, but leaves behind a legacy from a remarkable life — he was a campaign director for Robert F. Kennedy (!) — and a field, psychology, far more sensitive and inclusive than when he found it.
Fanny for the self-titled album, 1970. Photographer Unkwown
The ideia of the name came from the group’s need of a short feminine name. The guitarrist June Millington explained “We really didn’t think of [the name Fanny] as a butt, a sexual term. We felt it was like a woman’s spirit watching over us.”
They exploited the name by showing the group members from the back and distributing bumper stickers urging record buyers to GET BEHIND FANNY, and a later advertising campaign proclaiming FANNY: THE END OF AN ERA. About fanny
So, friends, it’s been a while. This is going to be a quick post to celebrate the amazing lady pictured above, a Victorian trailblazer whom you may not have heard of before but definitely should remember from now on.
Sophia Jex-Blake, quite apart from having one of the sickest Victorian names I’ve ever come across, was the leader of the ‘Edinburgh Seven’ (the others were Isabel Thorne, Edith Pechey, Matilda Chaplin, Helen Evans, Mary Anderson, and Emily Bovell). These seven women petitioned the University of Edinburgh to allow them to matriculate [i.e., to become students on a course for a degree] in medicine. At first, the uni told Jex-Blake – who initially sought to take the entrance exam alone, before enlisting the help of the others – it would be too expensive and disruptive to have to set up lessons, exams, surgery theaters, etc., for just one woman. Obviously this was an excuse to exlude Jex-Blake because of her gender, which the medical establishment deemed too sensitive and too distracting to allow into their halls. Jex-Blake called their BS, publicly calling for like-minded women via posts in The Scotsmannewspaper and thus gathering together six fellow women. The Edinburgh Seven thus studied up for the matriculation exam. As the Wiki report notes:
Of the 152 candidates who sat the exam on 19 October 1869, five were women. Four of the women came in the top seven places. [x]
By18 November 1870, they were in.
Except, as Virginia Woolf can tell you, getting “in” isn’t the end of the struggle. Once Jex-Blake et al. had joined the program, pushback from the male-dominated students, teaching assistants, professors, and physicians made attending classes – even gettingto lectures – incredibly difficult. Not only did the university charge the womenhigher tuition fees (for the inconvenience of being women and thus necessitatingseparate courses!), but also offered them fewer scholarship opportunities to pay for their coursework. More violent reactions came from classmates and TAs:
Sophia later wrote that it was “as if a conspiracy had been formed to make our position as uncomfortable as might be”. She catalogued the abuse: her doorbell was “wrenched off” and her nameplate damaged five times; a Catherine wheel was attached to her door; smoke was blown in their faces;filthy letters were sent; they were waylaid in quiet streets; obscenities were shouted at them in public.
Edith Pechey, in a letter to the Scotsman, also spoke of being followed in the streets and having “the foulest epithets”, such as “whore”, shouted at her. [x]
Eventually, after an actual “Servants’ Hall riot” about their attendance, the Seven got near the end of their degrees, only for the university to rule in 1873 that the women were to be rejected of their degrees and dismissed.
After that, each of the Seven decided to pursue her medical career elsewhere. Jex-Blake went to Switzerland to finish her training, then eventually – in 1877 – was recognized in Ireland (still then unified and part of the UK) as a doctor. Thus she was eligible to practice in Britain at last.
But she didn’t just go back to any old major or country hospital. Instead, Jex-Blake(at first with Pechey and other comrades from the Edinburgh fight) founded the Edinburgh School of Medicine FOR WOMEN in 1886! For six years, their school continued to be the only one that fully admitted female students in the discipline of medicine; according to the history of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh, “During the twelve years of the School’s existence,at least 80 students started courses of whom 33 completed their training there; [and] 31 completed their training elsewhere” (x). Nor were these just the same middle-class white women who had stormed the Uni of Edinburgh the previous decade:
At the start of the summer term 1888, Annie Wardlaw Jaganndham, a Hindu woman, came to Edinburgh to continue her medical studies. She was soon joined by Annie Wells, who had studied for the Certificate of Medical Practitioner at Madras University and the Grant Duff Gosha Hospital. Dr Jaganndham was the first of many newly qualified doctors to become resident medical officer in the Edinburgh Hospital for Women and Children, to be followed by other newly qualified young doctors in that position. Other doctors who had studied at the School served in more senior posts in the hospital.
After the two women from India graduated, Dr Jex-Blake wrote a second article which was published in The Spectator in 1890. She again stressed the need for women doctors in India. Her plea was answered by Mr James Cropper who instituted a scholarship for that purpose. The first recipient was Rose Govindurajulu who had taken some medical classes in Madras and been given study leave from her post in the Mysore Hospital. Having qualified, she returned to Mysore to become Assistant Physician and later Surgeon in the Mahareenee’s Hospital. (x)
Now, any fair history of Jex-Blake has to acknowledge her reputation – especially among the women with whom she had begun this fight, and who had been the first teachers at the Edinburgh School – as “brilliant, hot-tempered, and resourceful”in a more generous light; in a more unforgiving one, for being a tenacious tyrant. Eventually, disagreements between Jex-Blake and several of her female colleagues led them to part ways, with the Cadells setting up their own school for women in Edinburgh.
In 1894, though, these schools become moot: the University of Edinburgh finally saw the light, and began admitting women for the Faculty of Medicine. (Their tuition still wasn’t covered, and they still for a while had to attend separate lectures from the male students.) Jex-Blake’s and the others’ newer schools were no longer needed, and since they had been a financial and personal burden on Jex-Blake and the other founders from day one, the ESMW closed in 1898.
More happily, Jex-Blake lived the rest of her life with her companion, Dr. Margaret Todd, a younger woman who had graduated from Jex-Blake’s school in 1894! Not only was Todd a minorly successful novelist, but she also is credited with coining the term “ISOTOPE” (!!!), when discussing with friend and chemist Frederick Soddy his work on, well, isotopes. Soddy went on to win the Nobel Prize in chemistry (in 1921, for this very work); Todd went (obviously) unrecognized for years. She died in 1918, at age 58, after completing a detailed work on Jex-Blake’s life.
Jex-Blake herself died in 1912, age 71. As the Edinburgh alumna page dedicated to her notes, she “continued to campaign for women’s suffrage” both in Britain and in the larger empire “until her death” (x).
This woman used to be mocked on the internet but she is obviously a pioneer now the official ‘most bought Christmas present 2014’ are selfie sticks! LEGEND
