Wonders of Collaboration by John DeVilbiss
“Wondrous Hairy Disease” took the life of a 17th century woman in what must have been an agonizing death. A 400-year-old autopsy report describes that she suffered from a hairy tumor that took eight years from its onset before it killed her. The tumor caused her abdomen to extend by about a foot, and made breathing difficult because of the way it pressed on her diaphragm. Whether the tumor was malignant or benign was inconsequential because cutting it out was not an option. Anesthetics had not been developed.
Photo courtesy of William Lensch.
S
Caption goes here.
Kristen Brady holds a medieval medical text as illuminating today as it was 400 years ago.
52 UTAHSTATE I SPRING 2020
he was a woman who leaped off the page for Mark Damen, Utah State University professor of history and classics, when his former Latin student, William Lensch, ’91, asked for his help in translating the medieval medical text detailing her cancer. Lensch, now strategic advisor to the dean in the Harvard Medical School, believed he had come across the first documented case of a reproductive system teratoma in Harvard’s medical archive. His Latin, however, was rusty. Damen enlisted help from another former student, Chuck Oughton, ’08, to translate the 15,000-word report which Lensch used for his research on teratomas and cited the text in a published report. Meanwhile, the rare translation sat on Damen’s desk for another 10 years whose whisperings he could not entirely shut out. He knew the text lacked historical perspective. He also knew that a recently recruited grad student in history, Kristen Brady, was interested in historical medicine. Would she be willing to take it on as an interdisciplinary project? “Oh yeah!,” she told him. “This is actually the kind of work I really want to be doing.”
That is because shortly after Brady arrived in 2018 to study social history, she experienced some personal health issues that caused her to pore through medical journals, teaching herself how to read them. “I actually really started to enjoy it,” she says. Brady came across a few history of medicine articles that weren’t “very good history, to be honest,” she says, “but those articles still meant something to me as a patient.” She realized that historians of medicine have access to a large demographic because everyone is, in a sense, a patient. “There’s this entire audience that is kind of being untapped because we, as historians, are really focused on creating an historical narrative specifically for other historians,” she says. “As soon as I started uncovering this narrative, I was kind of like, okay, this is how I make history useful.” For her, the autopsy report of this 17th century woman demonstrated how an important story emerged from a single find because one person cared enough to share and consult with others about it. That case has taken on more relevant meaning, not only because it better informs scholars today about diseases and medical procedures in early modern
