Imagine a magician who says there is such a thing as “animal magnetism,” an essence or element that exists in your body that can be transmitted by a ritual of the laying of hands. Imagine this practice is a descendant of exorcism, the expulsion of demons by a priest. Imagine that people who engaged in such a ritual claimed that they really experienced convulsions and felt waves of electricity flowing through their bodies. And imagine that this practice was claimed to have a medical purpose.
This an actual case cited by Anne Harrington, a distinguished historian of science at Harvard, in her talk “Bodies Behaving Badly: What the History of Mind/Body Medicine Teaches Us and Why It Matters,” who discussed the ways that cultural understandings of how the body should work in fact influence the way bodies do function.
What she described was no mere intellectual exercise: it referred to a practice known as mesmerism, which had a fervent following in 18th-century Europe. But as the belief in the practice eroded, so did the actual physical effects of the ritual. This pattern is repeated throughout the history of the body, Harrington argued, and she cited numerous other examples of what are now regarded as crackpot or idiosyncratic practices that had at the time real physical and even medical efficacy.
The talk, which took place on February 23 in Blaustein, was this spring semester’s first installment of Pizza and Profundity, a lecture series sponsored by the Philosophy Department. Harrington was introduced by Derek Turner, Chair of the Philosophy Department, who teaches Harrington’s work in his courses in the philosophy of science.
This particular lecture, however, was also co-sponsored by the Psychology Department, a fact that spoke to the interdisciplinary nature of Harrington’s talk. She began by highlighting the physical distance between the life sciences and the humanities and social sciences on the Harvard campus as a metaphor for the intellectual rift between the disciplines, and ended with an entreaty for medical-scientific and cultural understandings of the body to unite their efforts to create a fuller conception of how the body functions.
Harrington sought to challenge the notion that the body is a “culture-free zone” that can be studied independently of cultural values and norms. The gist of her argument is that cultural beliefs profoundly influence the actual workings of human bodies.
“History gets under the skin,” she said. Bodies “culturally conform” to existing norms and expectations. These norms she termed “learned scripts,” likening the expectations surrounding bodies to theater or performance. Bodies, far from being the objective space that medicine traditionally takes them to be, are in fact “narrative and dramaturgical in nature.”
According to these scripts, Harrington argued, bodies “really do change.” In addition to mesmerism, Harrington also discussed neurasthenia, a condition in the late 19th century that was caused by stress that resulted in digestive problems and skin rashes, among other symptoms. It is no longer regarded as a real medical condition, yet it was widely documented at the time. A similar contemporary case is Hwa-byung, a condition restricted mostly to Korean women who have unexpressed anger and other personal frustrations that results in sight loss and lack of balance.
The point of these examples is that when the narratives or “scripts” exist in a culture that supports the possibility of these conditions, they become possible, and when they stop “feeling plausible” to the culture, they cease to exist.
The medical community, however, regards such cases as marginal. The patients in fact suffered from depression, doctors and medical historians argue, or they “tricked” their bodies with their minds to believe in certain phenomena. These experiences are trivialized as “hysterical” or “psychosomatic.”
Against such interpretations Harrington encouraged the audience to “take these bodily experiences seriously.” Harry Rossoff ’12 concurred with this sentiment after the talk, saying he was surprised “how we’ve largely ignored studying culture in the medical science. There’s no reason why we shouldn’t look at cultural explanations” as well.
In our own culture we see the same pattern as those earlier cited cases, Harrington said: the phenomena of the placebo effect is an example of our bodies following the script of bodies being cured by prescribed pills. Placebos are a “central prop” in the script of contemporary medicine, she argued.
Max Sell ’12 said he was sympathetic to Harrington’s argument for a union between biological and cultural understandings of the body, which she described as the “bottom line” of her talk. “I can relate to that as a philosophy major,” he said.
Mike Natriello ’12 agreed, saying he concurred with Harrington that bodies and bodily afflictions are “not purely physical or psychosomatic. It’s still a two-way street.” •
