Welcome to this podcast!
This podcast came about as a way to talk about my favorite things: the representations of science in pop culture, and the ways in which race and gender are constructed in the long 19th century.
I am originally a historian who took a turn into literature and linguistics around the time I moved to the United States in 2007. I hold a BA and an MA in European history from Université de Strasbourg, a MA in Literature, Language and Linguistics from Syracuse University, and a PhD in French Studies from Brown University. 15 years ago, I started working on the construction of gender throughway of women-authored travel journals, particularly women who had traveled to the Maghreb and North America. All the authors I worked on were upper class women, and although you would expect these women to be very traditional, all were bucking what one would expect to be the framework of femininity in the 19th century.
The history of these women, the history of travel, and the birth of mass tourism in France is essentially the history of a complex network that extends on both sides of the Channel and both sides of the Atlantic. It’s the story of how material culture, overconsumption, mass marketing, and capitalism, radically changed the notions of gender and race in the long 19th century, and how some Western European countries underwent massive changes that made them massive imperial behemoths.
I’m interested in all things travel studies, an umbrella term that encompasses different genres: adventure novels, non-fictional travel journals, scientific reports, administrative reports, films, and even leaflets and ads.
It’s an area that is particularly permeable to fads, trends, and structural changes in what it means to be a citizen of a country–it incites political discourse while avoiding it, transmits scientific discoveries, and travel journals are a genre that is inherently democratic and encompassing, because it’s not considered “canonical”.
In this blog, we will talk about subjects that are coursing through these travelers’ lives and notes, and we will do by using one or two objects. Every time, I will give a short history of that object, and relate it to a trend in European and American history in the 19th century. Frequently, this podcast will hop the pond and talk about US history, with the understanding that it’s through the longstanding relationship to its so-called oldest ally, France, that I examine the United States.
Episode 1: Indiennes, Netflix, and the Fashion of the Rising Bourgeoisie
Find episode 1 on PodBean here: https://www.podbean.com/ew/pb-kirpu-1054a2f
Episode 1 Reference
Dominique Kalifa (French historian, 1957-2020)
- Dominique Kalifa’s work in French: L’Encre et le Sang (Paris, 1995); Les Exclus en Europe (Paris, 1999)
- Kalifa’s work in English: Vice, Crime, and Poverty. How the Western Imagination Invented the Underworld (New York, 2019)
Center for Population Studies, Brown University
“Changes and Persistance in the Age of Modernization: Saint-Germain d’Anxurre, 1730-1895.” Working Paper is here (but also, you should visit their international projects page here).
HAL: Archives for Human Sciences (a lot is in French)
There isn’t necessarily one paper to cite here, but the HALS website provides a ton of useful information in economic history, and history more broadly, which are, by far, the fields in which the archive registers the most papers deposited. The project is an imprint of the CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique).
“L’économie matérielle de la France (1830-2005): L’histoire d’un parasite” is a wide-ranging study showing that France long-benefitted from imports for its economy. You can see this paper here. It shows that the trade balance of France has been in a deficit since 1830.
Persée
Persée is another French database for human sciences that’s greatly useful here. This paper is not particularly recent, but it does a good job at showing that Western European countries have run a trade deficit since the 19th century.
On cotton trade, and indiennes
- There is a fantastic museum of fabric in Mulhouse, historically a center of production, which has one of the most extensive collections of indienne patterns in Europe. Find it some of it here.
- Beckert, Sven. Empire of Cotton: A Global History. New York City, 2015.
Economic history/economic terms
- Organic-based economy: an economy that’s dependent upon agricultural production.
- Mineral-based economy: a developing country’s economy, basically, which generates around 8-10% of its GDP based on minerals like coal, and at least 40% of its exports.
Episode 2: Cuvier and the Birth of Compared Anatomy
Find the episode on PodBean here: www.podbean.com/ew/pb-idn7n-1054a49
A small correction here: my accent makes it seem like I’m saying Marion Smith at the end, but I of course meant James Marion Sims, the man who tortured dozens of Black women in the name of science and gynecology.
Episode 2 References:
On Cuvier
- Dorinda Outram’s work on Cuvier is, of course, unavoidable and great: George Cuvier. Vocation, Science, and Authority in Post-Revolutionary France. Cambridge: 1984.
- Two researchers actually attempted to trace the biography of Baartman, and they discuss it here.
On racialisation
- Stephen Jay Gould’s much discussed book, The Mismeasure of Man, talks about Baartman and Cuvier. Gould’s book has a long history of being controversial–in 2011, the NYTimes, gleefully published this article on work done by a team of scientists at Penn State that seemingly debunked Gould’s views of racialism and scientists’ bias, and especially his work on Samuel Morton’s skull collection. But a subsequent paper in 2015 proved that this study had only accounted for 46% of the skull collection, and did not take into account pondering factor, and in the years since then works by Paul Mitchell and others have shown that with similar datasets, other 19th century scientists came to opposite conclusions. Suffice to say that the notion that scientists don’t have biases is not a good one…
- Alice Conklin’s In the Museum of Man is a good introduction to the rest of the story–it follows anthropology’s progressive rebellion against power and the idea of racism, and bridges the gap between this podcast and Claude Levi Strauss’ A World in Wane, to the conclusion of French anthropology, eventually, that race is a historical and social construct.
Side references:
This is the Jules Verne picture by Gill I am referring to in the episode:
On exorcism is on the rise, as churches empty in the West, see The Atlantic here.
The Museum of Natural History of Strasbourg is currently undergoing extensive renovations and will not reopen until 2023, but you can see the cabinet of curiosities of Johannes Hermann here. Note the pufferfish on the left shelves, topmost shelf!
The Oeuvre Notre-Dame’s sculpture department, in Strasbourg, is remarkable, and the museum itself is one of the few in France entirely dedicated to medieval and renaissance arts (actually not that common in France, and in Europe, as in general, medieval arts tend to be part of bigger museums). The museum is part of a European network of medieval museums, alongside the Musée de Cluny in Paris.
Episode 3: The Photographer, The Doctor, and the Madwoman
Find the episode on PodBean here: https://www.podbean.com/ew/pb-snt7e-11154cd
Episode 3 References:
On Charcot
Foucault, Michel. Madness and Civilization. A History of Ins in the Age of Reason. Random House: NY, 1965.
Foucault, Michel. The Birth of the Clinic. An Archeology of Medical Perception. Random House: NY, 1973
Gelfand, Toby. “Charcot’s Response to Freud’s Rebellion.” Journal of the History of Ideas. 50.2, June 1989: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2709736?seq=3#metadata_info_tab_contents
Goetz, Christopher. Charcot: Constructing Neurology. Oxford: OUP, 1995. Goetz is one of the leading authorities in the medical world on Charcot. He rightfully underlines that Charcot was favorable to female doctors, but he minimizes the fact that we don’t really have any female voices here to speak, as patients, of Charcot. It is true, as I mention in the episode, that there is no evidence that Charcot ever was physically or verbally abuse with his patients, but some of his interns certainly were, and the work he oversaw was oppressive to patients, as well as to some extent staged. I’m not diminishing the contributions Charcot made to neurology–but he was a man, not a God, and that man let patients be dehumanized and dramatized for the benefits of Science and his own clinic. Like Cuvier, Charcot was a man of ambition–a piece that is too often sugar-coated in articles on Charcot.
Kumar and ali. “Jean-Martin Charcot: The Father of Neurology.” Clinical Medicine and Research. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3064755/
PBS. A Science Odyssey: People and Discoveries: Jean-Martin Charcot. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aso/databank/entries/bhchar.html
Shah, Shailesh and Waraich, Manni. “Jean-Martin Charcot”. Journal of the Intensive Care Society. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1751143717709420
Showalter, Elain. Hystories. Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Media. CU Press: New York Press, 1997.
You can find some of the pictures from Meige’s work and Charcot’s Lessons on the Nervous System in the online collections of Brown University, in the project Paris, Capital of the 19th Century, for which I contributed research and metadata.
On the Pitié-Salpêtrière (in addition to Foucault’s work of course)
Micale, Mark. “The Salpetriere in the Age of Charcot.” Journal of Contemporary History. 20, 4. October 1985. https://www.jstor.org/stable/260404?seq=4#metadata_info_tab_contents
Walusinski, Olivier, MD. “Albert Londe, Photographe à la Pitié-Salpêtrière.” http://baillement.com/recherche/londe_albert.pdf
On Willard Asylum
Atlas OBscura’s page on Willars: https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/willard-asylum-for-the-chronic-insane
Barry, Dan. “Restoring Lost Names, Lost Dignity” The New York Times. November, 27, 2014. https://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/28/us/restoring-lost-names-recapturing-lost-dignity.html
Penney, Darby and Statsny, Peter. The Lives They Left Behind: Suitcases from a State Hospital Attic. Bellevue Press: NY, 2009
The exhibit, “The Suitcases of Willard,” documented some of the suitcases’ owners and content. The exhibit was once hosted permanently in the disABILITY museum in Buffalo, NY. Unfortunately, last year, a victim of its lack of permanent funding (and interest from the state administration) and COVID, the museum closed for good. You can still find some of its collections online here. You can find a more extensive documentation of the suitcases on a website maintained by the photographer who took pictures of the suitcases to document them before the state decided whether to dispose of them or not. The website is here. You can read the page on the content of Lawrence Mocha’s suitcase here, and you can learn more about him here.
On the link between arts and mental illness
Gordon, Rae Beth. De Charcot à Charlot. Mises en scène du corps pathologique. Rennes: PU Rennes, 2020
On mental illness, abuses in asylums in films
Laurent, Mélanie. The Mad Women’s Ball, 2021. Trailer here. Available on Amazon Prime.
Monot, Jean-Christophe and Jean-Christophe Valtat. Augustine. Currently unavailable anywhere, but Gordon’s book contain a copy on the DVD that accompanies the book.
Winocour, Alice. Augustine, 2012. Trailer here. Available for rent on Apple TV or Google Play movies.
Wiseman, Frederick. Titicut Follies, 1967.
On autism in France and Michael A Woodbury
Autism is very controversially treated/evaluated in France, and France is regularly called out by human rights institutions over its lack of assistance to autistic children–formal calls to the European commissions and the European Court of Human Rights were made in 2004 and 2012, and in both cases France was found in violation of European treaties. This article (link is in French) summarizes the rights of autistic people in Europe, and compares educational opportunities in France, Spain and Poland. As a point of comparison, France only educates through the school system an estimated 40% of its autistic children population, versus 70% in the United Kingdom.
This senior thesis from Scripps College actually does a great job at showing how France is behind in helping autistic children: https://scholarship.claremont.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://www.google.com/&httpsredir=1&article=1278&context=scripps_theses
HHK Medical News article on Cohen and packing in France: http://interverbal.blogspot.com/2007/08/state-of-autism-science-in-france-could.html
This article on packing and the history of packing’s use in autism, from Social Science and Medicine gives a good rundown of the history of packing, and the role that some parental lobbies have played in making “alternative” cures for autism so big in France, and the role other parent associations played in finally having packing prohibited: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277953619302278
Molet, Mikaël. “Le packing vu autrement”. In this article (in French), the author explains the debate around packing, its political background, but also gives a solid summary of why packing is, in his scientific opinion, not a good practice that can provoke psychological trauma: https://www.cairn.info/revue-enfance-2012-4-page-435.htm
Side references:
This is the two paintings I refer to in this episode:
The scene of the worker having a sudden breakdown in Modern Times is an excellent way to illustrate the influence of Parisian psychiatry on film, even more so because the film is outrageously plagiarized from an earlier French movie, à Nous la Liberté, by René Clair (1931)
The Traveling Scholar | AC Sieffert, PhD 