Those Painful Feelings”: Sympathy and Self-Mastery in Nineteenth-Century American Medical Practice

This talk explores the challenges of emotional expression for medical practitioners through the lens of the dual meanings of sympathy in the nineteenth century, demonstrating how emotional self-management was an essential—but unwieldy—tool for physicians. In this period, correct emotional expression at the bedside was crucial to both maintaining the character of the physician and for supporting the health of the patient. I demonstrate how such emotions can be excavated from medical manuscripts, offering a case study of a single physician’s archive as a glimpse at the challenges of such emotional expression and management. This talk showcases a methodology for reading emotion into medical records, in order to re-locate emotions into historical analytical matrix of nineteenth-century American medicine.