The Highly Legitimate, Infinitely Respected, and Ever So Weird Laboratory of Dr. Rudolph Witthaus

Steve Gorelick is Professor in the Department of Film and Media Studies at Hunter College of the City University of New York. For close to two decades, his undergraduate class at Hunter College, Myths and Images, has focused on the representation of HIV/AIDS and other health issues in media and culture.

Last week, right in the middle of an undergraduate course I teach – Disease and Disaster in Media and Culture — my students and I found ourselves smack dab on the site of the Hunter-Bellevue School of Nursing.  And, as if this didn’t come as enough of a surprise, we found ourselves there on a hot and humid summer day in 1897.

We have been reading a wonderful new book by Paul Collins — The Murder of the Century:  The Gilded Age Crime That Scandalized the City and Sparked the Tabloid Wars — an account of the legendary Guldensuppe love-triangle murder of 1897.  New York newspaper readers literally learned about the case “piece by piece,” as body parts of the victim began appearing at various sites around the city.

So how did our class end up on the site of the building now housing the site of our very own Center for Health Media and Policy?

The latter decades of 19^th century marked a major turn toward empiricism in criminology. Physicians and scientists interested in crime began the practice of extensively collecting, categorizing, and analyzing both social statistics and physical evidence in an effort to understand who did bad things and why they did them.  This turn toward evidence was significant, but the evidence gathered was most often guided by absolutely nutty theories hypothesizing, for example, connections between facial features and criminal behavior.

During the months in 1897 that the story of the Guldensuppe murder captured public attention, the epicenter of cutting-edge knowledge in forensic criminology was New York City’s Loomis Laboratory. The presiding expert, the legendary Dr. Rudolph Witthaus, Professor of Chemistry and Toxicology, discovered key evidence in the case. I would love to tell you more about the Dr. Witthaus’s amazing combination of toxicological innovation and mind-boggling weirdness, but I would not want to spoil a great read. Let’s just say that, while the Loomis Lab might have been the center of respected knowledge in forensic science, some of what passed for respected scientific orthodoxy was – well – simply wacky.

As I often do when my students and I examine a historical event and location, I plugged the address of the Loomis Lab into Google Maps so we could see the current appearance of the long-forgotten site.  And this is the picture that was projected on the screen.

The Loomis Lab at 410 East 26^th Street was on the site of what is now the Hunter-Bellevue School of Nursing. After a few moments of mental time-travel, in which I actually found myself giggling at the thought of Diana and Barbara as mad scientists creeping around a musty 19^th century lab, something more serious came to mind.

At any stage in history, society has tended to look to the most legitimate and respected institutions and publications for cutting-edge knowledge about health and medicine. These institutions carry enormous symbolic legitimacy. While this legitimacy might on occasion be exaggerated and oversold, no small part of it is a function of having actually advanced knowledge, discovered effective treatments, and vastly improved patient care.

Thinking about the erudite Dr. Witthaus, though, and some of his nutty practices (not to mention his own involvement in nefarious activity),  reminded me of the extent to which we often allow ourselves – impressed with a veneer of symbolic legitimacy — to give a pass to scientific findings that deserve — no, require – serious, informed, and skeptical scrutiny.

An American Journal of Nursing, JAMA or Lancet or SCIENCE article, for example, should seriously engage our attention.  But the public seems to forget that science is not theology, and that these publications are not Holy Scripture reporting settled wisdom.  Findings are contributions to an ongoing and evolving scientific discussion and invitations to disagree and present contradictory evidence.

Unfortunately, such high-profile “certified” findings are often reported as the end of debates rather than the start of discussions. The result might be that subsequent findings on the same problem in the same publication are ignored.

One fascinating current example is the continuing debate that began in October, 2009 with the publication in SCIENCE of an article reporting the detection of an infectious retrovirus, XMRV, in blood cells of patients with chronic fatigue syndrome.  Rather than seeing all the subsequent controversy and contradictory findings as science at its contentious and skeptical best, the whole episode has been reported as evidence of failure and confusion.

Is it unrealistic to wish that a public with more sophisticated health science literacy might see this confusion as precisely how we hope our science will unfold – occasionally definitive, but more often an ongoing process of steps and missteps, advances and setbacks?

Awe is not always a bad thing. I confess to following science like baseball, and am the kind of nerdy guy who can instantly summon several names of researchers for whom my awe is boundless. Check out the work of three of my many “all-stars,” — Susan Mango, Barry Marshall, and Robin Warren.

The point, though, is that awe – of individuals, institutions, publications — should never lead us to end debates or hold back healthy skepticism. Skepticism in science is an act of profound respect, not heresy.

Steve Gorelick is Professor in the Department

Nursing Students as Writers, Part 2

In July, I wrote a post on the first-ever narrative writing course for nursing students at the Hunter-Bellevue School of Nursing. CHMP poet-in-residence Joy Jacobson and I taught the five-week course, which met twice each week for three hours per class. I’m happy to report that it was a great experience for us as instructors and, by the end of the course, the consensus among students was that they didn’t want the class to end.

Eleven nursing students were enrolled and one Hunter staff member audited the course; seven of the 12 participants were not native English speakers (their first languages were Mandarin, Korean, Russian, and Yoruba). Most had done little writing for themselves and all needed to improve compositional and grammatical skills. Nevertheless, all of the students produced creative and moving original writing in a variety of formats, including in-class exercises, blog posts, and personal essays.

Several readers of my previous post asked for more particulars about our teaching methods. Here I’ll focus on the in-class writing exercises.

We spent about the first half hour of each class on one or more “quick writes”—guided writing exercises designed to get everyone writing quickly and spontaneously, without concern for the rules of grammar, spelling, and punctuation. The ideas for the quick writes came from several sources, and we adapted freely from books such as Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within, and The Essential Don Murray, edited by Thomas Newkirk and Lisa C. Miller. We encouraged students to keep their hands moving and to trust their impulses, in the hope that they would get in touch imaginatively with emotions, memories, and sensory impressions, and write about experiences they wouldn’t usually commit to paper. Joy and I did the writing exercises along with the students.

We then spent the next hour of the class reading and discussing what we had just written. While sharing was optional—no one was forced to read aloud—most students were eager to read most of the time. It was remarkable how quickly this sharing helped establish a sense of trust and an atmosphere of mutual support and respect. The feeling that we were coming together as a community of writers proved to be essential as the course progressed and some of the writing prompts led class members into deep and sometimes turbulent emotional waters.

The idea for what may have been the most powerful of the quick writes came from Between the Heartbeats: Poetry and Prose by Nurses, an anthology edited by Cortney Davis and Judy Schaefer. A short piece by Ruth E. Brooks, “Dear Alma Mater,” is in the form of a letter addressed to the Harlem Hospital School of Nursing, which was closed in 1977. The author writes to her alma mater as if it was a person, saying how news of the school’s closing gave her a profound sense of loss. “Let me tell you what part of me was sealed behind those doors,” she writes, and then enumerates not only some of the nursing skills but also the philosophical perspectives she learned there. In concluding, she expresses her sense of indebtedness to the school for helping her transform her life in the process of becoming a nurse.

I found the piece very moving, so I began one class by reading this letter aloud and then asked the students to write a heart-felt letter to a place or a person—living or deceased—that is important in their lives; and I asked them not to hold back, and to write all the things they wish they could say or could have said. When given the chance to express their feelings about what matters most to them, even those students who had the most difficulty with written English wrote clear, straightforward sentences that carried tremendous emotional weight. The stories that came out, the courage the students showed in sharing them, and the way they supported each other’s telling were cathartic and inspiring.

Students also were required to keep a daily journal, and there were assigned readings and writing projects. The final project was a personal essay. One student, Jamie Torres, wrote about her experience of the course itself, and how the close reading and discussion of some of the poems in the Heartbeats anthology had given her a new appreciation of poetry and her own abilities as a writer. She kindly gave me permission to quote from her essay, in which she wrote:

I would encourage all nurses to step out of their comfort zone and start reading poetry, write in a journal, and begin to share their stories. We can call it Narrative Nursing. Louise DeSalvo, author of Writing As a Way of Healing, says, “Through writing we see ourselves as able to solve problems rather than as beset by problems. We enjoy a heightened sense of self. We become more optimistic.” This is what nursing desperately needs. Narrative nursing will give us an opportunity to practice hearing our voice, in a new and fresh way. Maybe through writing we will recognize our own worth.

We’re looking forward to a guest blog post from Jamie sometime soon.

Jim Stubenrauch

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