Tag: Medicine

The Rise and Fall of Black Boston’s First Hospital (episode 294)

Despite the name, Plymouth Hospital was a South End institution.  As the first training school for Black nurses in segregated Boston, Plymouth provided a needed service to an underserved community, led by a medical pioneer.  Dr. Cornelius Nathanial Garland moved to Boston from the deep south to seek opportunity, but while he found opportunity in the Hub, he also found a deeply segregated medical establishment.  To fight against this system and provide opportunities for Black Bostonians in medicine, he founded a hospital and nursing school.  However, the most radical civil rights leader in Boston would accuse Garland of reinforcing that very same system of segregated medicine.


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Revolutionary Surgeons: Patriots and Loyalists on the Cutting Edge, with Dr. Per-Olof Hasselgren (episode 237)

Dr. Per-Olof Hasselgren is a practicing surgeon and author of the recent book Revolutionary Surgeons: Patriots and Loyalists on the Cutting Edge, which is a profile of eleven Revolutionary War surgeons.  Dr. Hasselgren joined Jake to discuss the Boston physicians, brothers, and brothers in arms Joseph and John Warren.  Joseph is famous for arranging the lantern signal from Old North and dispatching Paul Revere on his famous ride, as well as for his heroic death at Bunker Hill.  His little brother John followed him into politics and medicine, and went on to found Harvard Medical School. 

Dr. Hasselgren brings a unique perspective to the conversation, examining the medical careers of these eminent physicians through a physician’s eyes.  The episode explores how 18th century physicians learned their craft, how they earned a living, and how they intermingled medicine and politics, as well as how surgery was changing during the Revolution and the groundbreaking surgery pioneered by John Warren and his son John Collins Warren.


Continue reading Revolutionary Surgeons: Patriots and Loyalists on the Cutting Edge, with Dr. Per-Olof Hasselgren (episode 237)

Dr. Rebecca Crumpler, Forgotten No Longer (episode 200)

Dr. Rebecca Davis Lee Crumpler was the first Black woman to earn a medical degree in the US in 1864, and she spent most of her adult life in Charlestown, Beacon Hill, and the Readville section of Hyde Park.  She devoted her career to pediatrics and obstetrics, published the first medical text by an African American author, and made a point of caring for the marginalized, even moving to Virginia to tend to formerly enslaved people at the end of the Civil War.  The nation’s first Black female physician lay in an unmarked grave for 125 years, but there have been important developments in the story of Dr. Crumpler while we’ve been in quarantine this year.


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Dissection Denied (episode 188)

Levi Ames was a notorious thief who plagued the Boston area in the years just before the Revolutionary War began.  He stole everything from shirts to silver plate, crisscrossing New England, until he finally got caught right here in Boston.  Tune in to learn about his criminal background, his supposed jailhouse religious conversion, and the desperate race between some of the most prominent Bostonians to steal his body after his execution.

Continue reading Dissection Denied (episode 188)

The Bloody Flux of 1775, with Judy Cataldo (episode 181)

In the late summer of 1775, a terrible epidemic struck Boston, and much of New England.  As the Revolutionary War heated up, and the siege of Boston reached its peak, both armies faced an invisible enemy.  Judy Cataldo will join us on the show this week to explain the disease that was known at the time as the bloody flux.  Today, we might know it better by the name dysentery or shigella.  The bloody flux was a diarrheal disease that took a terrible toll on the region’s children, but now it’s barely remembered, as it’s overshadowed by a smallpox outbreak of the same year.


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Epidemics and Public Health in Boston (episode 176)

I had planned an episode on a different topic for this week, but in light of our current COVID-19 state of emergency, I decided to share some classic clips about Boston’s experiences with epidemics and public health. Speaking of public health, I hope you’re already practicing social distancing, staying at home as much as you can, limiting contact with strangers, and staying six feet away from other people whenever you can. During the 1918 “Spanish” flu, cities that practiced social distancing fared much better than those that didn’t, and in that case Boston was slow to close schools, churches, theaters, and other gathering places. I hope we’ll do better this time around. Along with the 1918 flu pandemic, we’ll be discussing an 1849 cholera epidemic that Boston fought with improved sanitation, and the 1721 smallpox season, when Cotton Mather controversially used traditional African inoculation techniques that he learned from Oneismus, who was enslaved in the Mather household.


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Trunk Tragedy in the City of Shoes (episode 169)

In February 1879, Jennie Clarke’s body was found jammed into a leather trunk on the bank of the Saugus river on her 20th birthday. Every detail of the case reveals yet another tragedy in the life of Jennie Clarke, who died after attempting to terminate an unwanted pregnancy, and it reveals the unexpectedly permissive approach of Massachusetts law to abortion in the mid-1800s.  


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Boston in the Time of Cholera (episode 161)

Cholera is a truly horrifying disease, with severe diarrhea causing death through dehydration, while the patient remains awake and in agony.  The disease is carried by fecal bacteria, so it’s virtually unknown in highly developed countries today, because of our sophisticated sewage and drinking water systems.  Back in 1849, Boston had just begun to address its drinking water needs, with the Cochituate aqueduct opening the year before. We had not, however, even begun to deal with our sewage.  In most of Boston, raw sewage ran in open gutters down the sides of the street. When the first major cholera epidemic hit Boston in the summer of 1849, hundreds died.  There were no antibiotics or IV rehydration to treat victims with.  Instead, the city government took a public health approach that was focused on sanitation first.


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The Miracle of Ether (episode 129)

Among the many medical breakthroughs that are attributed to Boston, surgical anesthesia is among the most impactful.  It’s hard to overstate the importance in medical history of ether for the treatment of pain, particularly for those undergoing surgical procedures. Many believe that this technique was pioneered at MGH under the famous Ether Dome, but history tells us a different origin story.


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Apocalypse on Boston Bay (episode 119)

In the years immediately before English Puritans settled on the Shawmut Peninsula, a series of epidemics nearly wiped out the indigenous population of New England.  The worst of these plagues was centered on Boston Harbor, and swept from Narragansett Bay in the south to the Penobscot River in the North. It was the greatest tragedy to befall Native peoples of the region, who sometimes referred to it as “the Great Dying,” while English settlers called it a “wonderful plague” or a “prodigious pestilence.”  They believed the disease had been sent by God to purge the native inhabitants of the continent and make way for his chosen people.


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