Owen J. Wister, MD and the Drama of Medicine in the Nineteenth Century

Time: 5:30pm

Location: 407 Jefferson Alumni Hall, Thomas Jefferson University

Owen Wister (1825 – 1896) from the 1850s into the 1880s maintained an exhausting medical practice in the northwest sections of Philadelphia. His days were filled with the mundane of any general doctor’s existence, but also the confrontation with sudden and overpowering disease, and sometime the grisly deaths of friends and family. Often he worked from early morning until late evening, seeing as many as 30 or 40 patients in their homes scattered over a thirty mile range. He endured as well frequent calls at night for real or imagined emergencies and maternity cases. Eventually, he suffered burn-out and had to take several years off to regain his own health.

In this presentation, Dr. Peitzman will provide us with a glimpse of Dr. Wister’s practice using his words and those of one patient.

He will also explore in detail one tense episode in which he violated practice guidelines to save a life.

The lecture should raise questions such as: what are the implications of now never seeing patients in their homes? How does a physician avoid becoming a victim of her or his success? How and when can one deviate from the stated norms of practice?

Steven J. Peitzman, MD, a 1971 graduate of Temple University School of Medicine, is currently Professor of Medicine at Drexel University College of Medicine, where he’s a nephrologist with special interest in renal stone disease and refractory hypertension. He’s also a well-respected historian of medicine, with a reputation that spans both North America and the United Kingdom. His historical work has centered on his own specialty in the 19th and 20th centuries, on the history of American medical education, on medicine in Philadelphia, and on the history of American women in medicine.

Dr. Peitzman is the author of numerous papers and book chapters on these topics, and two books. The first, published in 2000, is A New and Untried Course: Woman's Medical College and Medical College Of Pennsylvania, 1850-1998 (Rutgers University Press). His second book (2007), within the Johns Hopkins series “Biographies of Disease,” is titled Dropsy, Dialysis, Transplant: A Short History of Failing Kidneys. In 2007, Dr. Peitzman gave the annual Garrison Lecture at the meeting of the American Association for the History of Medicine, which was published in the Summer, 2009, issue of the Bulletin of the History of Medicine. It deals with the life and practice of Owen Wister, MD, a nineteenth-century general practitioner in Philadelphia.

Dr. Peitzman has created and teaches several elective history courses at Drexel University College of Medicine, and has also taught students at Temple University, Jefferson University, and the University of Pennsylvania. In addition, he has developed and conducts two medical-historical walking tours of Philadelphia’s historic area. Dr. Peitzman has held research grants for historical work from the National Library of Medicine, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Philosophical Society.