TY - JOUR
AU - Pacitti,, Eugenia
AB - Abstract Historians of medicine have observed that the student experience of medical school is difficult to capture. While students sometimes left behind notebooks containing lecture notes and diagrams, there is often little evidence that illuminates their lived experiences and responses to their education. This article analyses written submissions to the publication of the Melbourne Medical Students’ Society, Speculum, between 1884 and 1912, to argue that students at the Melbourne Medical School in this era actively participated in discussions about the curriculum on offer, were highly aware of the moral and ethical consequences of their actions in the dissecting room and took great interest in the advancements and debates of the medical profession. It reclaims the student experience of medical school, which has often been hidden in favour of history written from the perspective of those in positions of power, to offer fresh insights into the history of medical education. medical education, medical schools, medical students, dissection, cadaver poem We are poor hard-working Meds, who’re mostly skin and bone, We’ve a hide like elephants, and need a head like stone, We have toiled until we’ve got no soul to call our own, But we’ve got the good old Med’s Society.1 Early students at the Melbourne Medical School faced limited resources, a difficult curriculum and a poor public image. In spite, or perhaps because of these challenges, these medical students created and experienced a community that helped forge hardworking, insightful young men and women who maintained a strong sense of pride and good humour in their endeavours. In the 50 years from the school’s opening in 1862, over one thousand students graduated from the course. Yet, we know little about their experiences. This article disrupts the historical silence that surrounds the student experience of medical school in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Australia. It contends that students at the Melbourne Medical School in this era actively shaped and reflected on their experiences of medical school. They engaged in discussions about the curriculum on offer, showed awareness of the moral and ethical consequences of their actions in the dissecting room and took great interest in the debates of the profession at large. By elevating the often-overlooked voices of medical students to a more prominent position within the existing scholarship about the medical school experience, this article contributes fresh historical insight into what it meant to be a medical student in Melbourne between 1884 and 1912. While medical students have sometimes left behind notebooks containing lecture notes and diagrams, these sources often provide little insight into their lived experiences. Indeed, historian Thomas Neville Bonner notes that the student experience of medical school is ‘difficult to recapture’.2 Despite this difficulty, scholars have recently taken up this challenge to shift attention towards hidden voices and actors within the history of medical education. Historians, such as Elizabeth Hurren and Michael Sappol, have comprehensively examined the conduct of medical students’ training in the nineteenth century. While Sappol provides an in-depth discussion of the relationship between medical education, hospital learning and the wider medical profession in the USA, Hurren contributes a significant analysis of the dissecting room and its occupants in Victorian England.3 In a similar vein, scholars have also explored medical students’ conduct during their time at medical school. For instance, Keir Waddington’s discussion of the changing image of English medical students throughout the nineteenth century contributes a greater understanding of how medical schools sought to curtail poor student behaviour.4 Building on this research, Laura Kelly’s recent scholarship on Irish medical student culture has further encouraged this methodological approach that prioritises the student experience in histories of medical education and institutions.5 The emphasis these historians place on students’ affective experiences as an integral part of their education provides an important framework for this article.6 There is also a wealth of sociological work from the 1950s and 1960s that considers how student culture combined with educational processes and environments to shape medical students into professionals.7 Taken together, these scholars have made significant inroads to unearthing the student experience of medical school and situating it within broader narratives of medicine and society. Scholarship in the Australian context is less developed. To date, literature on the history of Australian medical education is primarily comprised of biographies and institutional histories that celebrates the achievements of prominent medical men and chronicles the establishment of medical schools and teaching hospitals.8 Several works also examine the synergies between established medical schools in Britain and the newly fledged schools in colonial Australia.9 With the exceptions of medical historian Ross L. Jones’ thorough account of the anatomy department at the Melbourne Medical School, and former medical student Bryan Gandevia’s short but informative volume of the activities of the Medical Students’ Society (MSS), students often appear silent and passive in this scholarship, if they appear at all.10 To contribute an Australian perspective to the growing literature on the medical school experience, I analyse submissions from the journal of the Melbourne MSS, Speculum, as well as a range of correspondence and newspaper articles that shed light on the student experience of medical school. The MSS first published Speculum in July 1884 to continue its role in bringing ‘students of all years into contact, and to foster a kindly feeling’ within the student body.11 As the journal’s inaugural editor, H. R. Salmon, declared in the first issue, students intended that Speculum would ‘reflect ideas of the Melbourne medical student among his fellows’. They also hoped it would ‘imbue … the public mind with a totally different opinion of medical students to what ha[d] ben its wont in the past’.12 Although the Melbourne Medical School faculty maintained the power to discipline, and even remove, members of the editorial committee who had been voted in by their peers, the journal’s content was relatively unrestricted, and the relationship between student contributors, editors and staff generally remained good-natured. Indeed, staff, such as Professor of Anatomy and Pathology Harry Brookes Allen, contributed prose and verse to the journal on numerous occasions.13 A faculty member also acted as chairman at each fortnightly MSS meeting, as well as at annual meetings where, according to reports in Speculum, they often congratulated students on the society’s achievements.14 Jones suggests that students sometimes used Speculum as a ‘thorn in the side of authority’ to complain about particular members of staff and the school’s operations.15 However, they also praised their teachers who, in many cases, worked to advance their interests.16 The MSS brought Speculum into being with the support of the Melbourne Medical School. It was medical students from all year levels, however, who brought Speculum to life. They contributed a broad range of submissions: from reports detailing meetings between influential members of the medical sphere to creative writing and from complaints about the curriculum to advertisements for the society’s many social events. Some contributions assumed a serious tone as students petitioned the medical school and university for better conditions, while others presented humorous musings and social commentary designed to entertain. Together, these articles convey the array of issues, both in terms of their education and the profession, that interested and concerned students at the Melbourne Medical School. Speculum enjoyed a high subscription rate among medical students in the late nineteenth century and over time, broadened its reach to recent medical graduates and students in other faculties. In 1904, it also claimed a ‘large circulation among Medical Men in and around Melbourne and throughout the Commonwealth’ that ensured student voices gained exposure in the medical profession.17 While fluctuations in the number of subscribers and contributors often left the MSS with limited funds and content, it published between one and four issues of Speculum annually during the period covered in this article. It is difficult to gauge the journal’s reception and ability to instigate tangible changes within the medical school and medical profession. Nevertheless, it functioned as an outlet for students to express their thoughts on any subject affecting them as a body to create a shared experience of medical school and to engage with the medical profession at large. By analysing student voices in Speculum, this article recaptures students’ experiences, interests, successes and concerns from their perspective, rather than that of their professors and superiors. The Melbourne Medical School and Its Students Concerned that many of its Arts graduates were obliged to move overseas should they wish to obtain a medical education, the University of Melbourne Council engaged in discussions in January 1857 to institute a Faculty of Medicine. Advice was sought from prominent English anatomists, a curriculum laid out and building plans tendered, but issues of cost and viability consistently stalled progress.18 When the medical school finally opened its doors in 1862, it had only the bare bones of infrastructure, equipment and staff to function. The school’s first professor, George Britton Halford, even held dissection classes in a converted stable in the backyard of his rental house until a more appropriate location became available.19 Three inaugural students enrolled in the 5-year course consisting of classes in general anatomy, physiology, pathology, materia medica, classical languages and chemistry, as well as dissection in the second and third years. A decade later, that number had scarcely increased to 13 students.20 As enrolment numbers grew in the years that followed, students formed the MSS, which held its first meeting in 1880. While forming a medical school in a small, colonial city presented significant challenges, it soon became a lively community of students and professors, who played instrumental roles in establishing the medical profession in Australia. In late nineteenth-century Melbourne, much of the public viewed medical students in an extremely poor light. With the profession of anatomy, and its practitioners, already ‘regularly at the centre of scandal and dispute’, contemporary newspaper reports depicting medical students engaging in riotous conduct, being arrested for drunken behaviour and displaying contempt for authority only compounded the negative public perception under which they laboured.21 For instance, The Argus reported an incident in August 1888, in which 200 students arrived at the Melbourne Exhibition Building, dressed in cap and gown, to carry out a practical joke during a concert. The students held aloft a banner emblazoned with their well-known emblem of the skull and crossbones and carried ‘about 30 femurs, or thigh bones, vouched for as human’, but of origins unknown.22 The ‘youthful Galens’ sang and marched through the building until a ‘collision with the police’ resulted in the destruction of two chairs and a table, as well as the threat of prosecution.23 Melbourne medical students’ penchant for mischief was on show again the following year, when they disrupted a public performance of Hamlet. They reportedly sang loudly ‘with the time marked by the beating of long thigh bones with skulls swaying pendulum-wise’.24 While some audience members found the students’ ‘exuberance of youth’ endearing, others were less amused and complained about their antics.25 Newspaper reports about ill-discipline, coupled with the suspicion that had long surrounded anatomists’ work with dead bodies behind the closed doors of the medical school, cast medical students in an unfavourable light. Colonial Australian medical students appear to have inherited part of their poor public perception from their British contemporaries.26 British medical students were regularly portrayed in nineteenth-century popular fiction and satirical publications as ‘low men of low habits’, who were ill-mannered, boorish and frequently drunk.27 For example, a series of articles in Punch from the early 1840s presents London medical students as ‘a dissipated and irreligious set of young men’ with a variety of unappealing traits.28 Waddington also points to Charles Dickens’ 1837 novel The Pickwick Papers, with its unattractive characterisation of the two fictional medical students as ‘slovenly’ and ‘mildewy’, as a salient example of the depictions that permeated the popular imagination.29 Waddington argues that medical students came to embody the anxieties and proclivity for vice that accompanied the growing urbanism of London in the mid-nineteenth century.30 While the behaviour of many Australian colonial medical students brought negative attention to themselves, the parallels between public perceptions of medical students in Britain and its far-flung colony suggest that the Australian public, too, shared many of the same social anxieties. Curriculum and Conduct Despite their poor public image and tendency for raucous revelry, Melbourne medical students took the content and quality of their education seriously. They used Speculum as a ‘medium of expression for the[ir] needs and grievances’ about aspects of the curriculum they deemed poor or lacking, as they acted to try to improve their educational experience.31 For example, students often felt frustrated at the content and length of the course offered at the Melbourne Medical School, which was 5 years long, compared to the shorter 4-year courses at prestigious schools in London and Edinburgh. They believed that their course was deficient compared to overseas offerings, with one student labelling it ‘a weakly little curriculum prematurely born’.32 Far from merely complaining about the state of affairs, students stated clearly the changes to the curriculum they wanted to be implemented. At the start of the teaching year in 1889, an editorial declared: ‘we want more bedside instruction [and] more true clinics with the cases before us’. The editor continued that students also wanted ‘more instruction in diagnoses, in operations, in fact, in the great mass of knowledge that comes not from books, but can only be gained in the wards’.33 Indeed, the first year of the curriculum contained almost no practical work and instead included subjects, such as Greek and Latin and Natural Philosophy, that most students detested. It was only in the second, third and fourth years that students began to study anatomy and take up what little clinical experience the city’s hospitals had to offer. Compared to overseas offerings, students lambasted the Melbourne Medical School course as ‘splendid in theory, but lamentably lacking in practice’.34 The opportunity to gain clinical experience was among the most acclaimed features of medical courses in Britain in this era, so it is unsurprising that students in the colony wanted to receive the level and style of education they admired from afar.35 While it is not clear if complaints published in Speculum always reached the ears of those who could enact change, a report from 1899 reveals that the medical school faculty concurred at times with students’ views that the curriculum was ‘overcrowded with systematic lectures’ and worked to improve it.36 Medical students often expressed concern at the difficulty of the Melbourne Medical School course. In 1889, one student wrote to Speculum that the ‘undue element of severity in the examinations’ was such that it ‘occasionally over[came] the result of hard work done under very able teaching’.37 Those dissatisfied with the course frequently chose to complete their education in Britain, where they believed the curriculum and facilities were superior and the examinations were easier.38 Early students may also have worried about pursuing such a challenging curriculum because medical authorities in England only began to recognise the Melbourne degree in 1890. Students also expressed the detrimental impact that the rigorous course had on them emotionally. For example, in 1910, one young student named Edward Holder wrote to his former teacher, Professor Allen, that he ‘went home [to England] almost broken-hearted’ having not made it through his final examinations due to the heavy workload.39 He had then attempted to finish his studies at the Edinburgh Medical School, but a lack of funds prevented this endeavour. Holder’s story underscores the anguish that some students suffered during their time at medical school. These first-hand accounts reveal a thoughtful and vulnerable side to medical students that has often been overshadowed by the negative aspects of their behaviour. As well as a long and difficult curriculum, the Melbourne Medical School was also affected by the inability to procure cadavers for dissection that plagued most medical schools in the nineteenth century. The supply of corpses to the medical school was regulated by the Victorian Anatomy Act of 1862, which was based largely on the British Anatomy Act of 1832. The Victorian Anatomy Act allowed licensed medical men to acquire bodies for the purpose of dissection, but like the British act, it did not specify the institutions where corpses should be procured—a lack in detail that meant no institution was compelled to hand over the unclaimed dead.40 As a result, the medical school depended almost exclusively on the Melbourne Hospital to acquire the requisite corpses. On several occasions in the 1870s, Professor Halford attempted to increase the supply of cadavers by petitioning both the University Council and the city’s Benevolent Asylum to allow the unclaimed bodies of deceased patients to be channelled to the medical school for students to dissect.41 Halford’s efforts did little to help the situation; there were apparently no bodies in 1887 and an ‘insufficient and intermittent’ supply of cadavers that amounted to a ‘subject-famine’ in 1888.42 With as few as ‘four bodies for one hundred men’ in 1894, students would be lucky to see the subject at all, let alone gain hands-on experience of dissecting.43 Consequently, students noted that a ‘prevailing depression … invaded the dissecting room’.44 Many of those who paid four pounds and four shillings—a significant sum for students—for the opportunity to dissect a whole body over the course of the winter months did not receive their money’s worth. One student reflected that ‘if only two parts, double-handed at that, can be given to each student, it is not honest to charge for a whole body to himself’.45 Furthermore, those who did not gain adequate dissection experience would be at a disadvantage when they were examined on body parts that they had never seen or dissected. Students found faculty support for their concerns in 1889, when Professor Allen contacted Melbourne’s charitable institutions to ask for further assistance in the matter of cadaver procurement.46 Despite the school’s desperate attempts to obtain a sufficient number of cadavers, the issues surrounding this part of the medical school experience continued for the rest of the century, and many students missed out on seeing the body’s interior first-hand. Nevertheless, by using Speculum to bring their frustration at the lack of dissection subjects to those in charge of the school, students took it upon themselves to advocate for a better education. The educational experience of medical school was not all doom and gloom, however, as students frequently commented on the positive changes being made at their school. One student remarked in 1887 that the ‘light and airy appearance’ of the dissecting room meant one was ‘almost prepared to see the corpse on the table smile’.47 The issue of procuring sufficient dissection subjects appeared to improve around 1905, as did the opportunities for practical work at the city’s hospitals. Moreover, following the appointment of a new Professor of Anatomy, Richard Berry, in early 1906, students rejoiced that the teaching of ‘anatomy [was] no longer dry bone’, as it had been under his predecessor, Professor Allen.48 Light-hearted commentary about professors and the classroom antics contained within Speculum further evokes the enjoyable aspects of medical school education. Plumbing students’ written contributions to the journal bring to light what mattered to them and what they thought about their experience at medical school—the good and the bad. In addition to training in the practical skills necessary to becoming a medical professional, the Melbourne Medical School went to great lengths to ensure that students learnt about the professional conduct and ethics that would help them on their journeys into medical careers. They took part in practices of moral enculturation, such as attending lectures and presentations, where they began to appreciate the medical profession’s normative behaviours and mores. Speaking about ideals in the profession in September 1900, Dr G. Rothwell Adam warned students not to enter ‘the pursuit of medicine with no aim other than that of adding to [one’s] bank account’.49 To Adam, there was nothing more shameful than ‘the practice of medicine when conducted on … commercial lines from which the scientific spirit is absent’.50 In another address entitled ‘Our Duties and Responsibilities’, Dr P. Ward Farmer reminded his students that their ‘influence for good or evil [was] very great’ and to ‘treat poor patients as if they were the wealthiest in the land, remembering that position is largely a matter of accident’.51 Farmer continued that ‘kindness, politeness, and gentle manners’ towards patients were of the utmost importance during professional practice.52 These guiding words of professors and well-respected medical professionals appeared in the pages of Speculum, which ensured that even students who did not attend the lectures in person would be able to engage with the ideas presented. The journal played a crucial role in enabling students to become familiar with the norms and rules of the professional culture into which they would soon enter. The fact that columns about medical ethics and ideals appeared frequently in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries suggests that students found this type of advice a welcome addition to the practical training of medical school. A May 1903 editorial captures the sense that students reflected earnestly on this content. The author wrote that ‘a doctor is not to be regarded as a mere concocter of prescriptions, and a surgeon is not a man who uses a scalpel only’.53 He encouraged his fellow students to treat patients as men and women, not ‘as pathological specimens pure and simple’.54 As mentioned earlier, nineteenth-century medical students had developed a reputation for their poor behaviour in public and around patients. With this in mind, the revelation that students found this type of advice valuable enough to publish in the student journal suggests that they endeavoured to embrace the more humanistic elements of medical work—perhaps to improve their public image. Students in London, Edinburgh and Belfast also listened to yearly introductory addresses and had access to publications that spoke of the discipline needed to become a doctor.55Speculum differs from these overseas publications through the insight it provides into students’ reflections on the content of such speeches and advice; it reveals what they absorbed and how they felt about the ideas their superiors imparted. Melbourne medical students developed a collective identity through embracing narratives about what it meant to be a good doctor. The inculcation of attitudes, values, beliefs and behaviour into students was not part of a hidden curriculum, as sociologists have often claimed, but an integral part of the student experience at the Melbourne Medical School in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.56 From as early as 1883, the MSS also fostered a sense of shared experience for students through hosting smoke-nights and theatre nights, which consisted of singing, piano playing, recitations and, presumably, a steady consumption of alcohol. Such activities aimed to ‘promote good feeling and sociality among Medical Students generally, both senior and junior’.57 To this end, the society organised regular Hare and Hounds running races, which were usually followed by a formal dinner, to which the medical faculty and prominent members of the profession were invited. W. A. Osborne, who was Professor of Physiology from 1903 to 1938, recalled that it ‘took a little courage to attend a Medical Students’ Society Dinner’ because ‘things often got lively’. He believed, though, that these ‘youthful sallies’ did ‘a lot of good’ for those who attended.58 The attendance of over 360 people at the first annual ball in 1907 demonstrates the popularity of the society’s social scene.59 Students showed their pride in the society they had created by marching behind their own banner and carrying skeleton-related props during the procession to celebrate the medical school’s jubilee in 1906 (Figure 1).60Speculum also advertised extracurricular groups such as the Anatomical and Anthropological Society for students who wished to cultivate their knowledge further to what was required for examinations. Medical students developed a sense of collegiality through their interactions at informal events, and the jocular nature of Speculum’s reports about such events suggests their importance in relieving some of the pressures of medical school. Fig. 1 Open in new tabDownload slide Medical Students’ Society display for the University’s Jubilee procession, 1906, Speculum, no. 65, May 1906, 15 Fig. 1 Open in new tabDownload slide Medical Students’ Society display for the University’s Jubilee procession, 1906, Speculum, no. 65, May 1906, 15 The Affective Experience of Medical School As well as depicting students’ engagement with matters of curriculum and conduct, Speculum also reveals how they reflected on the emotionally challenging aspects of one of medical school’s most enduring and symbolic practices: dissection. Scholars commonly trace the origins of dissection to thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Italian medical schools and fifteenth-century public anatomy exhibitions that saw skilled anatomists perform dissections and explain the function of internal bodily structures to large, enthusiastic crowds.61 It was not until the nineteenth century, however, that dissection became an integral part of Western medical education. Despite the long history of dissection in medical schools, when students stepped up to the table, they often lacked sufficient knowledge, skills and guidance in how to undertake the task successfully. In her work on the epistemology of dissection in early nineteenth-century America, historian Rachel N. Ponce provides evidence that students in this era regularly made ‘false starts’ when dissecting; they often made a cut in the wrong place or with an incorrect technique.62 To make matters worse, students often had only blunt scalpels and dull knives with which to work. Ponce notes that supervision of the dissecting room was also inadequate, which meant that students did not always know what to do or how to behave when confronted with the difficult task of cutting open the body of a recently deceased human being. Similar issues existed at the Melbourne Medical School, where one student recounted working with ‘faulty appliances’ of an inferior quality to those available commercially.63 He remarked on one instance in which the ‘first plunge of [a student’s] knife went straight through the sternum’ and another where, ‘the first cut of the saw took the calvarium almost completely off’.64 These examples suggest that despite published guides on how to dissect, such as Cunningham’s Manual of Practical Anatomy, many student dissections were ‘more akin to butchery than artistry’.65 The above literature and depictions in Speculum demonstrate that, before the manufacture of formaldehyde in 1893 prevented cadavers from succumbing to quick decay, the dissecting room was a particularly unappealing place, light on air and heavy with tension. In her meticulous study of British medical students, Hurren portrays dissection as rather monotonous work, involving long hours labouring over a cadaver while inhaling tobacco and snuff to alleviate the odours and noxious fumes emitted by the decaying corpse and preservative fluids.66 Kelly and Sappol, too, depict the dissecting room in Ireland and the USA, respectively, as an overwhelmingly homosocial environment imbued with masculine tropes. They uncover tales of smoking, joking, ‘alcoholic jollity’ and acts of initiation that find parallels in the Australian context despite the neat and inoffensive scene sometimes presented in staged dissecting room photographs (Figure 2).67 In the dissecting room, Melbourne Medical School students became acculturated to the medical gaze and learnt to suspend or suppress the ‘normal physical and emotional responses to the wilful mutilation of the body of another human being’, such as revulsion, anxiety and guilt.68 Although they developed what eighteenth-century British surgeon and anatomist William Hunter called the ‘kind of necessary inhumanity’ needed to dissect, they nevertheless contended emotionally with this difficult undertaking.69 They felt anxiety, fear and, at times, great empathy for their dissection subjects and projected this wide spectrum of emotions onto the corpse. Fig. 2 Open in new tabDownload slide Dissecting at the Melbourne Medical School, 1864. Reproduced with permission of the Medical History Museum, University of Melbourne Fig. 2 Open in new tabDownload slide Dissecting at the Melbourne Medical School, 1864. Reproduced with permission of the Medical History Museum, University of Melbourne Student-written cadaver poems published in Speculum that feature fictional encounters with corpses provide a window onto students’ affective responses to their experiences of dissection. Embracing a strong tradition of creative writing among medical students in the British Empire, Melbourne medical students drew on tropes and themes of contemporary gothic fiction to explore the anxieties and unresolved tensions they faced during dissection.70 They demonstrate that anatomy was ‘not merely a biomedical discipline, but also a philosophical endeavour’.71 For example, one cadaver poem entitled ‘A Night in the Dissecting Room’ brings to life a student’s fear of the dissection subject. In the poem, written under the pseudonym ‘Femur’, the student character finds himself unexpectedly locked in the dissecting room for the night when the spirits of five dissection subjects ‘rise and waken’ to take part in a ‘swelling chorus’.72 They recount the events that led to their deaths, before the Chief Spirit summons them to ‘fling away [their] sadness’ and join together in a dance.73 As the spirits animate into a furious waltz around the room, they stumble upon their visitor who, until this point, has been hiding. Upon recognising the visitor as a student, they announce that ‘to men [they] are vicious … But to students most malicious’ and begin to torture him.74 One spirit declares: And, for once about me joking,   (I was far too stout to please you), In my side your finger poking,   By the snout I now will seize you.75 The student is saved from suffering when a chirping bird signalling dawn causes the spirits to flee. The student in the poem is terrorised by the cadavers he had left ‘dissected on the table / In the piercing winter weather’.76 They inflict physical torment on him; they grab him by the nose, then bind him ‘quickly to the earth’ as they prepare to dissect him alive.77 Murderous spirits of the student’s own making have come back to harm and haunt him as revenge for his past actions towards their bodies. The author may have been reflecting on the dangers that the dead body presented to the living during dissection. As depicted in Figure 2, students in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century dissecting rooms did not wear gloves or protective equipment. They were therefore directly exposed to the putrefying corpse, any fluids that it expelled and errant scalpel blades.78 The author may also have written the poem to explore the difficulty of students’ tasks during dissection: to maintain a connection to his humanity alongside the need to dismember the deceased body of another human being. The poem demonstrates that medical students confronted their fears and concerns about dissection and mortality in writing that they shared with their peers. Furthermore, by interpreting the literary spirits in ‘A Night in the Dissecting Room’ as representations of anxieties grounded in historical reality, the reanimation of the cadavers might symbolise students’ reflections on their future responsibilities an arbiters of life and death.79 Articles in Speculum reveal that students internalised the gravity of the duties that awaited them as physicians. Indeed, in 1901, one student shared his thoughts about the ‘frightful responsibilities’ and ‘unutterable importance of forcible and definite attention to the serious nature of the task’ that lay before him and his peers.80 Cadaver poems represent another outlet through which students developed ideas of what it meant to be a doctor and engaged in the complex and morally contestable elements of their chosen profession. Cadaver poems also convey how medical students negotiated their need to subvert normal moral behaviours in the dissecting room. In the 1908 cadaver poem, ‘The Wail of the Wraith’, the student character is startled when a dissection subject ‘moved its brainless head’ and came back to life while he is eating lunch in the dissecting room.81 The wraith ‘[took] up its tale’ and said of the way it had been treated: They were rude and too familiar when they brought my body in, Though I own ‘twas cold and formal in the trough of formalin; But they put me on this table, and the students came and gazed, Then my rigid limbs distended for lithotomy82 they raised.83 The cadaver continued to lament that during his dissection: There are other things … things which vex my inmost soul, If they must expose my thorax, can’t they keep my tissues whole? When they’d teased out my spermatic cord, they tossed it in the sink, As they’ve cut my motor oculi, I cannot even wink.84 The poem suggests that during dissection, students became desensitised to a cadaver subject’s humanity and began to view it as an object of anatomical knowledge. They needed to see and act in a manner that Melbourne-based surgeon Dr G. A. Syme told students was ‘different altogether from the principles which regulate the behaviour of ordinary people’.85 The wraith bemoans this reality; he conveys that he feels pathetic and undignified due to the insensitive way that students probed, tugged at and exposed his body during dissection. Through humanising the wraith, however, the author empathises with its plight and reflects on the pain and distress that students inflict on dissection subjects.86 Furthermore, the wraith’s final request to ‘let [him] rest in peace or pieces’ suggests the student’s unease at the prospect of this corpse not finding solace after death and dissection at his hands.87 The poem therefore presents medical school dissection as an emotionally loaded experience of self-discovery about death, dying and human mortality. It also conveys that, during their education, students began to come to terms with the complex issues that would be a constituent part of their future vocation when treating patients. Despite recent studies that discuss the emotional impact of dissection on twenty-first century medical students, it is difficult to access this part of the medical school experience for nineteenth-century students, and even more challenging to gain this understanding from the students themselves.88 This analysis demonstrates that, despite their fictionalised nature, cadaver poems provide a rich vein from which to gain insight into students’ emotional responses to dissection. It contributes to what historian Fay Bound Alberti identifies as significant scope for investigation into the ‘emotional characteristics of men of science’.89 The student’s encounter with the humanised dissection subject in ‘The Wail of the Wraith’ compelled him to reflect on his treatment of the dead and what historians Ruth Richardson and Brian Hurwitz label the ‘anatomical ethics’ of the era.90 Inspired by the wraith’s lamentation, the student ‘took [his] fountain pen in hand, with courage on [his] brow’ and signed a pledge to treat cadavers better in the future.91 Waddington argues that by the 1890s, medical students began to be thought of as ‘industrious and gentlemanly’—a stark contrast to depictions earlier in the century.92 This change in image occurred in unison with changes in Victorian and Edwardian society, such as social policies aimed at decreasing violence and increasing self-discipline. According to Waddington, medical students absorbed many of these new values at the same time as medical schools implemented them. The empathy that Melbourne Medical School students showed for dissection subjects and patients and time they took to express emotional responses to the practice in writing to Speculum suggests that they fit into this new mould. Amid humour and gothic overtones, their creative writing reveals that dissection was not only a rite of passage for late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century medical students; it was also a site of deep tension and profound reflection. Despite evidence pointing towards the empathetic and reflective behaviour of medical students, there were also instances of bad behaviour at the Melbourne Medical School. There are accounts of ‘meat fights’, involving students throwing decaying pieces of cadaverous flesh around the dissecting room and at one another.93 Sometimes, a student pocketed a femur or a pelvis to complement his (or, rarely, her) own sets of teaching bones at home.94 In another example, a suggested remedy for the cadaver’s post-mortem expulsion of fluids was to simply ‘mop up the superfluous moisture’ using the tassels of their hats or the hems of their gowns.95 These images harken back to those found in Punch, Melbourne Punch and other satirical works of the nineteenth century and hardly present a scene of decorum or sensitivity in the dissecting room. In fact, Speculum itself faced a ‘disciplinary explosion’ for the contents of several issues published between May 1911 and May the following year.96 As the journal set out to be circulated primarily among the medical fraternity, it contained ‘terms and phrases not occurring in the decency of ordinary public phraseology’ but which were ‘among the commonplaces in conversation in the medical world’.97 In the early twentieth century, however, even its editors noted that the journal had ‘more nearly approached’ the limit of public decency.98 The Professorial Board was eventually compelled to act on content it deemed to be ‘openly and grossly indecent’, particularly as Speculum was gaining readership in the broader university community.99 The articles in question contained numerous derogatory remarks about female medical students and a ‘thinly veiled’ protest against the ‘new order of things – decency’.100 The editorial committee was forced to apologise for the offending articles and decided to take proactive steps towards ensuring that Speculum ‘change[d] in its attitude towards questions of decency’.101 Episodes such as this did little to improve stereotypes surrounding medical students and their behaviour and contributed to the entrenchment of these negative images. Students had long been cognisant of their image in the public’s eye as ‘absorbent[s] of fermented liquors’ who ‘occasionally worship[ed] at the altar of Bacchus’.102 The contributor who wrote these comments did, however, want to remind the public that on the whole, the medical student was ‘genial and well behaved … plays cards and oftimes enjoys a quiet game of billiards’, much like most of society’s other young men.103 Engagement with the Profession at Large Medical students took time away from their studies to engage with many of the controversies and debates that engulfed the medical profession in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Victoria. Many of the issues that played out in the field at large found their way into the pages of Speculum, and the journal provides unique insight into students’ thoughts regarding these matters. This section considers student reactions to, and participation in, discussions about the women’s entry into the Melbourne Medical School and the effect of unqualified ‘quacks’ on the developing medical profession. Women’s entry into medical school in Australia was hindered by claims of their inability to conduct dissections due to their fragile constitutions and by the notion that it was immodest for female doctors examine men’s bodies.104 Although the Melbourne Medical School enrolled its first students in 1862, it was not until 25 years later, in 1887, that it allowed seven women to study medicine.105 A small group of women, led by Lilian Alexander, Helen Sexton and Clara Stone, had spent months skilfully and successfully lobbying the University Council and other interested parties to consider their request for a medical education. Responses to their efforts and subsequent entry into the medical course made their way into the pages of Speculum. For example, article from 1896 that stated ‘it is too late in the day to affirm or deny the advisability of admitting women to the practice of medicine’ suggests that existing male students were well aware of the coming change.106 Despite women’s entrance to the Melbourne Medical School being an ‘accomplished fact’ by the late 1880s, numerous students took great issue with this new reality.107 One student thought it ‘would be interesting to know what … they want to study medicine for’ and wondered if the ‘lady students could scarcely find the necessary lucre’ to finance their own education.108Figure 3 further provides a sense of the paternalistic culture that confronted women who wanted to enter the medical school. The photograph, taken in 1880, depicts a small group of male medical students posing behind the closed gates of the medical building. Their masculine stances, academic dress, pipe-smoking and skeleton props signal their status as elite insiders within the potent male culture cultivated at the medical school. As outsiders, women faced significant opposition to their requests to gain a medical education. Fig. 3 Open in new tabDownload slide Melbourne Medical School students, 1880. Reproduced with permission of the Medical History Museum, University of Melbourne Fig. 3 Open in new tabDownload slide Melbourne Medical School students, 1880. Reproduced with permission of the Medical History Museum, University of Melbourne Some students wrote to Speculum to convey a belief that their learning opportunities would be compromised if women entered the course. The opportunity to dissect was of particular concern. One student complained in 1895 that it was unfair that ‘the girls [should] have a separate room for dissection’.109 He questioned ‘what right [the women have] to have a subject between three of them, when perhaps there are sixteen of their fellow-students working on a similar body in the other room’.110 As discussed earlier, medical students often lamented the insufficient supply of cadavers for dissection in the late nineteenth century, which explains why this lopsided ratio between the men’s and women’s dissecting rooms became a source of frustration.111 A lengthy article in March 1890 detailed another two complaints about female students during clinical work: ‘first, that they monopolise the front rank at operations, and secondly, that they disconcert the surgeons while they are operating’.112 This student’s spite at the situation is perhaps best expressed in his statement that ‘the present little storm’ women had created over their entry into medicine would ‘do no harm’ if it made them ‘ponder over what they have to go through if they take up the medical profession’.113 Male students often showed animosity towards women’s attempts to gain a medical education in colonial Melbourne and did not hesitate to express their opinions. Rather than remain silent, women medical students also wrote to Speculum to refute the reasons given for why they should not be there. According to one female student in 1890, the main ‘charge laid against [women]’ was ‘that [they] exist at all’.114 She noted that arrangements for female students’ clinical sessions at the Melbourne Hospital were often forgotten and questioned how they were meant to qualify to practise medicine if they could not gain any practical knowledge. The author also countered the commonly-made argument that it was inappropriate for women to witness examinations and surgeries on male bodies, by demanding to know if, by the same logic, there was ‘there no indelicacy in male students attending special operations on women?’115 Although this letter reveals the level of abuse hurled at female students who attended the Melbourne Medical School, other contributions to Speculum suggest that some male students supported women entering the medical school. For instance, one article, entitled ‘“Her” Sphere by a Him’, denounced the idea that women were ‘inferior to man and of secondary importance in the community’ as ‘false’.116 The contributor referred to the ‘superiority of [women’s] perceptive faculties’ and suggested that the ‘world would have been better to-day had woman been allowed to stand in her proper place’ in the public sphere.117 He continued that, ‘in woman we find a construction superior in some respects, inferior in others; place the two together, and we view one beautiful and harmonious whole—homo’.118 Indeed, by 1907, the MSS was ‘awakening to a chivalrous sense of its duty to the fairer stronger sex’ as it allowed women to become members and began to invite women to social events.119 Despite some assistance from supportive men, it was the women themselves who designed and carried out their own campaign to enter medical school. Speculum sheds light on this development from the perspective of students and reveals how they believed it affected the medical school experience. Medical students also engaged with another major source of angst in nineteenth-century Victoria: the regulation of the medical profession. Historian Philippa Martyr describes the earliest days of the colony as the ‘“golden age” of unregulated medical practice’.120 By the 1890s, so many practitioners worked outside orthodox practice despite legislation to prevent it that one contemporary journalist described the medical sphere as ‘The Paradise of Quacks’.121 In 1886, one student took aim at unregistered practitioners in Speculum, labelling them ‘charlatans who infest Victoria’.122 The student worried that he would complete 5 years of medical training only to then have employment opportunities taken by ‘some person styling himself’ as a doctor.123 Medical students had been taught that ‘most breaches of ethics arise from the introduction of a spirit of commercialism into the profession’ and believed that unorthodox practitioners fit this mould.124 Claims of commercial quackery were not unfounded; the Victorian Census from 1891 recorded 110 active irregular practitioners compared to 777 regular practitioners.125 Public anatomy museums that displayed models of venereal disease in both male and female bodies, and whose proprietors often sold a range of unproven medical treatments, became of particular concern. Historian Elizabeth Stephens provides a nuanced discussion of the role such institutions played in educating the general public about illness and as a moralising force.126 That said, public anatomy museums were also the subject of venomous public commentary. A letter to the editor of Melbourne newspaper The Age in 1869, for example, demonstrates the public reception of Jordan and Beck’s anatomical museum, which had opened its doors to the public in 1867. The author, who wrote under the pseudonym ‘Humbug’, derided the museum as a ‘disgusting exhibition’ and accused its owners of ‘grop[ing] the gutters for a livelihood’. He continued in his condemnation, stating that the ‘silly prate about “science” and “intellectual improvement” was simple humbug’, and that all a visitor’s experience amounted to was ‘half-terrified perusal’.127 Although the two main public anatomy museums in Melbourne had been closed down by the late 1880s, unlicensed practitioners remained a feature of a medical scene lacking in regulation, much to the dismay of medical students. Students who wrote to Speculum about the state of the medical profession believed that the ‘welfare of patients must be the first consideration’ and worried about public safety if health care was in the hands of practitioners who were not formally trained.128 One student wanted to shame quacks publicly, declaring that ‘there should be some means of dealing with a … man who sinks so low as to drag the profession to the dust before the public’.129 Mounting pressure to control rampant quackery meant that Australian states developed legislation to mandate medical practitioners be formally trained, examined and registered. Medical students agreed with the need for regulation within medical practice, such as recognised training, to ensure not only that the public would receive proper care but to preserve their future employment prospects. Despite these noble intentions, Martyr suggests that the real concern to physicians, and physicians in training, was the loss of business in the competitive market of medical care.130 As well as creating a shared experience of medical school, Speculum reflects students’ engagement with the medical profession at large. They spoke out on issues such as how best to deal with the rise in unregistered medical practitioners and how to negotiate the admission of women into medical school. Students were not only concerned with learning a curriculum and passing examinations but were outward looking and showed thoughtfulness about some of the pressing health care matters of their time. Conclusion By analysing the voices of medical students in writing, this article has built an image of what it meant to be a medical student at the Melbourne Medical School in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It was, at times, extremely difficult; the act of dissection presented physical and emotional challenges, examinations were almost impossible to pass and the cost of attending a long course put great pressure on students to succeed. Despite these obstacles and a generally woeful public image, medical students fought for a better curriculum, facilities and equipment and fostered a strong culture of shared experiences through the organisation of popular social nights, clubs and societies. They also engaged with research and other issues affecting the wider profession. Of the several late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century publications aimed at medical students, Speculum provides a point of difference, not only because was it produced entirely by students for students but due to the multifaceted nature of its content. It incorporated serious matters like the latest medical research and advice regarding the profession, with the advertisement of social nights and humorous digs at teaching staff. The journal provided a platform for students in the far reaches of the British Empire to discuss curriculum issues that directly affected them and to engage with the developing field into which they would soon enter. Students’ sense of ownership towards Speculum meant that it cultivated a sense of collegiality amongst students in a way that many other publications did not. Although the journal’s title was likely a tongue-in-cheek choice at a time when all medical students were male, its motto encouraged readers to ‘look into the lives of all men as into a mirror, and thence to take example’.131 The speculum, then, signifies a mirror with which students were encouraged to reflect on the humanity and dignity of those they dissected and treated, as well as their own. Such a phrase is fitting when considering the rich, reflective content published in its pages. This article reconstructs the lived experiences of Melbourne medical students in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as depicted through their own words published in Speculum. In doing so, it contributes to a growing body of scholarship that challenges the often-inaccurate and negative stereotypes about medical students that permeate the historical record. It engages with scholars’ recent efforts to amplify the voices of patients and other disempowered actors in the history of medicine, which has often been told from the vantage point of those in positions of power. As such, it encourages investigation into other under-represented aspects of medicine in colonial Australia. By approaching the state of the medical scene in colonial Melbourne through the lens of the medical student, a new and vibrant perspective emerges. Students actively shaped and reflected on their experiences of medical school and were proud ‘of the rise of [their] school and the ability and energy of its professors’.132 They even believed that ‘never in the history of any Medical School in the world … ha[d] the rise and progress been so signal and sure’.133 These overlooked voices are worth pursuing for the insight they provide into the experiences that students enjoyed and endured during their time at the Melbourne Medical School. For what is a school without its students? Eugenia Pacitti is a PhD candidate in Historical Studies at Monash University. Her research examines the social and cultural history of collected human remains in Australia, focusing on the medical practices and cultures of collecting that contributed to the development of anatomy and pathology museums in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She maintains a strong interest in how the legacies of such collecting manifest in the present day. Footnotes 1 ‘The Medical Students’ Society song’, October 1908, quoted in: Bryan Gandevia, The Melbourne Medical Students, 1862–1942 (Melbourne: Melbourne Medical Students’ Society, 1948), 11. 2 Thomas Neville Bonner, Becoming a Physician: Medical Education in Britain, France, Germany, and the United States, 1750–1945 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 61. 3 Elizabeth Hurren, Dying for Victorian Medicine: English Anatomy and Its Trade in the Dead Poor, c.1834–1929 (Basingstoke; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); Elizabeth T. Hurren, Dissecting the Criminal Corpse: Staging Post-Execution Punishment in Early Modern England (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016); Michael Sappol, A Traffic of Dead Bodies: Anatomy and Embodied Social Identity in Nineteenth-Century America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002). 4 Keir Waddington, ‘Mayhem and Medical Students: Image, Conduct, and Control in the Victorian and Edwardian London Teaching Hospital’, Social History of Medicine, 2002, 15, 45–64; Keir Waddington, Medical Education at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital (Suffolk: The Boydell Press, 2003). See also: Lisa Rosner, ‘Student Culture at the Turn of the Nineteenth-Century: Edinburgh and Philadelphia’, Caduceus: A Humanities Journal for Medicine & the Health Sciences, 1994, 10, 65–86. 5 Laura Kelly, Irish Medical Education and Student Culture, c.1850–1950, 8 (Liverpool: University Press, 2017). 6 The role of emotions in the history of medicine has recently become a historiographical focus. See Fay Bound Alberti, ‘Bodies, Hearts, and Minds: Why Emotions Matter to Historians of Science and Medicine’, Isis, 2009, 100, 798–810; Fay Bound Alberti, Medicine, Emotion and Disease, 1700–1950 (Basingstoke; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006); Fay Bound Alberti, Matters of the Heart: History, Medicine, and Emotion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). 7 Howard Saul Becker, Boys in White: Student Culture in Medical School (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961); R. K. Merton, G. G. Reader and P. L. Kendall, eds, The Student-Physician: Introductory Studies in the Sociology of Medical Education (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1957). 8 Ross L. Jones, Humanity’s Mirror: 150 Years of Anatomy in Melbourne (South Yarra: Haddington Press, 2007); University of Melbourne Department of Pathology, The Melbourne School of Pathology: Phases and Contrasts (Parkville: University of Melbourne Department of Pathology, 1962); Kenneth Fitzpatrick Russell, The Melbourne Medical School, 1862–1962 (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 1977); J. A Young et al., Centenary Book of the University of Sydney Faculty of Medicine (Sydney: Sydney University Press for University of Sydney Faculty of Medicine, 1984). 9 See Laurence M. Geary, ‘The Scottish-Australian Connection, 1850–1900’, in Vivian Nutton and Roy Porter, eds, The History of Medical Education in Britain (Atlanta: Rodopi, 1995), 51–75; Tamson Pietsch, ‘Between the Nation and the World: J. T. Wilson and Scientific Networks in the Early Twentieth Century’, in Joseph M. Hodge and Brett M. Bennett, eds, Science and Empire: Knowledge and Networks of Science Across the British Empire, 1800–1970 (London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2011), 140–60. 10 Jones, Humanity’s Mirror, 79–102; Gandevia, Melbourne Medical Students. 11 ‘Editorial’, Speculum, no. 1, July 1884, 6. 12 ‘Medical Students’ Society’, Speculum, no. 2, December 1884, 5. 13 While Speculum contained satirical pieces that caused it to climb the ‘curve of naughtiness’ on occasion, for the most part, the editors ensured that only appropriate content made it to publication. On pages 33–34 of this article, I discuss one controversy that beset the journal in 1911 and 1912. See also: Gandevia, Melbourne Medical Students, 42. 14 ‘Medical Students’ Society’, Speculum, no. 2, December 1884, 3. 15 Jones, Humanity’s Mirror, xv. 16 For example, see ‘The Present State of the Medical School’, Speculum, no. 1, July 1884, 5. 17 Speculum, no. 60 July 1904, 85. In May 1884, the MSS had entered into an agreement with the Australasian Medical Gazette in which it would sell copies of the gazette in return for column space. ‘Minutes from 8 May 1884’, Minutes 1880–1888, Medical Students’ Society, 1978.0129, University of Melbourne Archives (hereafter UMA). 18 ‘Reasons for the Establishment of a School of Medicine’, May 1858, Folder 1, University of Melbourne Registrar, UM 419, 93/46, UMA. 19 The first building on the site was completed in 1884. Russell, The Melbourne Medical School, 1862–1962, 28. 20 Speculum, no. 3, May 1885, 7. For an overview of the early years of the medical school, see Gandevia, Melbourne Medical Students, 13–19. 21 Jones, Humanity’s Mirror, 4. For reports of medical students’ poor behaviour in public, see ‘Two Arrested in Melbourne’, Advertiser, 19 April 1926, 17; ‘Craving for Cocaine’, Geraldton Guardian, 5 January 1924, 3; ‘Vulgar Medical Students’, Advertiser, 18 May 1911, 11; ‘Indignation Meeting of Medical Students’, Argus, 13 May 1881, 6. 22 ‘Visit of University Students—Strange Proceedings’, Argus, 20 August 1888, 8. 23 Ibid. 24 ‘The Students and Hamlet’, Argus, 1 May 1889, 7. 25 Ibid. 26 Amid a climate already characterised by historical tensions between anatomists and the public, inherited from Britain, several objectionable incidents involving prominent anatomists in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Australia further heightened the public’s distrust of anatomists’ and medical students’ work with dead bodies. See Helen MacDonald, Human Remains: Dissection and Its Histories (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2005); Helen MacDonald, ‘A Scandalous Act: Regulating Anatomy in a British Settler Colony, Tasmania 1869’, Social History of Medicine, 2007, 20, 39–56; Helen MacDonald, ‘The Anatomy Inspector and the Government Corpse’, History Australia, 2009, 6, 40.1–40.17; Jones, Humanity’s Mirror, 1–71. . 27 Waddington, ‘Mayhem and Medical Students’, 45. 28 ‘Physiology of the London Medical Student’, Punch, 1841, 1, 154. 29 Charles Dickens, The Pickwick Papers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988 ), 363–67, quoted in Waddington, ‘Mayhem and Medical Students’, 48. 30 Waddington, ‘Mayhem and Medical Students’, 48–49. 31 Speculum, no. 84, September 1912, 76. 32 Speculum, no. 8, February 1887, 31. 33 Speculum, no. 16, January 1889, 1. 34 Speculum, no. 62, May 1905, 2. 35 Rosner, ‘Student Culture at the Turn of the Nineteenth-Century’, 77. 36 ‘Report of the Faculty of Medicine Concerning the Medical Curriculum’, Box 2, Folder 3, University of Melbourne Registrar (1863–1909), UM 419, 93/46, UMA. 37 Speculum, no. 17 June 1889, 18. 38 See Jones, Humanity’s Mirror, 74–78; Geary, ‘The Scottish-Australian Connection, 1850–1900’; Speculum, no. 14, August 1888, 29–30. 39 Edward Holder to Harry Brookes Allen, 26 December 1910, Sir Harry Brookes Allen Collection, 76/6, Box 1, Folder 2, UMA. 40 For a detailed history about anatomy legislation in Australia, see Helen MacDonald, Possessing the Dead: The Artful Science of Anatomy (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 2010). 41 ‘Benevolent Asylum’, Argus, 27 May 1870; ‘Subjects for Dissection’, Age, 27 June 1873. 42 Speculum, no. 13, May 1888, 13. 43 ‘Spicula’, Speculum, no. 30, August 1894, 30. 44 Ibid. 45 Speculum, no. 11, October 1887, 12. 46 Speculum, no. 16, January 1889, 17. 47 Speculum, no. 9, May 1887, 11. 48 Speculum, no. 67, December 1906, 121. 49 G. Rothwell Adam, ‘Ideals in the Pursuit of Medicine’, Speculum, September 1900, 47, 28. 50 Ibid. 51 P. Ward Farmer, ‘Our Duties and Responsibilities’, Speculum, no. 41, July 1898, 55, 58. 52 Ibid., 58. 53 ‘Ourselves’, Speculum, no. 56, May 1903, 1. 54 Ibid. 55 Kelly, Irish Medical Education and Student Culture, 51–62; Waddington, ‘Mayhem and Medical Students’, 51. See also William Tennant Gairdner, Medical Education, Character, and Conduct : Introductory Addresses, Delivered to Students of Medicine in Edinburgh and Glasgow, 1855–1866–1882 (Glasgow: J. Maclehose, 1883); P. D. Handyside, Shall I Study Medicine? (Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1877). Interestingly, one journal, published in 1830s Boston, aimed to convey humanistic aspects of the medical profession directly to medical students—perhaps the only the one of its kind. See Irving A. Beck, ‘An Early American Journal Keyed to Medical Students: A Pioneer Contribution of Elisha Bartlett’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 1966, 2, 124–34. 56 For discussions about socialisation and moral enculturation as a ‘hidden curriculum’, see Frederic W. Hafferty and Brian Castellani, ‘The Hidden Curriculum: A Theory of Medical Education’, in Caragh Brosnan and Brian S. Turner, eds, Handbook of the Sociology of Medical Education (London: Routledge, 2009), 15–35; Dawn Goodwin, Laura Machin and Adam Taylor, ‘The Social Life of the Dead: The Role of Post-Mortem Examinations in Medical Student Socialisation’, Social Science & Medicine, 2016, 161, 100–08; Rachel Prentice, Bodies in Formation: An Ethnography of Anatomy and Surgery Education (Experimental Futures) (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012). 57 Speculum, no. 2, December 1884, 6. 58 W. A. Osborne, quoted in Gandevia, Melbourne Medical Students, 30. 59 ‘M. S. S. First Annual Ball’, Speculum, no. 71, May 1908, 33. 60 Gandevia, Melbourne Medical Students, 35. 61 Giovanna Ferrari, ‘Public Anatomy Lessons and the Carnival: The Anatomy Theatre of Bologna’, Past & Present, 1987, 117, 50–106, esp. 59–60; Katharine Park, ‘The Life of the Corpse: Division and Dissection in Late Medieval Europe’, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, 1995, 50, 113–32, 115; Cynthia Klestinec, Theaters of Anatomy: Students, Teachers, and Traditions of Dissection in Renaissance Venice (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011). 62 Rachel N. Ponce, ‘“They Increase in Beauty and Elegance”: Transforming Cadavers and the Epistemology of Dissection in Early Nineteenth-Century American Medical Education’, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, 2013, 68, 331–76, 357. 63 Speculum, no. 9, May 1887, 11. 64 Ibid. 65 Ponce, ‘“They Increase in Beauty and Elegance”’, 357. 66 Hurren, Dying for Victorian Medicine, 85; Speculum, no. 65, May 1906, 24. 67 Sappol, A Traffic of Dead Bodies, 81; Laura Kelly, ‘Irish Medical Student Culture and the Performance of Masculinity, c. 1880–1930’, History of Education, 2017, 46, 39–57. 68 Ruth Richardson, Death, Dissection, and the Destitute (London: Routledge, 1987), 30. 69 William Hunter, Two Introductory Lectures, Delivered by Dr. William Hunter, to His Last Course of Anatomical Lectures, at His Theatre in Windmill-Street (London: Trustees of J. Johnson, 1784), 67 quoted in: Richardson, Death, Dissection, and the Destitute, 31. 70 Richardson and Hurwitz’s analysis of a short story, published in 1893, demonstrates how nineteenth-century medical students used fictional narratives to evoke the ethos of the dissecting room. Shane McCorristine’s work on ghosts and spectres, too, provides an intriguing analysis of fictionalised encounters with apparitions as grounded in historical realities. See Ruth Richardson and Brian Hurwitz, ‘Celebrating New Year in Bart’s Dissecting Room’, Clinical Anatomy, 1996, 9, 408–13; Shane McCorristine, The Spectral Arctic: A History of Dreams and Ghosts in Polar Exploration (London: UCL Press, 2018). There is a tradition of physicians engaging in fictional writing. Among those to partake in both practices historically are Arthur Conan Doyle and Anton Chekhov. Several faculty members at the Melbourne Medical School were also enthusiastic writers. The affective experience of dissection continues to pique the interest of creative writers in the present day. For example, Marianne Boruch’s recent long-form poem, Cadaver, Speak, based on her observations of university dissection classes, presents a deeply human insight into the relationships between the living and the dead in the dissecting room. See Marianne Boruch, Cadaver, Speak (Port Townsend: Copper Canyon Press, 2014). 71 Fay Bound Alberti, This Mortal Coil: The Human Body in History and Culture (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 109. 72 Femur, ‘A Night in the Dissecting Room’, Speculum, no. 18, August 1889, 47. 73 Ibid, 48. 74 Ibid. 75 Ibid. 76 Ibid. 77 Ibid. 78 Cadavers sometimes posed a risk of contagion. See: Ponce, ‘“They Increase in Beauty and Elegance”’, 338; Sean Burrell and Geoffrey Gill, ‘The Liverpool Cholera Epidemic of 1832 and Anatomical Dissection – Medical Mistrust and Civil Unrest’, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, 2005, 60, 495; Hurren, Dissecting the Criminal Corpse, 260. 79 Not only did nineteenth-century doctors know little about the scientific mechanisms behind cell death, brain death and organ failure, but hurried mass burials during outbreaks of infectious diseases led people to believe that they could be buried alive while in a death-like coma if a doctor did not diagnose their condition correctly. For more, see Andrew Mangham, ‘“Buried Alive: The Gothic Awakening of Taphephobia”’, The Journal of Literature and Science, 2010, 3, 10–22; Chris Willis, ‘A House for the Dead: Victorian Mausolea and Graveyard Gothic’, Victorian Gothic: Leeds Centre for Working Papers in Victorian Studies, 2003, 6, 155–65; Elena Del Río Parra, ‘“He Has No Pulse”: Typologies of the Fear of Being Buried Alive in Preindustrial Spain’, South Atlantic Review, 2011, 76, 129–50. 80 Patriarch, ‘The Student and his Responsibilities’, Speculum, no. 51, December 1901, 87. 81 ‘The Wail of the Wraith’, Speculum, no. 72, September 1908, 71. 82 Lithotomy is the removal of kidney, bladder or gallbladder stones. 83 ‘The Wail of the Wraith’, 71. 84 Ibid., 72. 85 G. A. Syme, ‘Lecture on Medical Ethics’, Speculum, no. 66, August 1906, 48. 86 Waddington, ‘Mayhem and Medical Students’, 53–55. Practical jokes and crass humour helped students deal with dissecting room anxiety and tension. It remains a relatively common practice today. See Kelly Underman and Laura E. Hirshfield, ‘Detached Concern?: Emotional Socialization in Twenty-First Century Medical Education’, Social Science & Medicine, 2016, 160, 94–101; Daragh Smith, Dissecting Room Ballads from the Dublin Schools of Medicine Fifty Years Ago (Dublin: Black Cat Press, 1992). 87 ‘The Wail of the Wraith’, 71–72. 88 For example, see Hope Ellen Bouwer, Krisztina Valter and Alexandra Louise Webb, ‘Current Integration of Dissection in Medical Education in Australia and New Zealand: Challenges and Successes’, Anatomical Sciences Education, 2016, 9, 161–70, 163; Horst-Werner Korf et al., ‘The Dissection Course - Necessary and Indispensable for Teaching Anatomy to Medical Students’, Annals of Anatomy, 2008, 190, 16–22, 18. 89 Alberti, ‘Bodies, Hearts, and Minds’, 809. 90 Richardson and Hurwitz, ‘Celebrating New Year in Bart’s Dissecting Room’, 408. 91 ‘The Wail of the Wraith’, 71. 92 Waddington, ‘Mayhem and Medical Students’, 50. 93 Speculum, no. 21, June 1890, 68. 94 Richard J. A. Berry, ‘Chance and Circumstance’ (1954), 110. 95 Speculum, no.21, June 1890, 66. 96 Gandevia, Melbourne Medical Students, 42. The offending issues were: Speculum, no. 80, May 1911; Speculum, no. 82, November 1911; Speculum, no. 83, May 1912. 97 Speculum, no. 84, September 1912, 77. 98 Ibid. 99 Ibid., 80. 100 Ibid., 79. 101 Ibid., 83. 102 Speculum, no. 9, May 1887, 15. 103 Ibid., 15. 104 Laura Kelly provides excellent insight into nineteenth-century debates over women’s physical and emotional suitability for medical education in Ireland. Similar discussions occurred in colonial Australia. See Kelly, Irish Medical Education and Student Culture, 170–88. 105 R. J. W. Selleck, The Shop: The University of Melbourne 1850–1939 (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 2003), 268–83. The first women admitted to the Melbourne Medical School in 1887 were Lilian Alexander, Annie O’Hara, Elizabeth O’Hara, Helen Sexton, Clara Stone, Grace Vale and Margaret Whyte. They all graduated between 1891 and 1895. 106 Speculum, no. 34, May 1896, 1. 107 Speculum, no. 12, February 1888, 12. 108 Speculum, no. 8, February 1887, 31. 109 ‘Dissecting Room “Incident”’, Speculum, no. 31, May 1895, 24. 110 Ibid. 111 Selleck notes that the issue of mixed or separate classes comprised the Faculty’s core strategy of resistance to admitting women. Selleck, The Shop, 272. 112 Speculum, no. 20, March 1890, 2. 113 Ibid., 3. 114 A Woman Medical Student, ‘Women Students at the Melbourne Hospital’, Speculum, no. 21, June 1890, 94–95. 115 Ibid., 95. 116 Speculum, no. 12, February 1888, 13. 117 Ibid., 17. 118 Ibid., 14. 119 Speculum, no. 69, August 1907, 9. 120 Philippa Martyr, Paradise of Quacks: An Alternative History of Medicine in Australia (Paddington, NSW: Macleay Press, 2002), 63. 121 ‘The Medical Profession in Australia’, 20 March 1893, Daily Telegraph, quoted in Martyr, Paradise of Quacks, 7. 122 Speculum, no. 5, April 1886, 1. 123 Ibid. 124 G. A. Syme, ‘Medical Ethics’, Speculum, no. 66, August 1906, 47. 125 See Martyr, Paradise of Quacks, 188–89. 126 Elizabeth Stephens, Anatomy as Spectacle: Public Exhibitions of the Body from 1700 to the Present (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2011). 127 ‘The Pathology of Filth’, Age, 9 September 1869, 3. 128 Speculum, no. 5, April 1886, 1. 129 Speculum, no. 22, September 1890, 101. 130 Martyr, Paradise of Quacks, 9. 131 The motto in Latin reads: inspicere, tanquam in speculum, in vitas omnium ieubeo, atque ex aliis sumere exemplum sibi. The phrase derives from The Brothers by Roman playwright, Terence. See Jones, Humanity’s Mirror, xv. 132 ‘The Present State of the Medical School’, Speculum, no. 1, July 1884, 4. 133 Ibid. Acknowledgements I wish to thank Associate Professor. Paula Michaels, my writing group colleagues at Monash University, and Nick Pacitti for their constructive feedback and encouragement during the writing process. I am also grateful to the anonymous reviewers and the journal editors for their valuable comments. © The Author(s) 2020. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for the Social History of Medicine. This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - Dissecting the Student Experience at Australian Medical Schools, 1884–1912
JO - Social History of Medicine
DO - 10.1093/shm/hkaa012
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