Understanding the Motives behind the Medical Field

    It’s the first day of school, and you walk into your first class Literature & Psychoanalysis. You take a sit; your professor greets the class and takes attendance and briefly goes over the syllabus and then boom. You see this image of a group of men in a room; some are taking notes while others are studying something or someone. Your eyes nudge a bit to the direction they are facing, and you see a woman who seems like she is unconscious. Next to the woman seems to be an older man holding her with one arm on her hip and another one pointing to someone. Two other women seem to be nurses and another man observing her from above. If you take a closer look, it seems like the man in the front has an apron on, as if he is some type of doctor or volunteer. The image I am describing to you is from, Charcot, “A Clinical Lesson at the Salpêtrière” and when first noticing this image I expressed no drastic emotion such as anger, sadness, confusion, etc. Which means I am feeling apathetic towards this image.

    At a sudden glance at the image, I was nonchalant about the ordeal and possibly normalizing it based on my perspective on the picture. For instance, this image most likely captures a moment around the 1880s. What more should I expect from those times when women weren’t allowed to vote, have freedom of speech, and to put in simpler terms they were being oppressed. So, when seeing a woman used as a subject of study, I really can’t be surprised since I already knew the history before this image. But I can’t deny the fact that other people believe this is disturbing to see. They see a bunch of people who are men using another person who is a woman as a test subject mainly because of some possible type of mental or organic illness she is possibly facing. When really thinking about it from a different point of view, these scholars are probably doing this with the right mindset but with upsetting methods.

    Let’s observe it from another perspective while only thinking about my own opinions and no other since it will interfere with my analysis. In the medical world, there are two things that doctors have trouble identifying during these times, which are, hysteria “mental” and organic illness. Hysteria, which is now known as mental illnesses, is an unknown virus in the 1880s, while organic illness is something that people could visually see like a fractured arm or torn lung. And while it doesn’t seem like a wholesome way to research and investigate more about hysteria, scholars/doctors must observe people diagnosed with Hysteria to gain more knowledge and help patients in the future. It may or may not seem like a cruel thing to say, but I feel like it’s a coincidence that the patient in the photo is a woman. Women didn’t have the opportunity to be in the medical field except for being a nurse, but they really didn’t possess the privilege to take care of patients by themselves thus making many of the doctors, male. And as for the patient, it could have been that women were the majority facing ‘hysteria’ or men weren’t comfortable consulting doctors their problem if it is not visual maybe because of their pride and ego. That is one way I can describe my emotions about this image by thinking in a more general way. The scholars are learning about new types of illnesses while using a patient as a demonstration. And I believe it is all a misunderstanding of why they are observing her like a naked French girl.

    To tie things up, I discussed one possible scenario of doctors/scholars being misunderstood which made me feel no type of certain emotions. And while people might try and convince me otherwise, people should agree to disagree about opposing viewpoints whether it’s right or wrong. For example, I might be completely wrong about this theory and the patient might be in the lecture room against her will but if I recognize and understand the other side of the argument without any biased judgment that should be fair. We should at least acknowledge each other arguments whether we agree or not because that makes us a well-rounded human being.

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