Behind the Scenes Minis: Law and Medicine

Tracy discusses the inherent challenge of talking about topics that relate to current events. She also shares more information about Emma Reynolds that didn't really fit into the Dr. Daniel Hale Williams episode. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class a production
of iHeartRadio, Hello and Happy Friday. I'm Tracy V. Wilson
and I'm Holly Frye. We talked about United States versus
Wan kim ARC this week. We stressed that we could

(00:25):
not keep up with everything about it as I was
researching it. Yeah, in terms of the current events related
to this, Yeah, Yeah, it really felt like every single
day there was new commentary, new arguments, and new counter arguments.
Knew everything. But then in addition to that, just a
continual fire hose of stuff also happening. And I think

(00:52):
anytime there has been an episode like this one where
there has been a specific reason that something felt urgent, uh,
it has also felt like there have been fifty other
equally urgent things happening simultaneously. There is no way to

(01:12):
do all fifty things. And then additionally, in the two
weeks that pass ish two weeks approximately the pass between
researching and writing the episode and the episode actually coming out,
fifty more things are going to happen, and then like
exponential escalation of things involving what we were actually talking about. Yeah,

(01:35):
And it's one of the reasons why it is not
that often that I decide to do an episode that's
directly related to something that's happening in the news right now. Yeah,
it's building a house on shifting sand. Like completely, there's
always going to be some key element that emerges that
we didn't include, because yeah, you can't. Yeah. Yeah. While

(02:02):
I do not necessarily like the content of old Supreme
Court decisions, sometimes I do like reading the old Supreme
Court decisions. Sometimes they just they just include interesting things about,
you know, the mindset of the time and the justices

(02:22):
that we're writing it. This particular one, though the majority
opinions synopsis of what was happening previously, it goes on
for so long, yeah, so long, and each case that
it's talking about previously is maybe only a paragraph long.

(02:46):
But I really struggled with it. It It just it
felt like it was going on forever, and I was like,
I want to get to the part where you're telling
me about this case specifically. I understand what you're doing
by building up the immense precedent that we are already
talking about, but like, can we can we fast forward

(03:09):
a lot? I imagine probably right, it's exactly that they
know that this is something that not everybody sides with
and they want to be able to protect people with
just a mass of paperwork and precedent examples. Yeah, but
it does sometimes make it difficult to actually get through
the content of the decision. This was also not a

(03:32):
court that was racially progressive in any way, right, and
it had other decisions that were really the opposite of
this one in terms of talking about the ideas of
things like equality. And one of the things that we've
talked about before is John Marshall Harland, who became known

(03:54):
as the Great Dissenter, writing dissenting opinions some of these
previous cases where the court had taken a stance that
was just broadly speaking, not in favor of equality, and
he had written just a scathing descent of that that

(04:14):
picked apart all of it. And then in this case
he also dissented. But this discent was the descent of no,
this should not be should not be citizens for Chinese people?
Obviously not so anyway, I find that interesting about him.
I also had a little bit more in this episode

(04:37):
originally about Justice Stephen J. Field. A couple of sources
that I read framed him as being the only justice
that had really expressed any kind of support for the
idea of birthright citizenship. I don't actually know how accurate
that is, Like it was not a situation where I
could go and look up the entire scope of his

(05:00):
previous career as a Supreme Court justice. But he was
also a justice during some of the other cases that
we talked about that did not seem I was like,
just it does not seem like there were things that
made it read almost like like, yeah, he was the
one person who was in charge who was like in

(05:21):
favor of birthright citizenship, but he like he had other
cases that he had been part of the way. Yeah,
they're definitely not that way. Like he was part of
the majority in Plusy versus Ferguson, which upheld racial segregation.
He was part of the majority in Chai Chong Ping
versus the United States. We have we have episodes about
both of those, and you know that like U PLUSY

(05:45):
versus Ferguson establishing that that segregation was constitutional, Like that
was also part of I think the same court. Melville
Fuller was definitely still the justice. So anyway, that's been
one of the things that people have pointed out with
this executive order was that, like, this case came before
a court that had made a lot of pretty specifically
racist interpretations at the Constitution, and even within that context,

(06:09):
was like, no, this is saying everyone is a citizen
if they're born here, right, including Chinese people even anyway,
who probably didn't want to say that, had to acknowledge it.
They had to do it. Yeah, not that it would
ever be a thing I could do. But every time
we talk about the Supreme Court and a decision and dissenters,

(06:33):
I just know I could never be a judge on
the Supreme Court because I couldn't go to work with
those people the next day and be cool. I just couldn't.
I know who I am. And it's not that I
pretend that people that irritate me or make me angry
at work don't exist anymore. It's not a good habit,
but it's something that I just involuntarily do. So that

(06:54):
wouldn't work. Yeah, I think I have. I might have
told this story on the podcast before. A friend of
mine is a lawyer and we have been friends starting
from before he decided to change careers and go to
law school. And while he was in law school, there
was a case that was happening in the news in

(07:16):
which a person's behavior had been odious and awful, and
that person is still entitled to competent legal representation. That's
sort of how that idea works. Everyone is entitled to
competent legal representation, no matter what they have done. My

(07:37):
friend spouse, who I'm also friends with, I love them
both dearly. They came into the room continuing a conversation
on this subject that had started in the car, and
it was clear that she was furious, and he was like,
this is just how it has to work, and then
said that, like, one of the things they learn in

(07:58):
law school is that when you if you try to
talk about some of this with people who aren't lawyers,
it's violently upsetting. Yeah, because you, like, you have to
train your brain to work in this way. That's about
what the law says and what the Constitution says, and
not necessarily like what seems right to you, which is

(08:21):
part of part of where I get hung up. I'm like,
but that's messed up. Yeah. Yeah, Anyway, I do not
have enough grace in my heart for such things. It
turns out I get it. Yeah, Yeah, that's why I'm
spending a lot of time looking at plants for my
mental health. Right now, look at my garden plants. I

(08:47):
understand this. I like to take lots of locks. Yeah,
you do an out in nature thing. I do it
bring nature inside things. Yeah. Well, the the reason we
haven't done the bring nature inside thing at our house
is when we have had when we have tried to
have plants, the cats have not used them as litter boxes,

(09:07):
but they have liked to just pull things out of pots. Yeah.
And our house is just not set up in a
way that there's like places that plants can go that
cats can't access. Yeah. Yeah, So yeah, anyway, plants which
you're gonna inform future episodes to st I'm not sure

(09:28):
what my next episode is. Of course, there are a
million things that feel like are urgent to talk about
on the show, But I do not have the fortitude
to do urgent things all the time in a climate
of a fire hose of horribleness, which is what is
going on right now. So one of our episodes this

(09:59):
week was on Daniel Hale Williams. Technically Daniel Hale Williams
the third but I think we only said the third
part one time. There are several books about him that
are children's books. A couple of them have the name
doctor Dan in the title. I only know of one
full length biography for adults of him, and that was

(10:23):
published by a white woman named Helen Buckler in nineteen
fifty four, using research that had started in the late
nineteen forties. So when Buckler was researching this book, there
were people still living who had personally known him. The
forward of this book is really interesting because it talks

(10:43):
about her own experiences of basically crossing a color barrier
to learn about him and becoming more aware of her
own privilege and her own ignorance while doing all of that.
Apparently there were people so surprised that she was doing
this research on a black surgeon that they assumed that

(11:06):
she was a black person with very fair skin. Oh,
how fascinating. Yeah, so like really interesting to me that
part of it. So, of course, if you go and
you read this book, parts of it are going to
seem dated by today's standards in the language and how
it talks about things. But like, to me, the fact

(11:27):
that she was at a time of intense racial segregation
and also backlash to the civil rights movement that she
was doing this work. Montague Cobb, William Montague Cobb, who
we've also talked about on the show, wrote a couple
of different profiles of Daniel Hale Williams. That's one of
the things that Cobb did was write profiles of figures

(11:49):
from black history, and in one of these he says
that Butler had started researching this biography because she was
so fascinated with the idea that the first surgeon to
do an open heart surgery was black, and then her
own research revealed that there were earlier surgeries that he

(12:10):
wasn't actually the first one, and that when that happened,
her publisher lost interest in it. If that's accurate. She
did find another publisher fairly quickly after that, because the
book came out originally in nineteen fifty four. And then
all of that led me to say we should do
a Saturday Classic of William Montague Cobb, because it's been

(12:30):
four entire years since that episode came out, and I
would have said it was last year. I don't I
would have said it was last month. I mean, all
the time since twenty twenty has really really blurred together.
So anyway, that'll be coming up as a Saturday Classic.
I also found Daniel Hale Williams to be kind of

(12:51):
an interesting comparison to Vivian Thomas, who we have talked
about on the show before Vivian Thomas came along decades
later and is kind of an example of how like
shifts in the world and segregation. Specifically, because Daniel Haill

(13:12):
Williams was born before the Civil War grew up during
the Civil War, I have no idea what his experiences
of the Civil War years were like, lived through reconstruction.
When he went to medical school, it was at a
time of escalating racial segregation and escalating violence against black

(13:34):
people and black communities in response to basically the reconstruction
reconstructions progress. But I think this is what enabled him
to go to medical school and start practicing surgery when
he did. I didn't really find a tail about whether,
like how many other black students there might have been

(13:56):
at the school at the same time, what the process
was like for him, whether the admissions people were aware
of his race or anything like that, right, But it
was like he went to school and started working at
an era when there was somewhat more integration in Chicago,

(14:18):
and then Chicago became increasingly more segregated in the face
of like the great migration of black families out of
the South, and then Vivian Thomas much later segregation a
lot more entrenched, a lot more explicitly spelled out in
terms of laws and things. And you know, Vivian Thomas

(14:42):
also broke a lot of ground with surgery, but not
as a as a surgeon, as a surgical technician. So
I found those two interesting things to or an interesting
comparison to think about with the two of them. Yeah,
it is kind of fascinating that we go forward in
time but backwards in terms of, yeah, ways to make

(15:04):
things happen. I don't want to say opportunity, because it's
not so much that as him making a path right right, Yeah,
the like so much progress happened during reconstruction that was
then explicitly dismantled. So yeah, I also originally had this
in the actual body of the episode, but it just

(15:25):
felt like it was a weird aside anywhere in the
flow of the narrative that I tried to put it.
And that's about Emma Reynolds, who wanted to be a nurse.
She'd wanted to be a nurse. Her brother went to
Williams about her not being able to train to be
a nurse. I think her brother's original thought might have

(15:48):
been that Williams might just pull some strings for her.
I don't know if he really went into it thinking
We're going to start an entire hospital. I'm going to
make work for my Emma Reynolds grad Or was accepted
into that first class of nursing students. She graduated from
the nursing program at Provident Hospital in eighteen ninety three.

(16:09):
From there, she went on to Medical College of Chicago,
and she earned a medical degree there in eighteen ninety five.
So she became the first black woman to graduate from
the Medical College of Chicago, which I found also, of course,
very interesting. Yes, I wish I had had more like

(16:31):
first person accounts of what Daniel Hill Williams' life was like,
what his relationship with his mother was like. It really
felt like a lot of people were very critical of
his mother. But I also felt like I was reading
people's judgments and like not reading the facts of what happened.

(16:51):
If that makes sense. Yes, And that's actually one of
the things in his story that jumps out to me,
because this is a thing I am, you know, learned
late in life. I don't want to blow anybody's mind,
but parents are humans. Oh yeah, yeah, it becomes so easy.
I think too, because we kind of set up this

(17:13):
like very specific caricature of what it is to be
a parent and specifically a mother, and if people don't
like fit into what that is for whatever reason, yeah,
even if it's completely reasonable and understandable, people get real
weird about it and real judging in a minute. And

(17:35):
I'm like, this is a black woman at a time
when things are starting to go in a really yucky
direction in addition to dealing with the loss of her
spouse and trying to figure out how to manage her
own life in the lives of her kids. Was she

(17:55):
a great mom? I don't know, but like I'm I
don't feel like I'm in any position to put any
judgment on that situation because it's a lot well. And
I also think of like the decision that she and
her two oldest daughters were gonna go to Illinois and
they were gonna learn to to, as I understand it,
become hairdressers, right, which was like one of the things

(18:18):
that black women could do to support themselves in their families.
And could do really well at and so like just
the fact of that of like, Okay, I and the
two older girls who are old enough to you know,
start working, We're gonna go We're gonna learn hair stuff.
I'm like, yeah, that seems like a reasonable plan to me.

(18:41):
It also seems not possible to do that if you
also have four other children to care for. So like
the fact of having to split up the children does
sound horrifying, but also like what other option might there have? Right?

(19:08):
I think too the judgments of it to me, and
I didn't do the research, so you may have insight
that shifts this. It seems to decontextualize the fact that
that was not all that uncommon a practice in a
situation like that, where some catastrophic thing had happened to

(19:28):
a family, and often the loss of the primary breadwinner
was like, okay, who in the family can help? Where
can we put these kids? Often it meant splitting them
up among relatives' houses. That wasn't an unusual path, yep.
So for her to have that level of scrutiny and
kind of be characterized as though she abandoned her kids

(19:52):
is unsettling and obviously rooted in the bias of racism.
I'm sure, yeah, yeah, that happened to my grandmother's family. Yeah,
not at all. Yeah, so uh yeah, I uh. I
kind of like I wish I had like more specific detail,
because what I've read really felt like people had a

(20:14):
lot of judgment of her, and I could not figure
out whether those judgments, those judgments were really justified or not.
I also went down a rabbit hole while researching this
episode of whether a surgery on the pericardium is an
open heart surgery, since the heart muscle and the pericardium
are two different things, but the pericardium is part of

(20:36):
the way the heart functions, and generally the answer seemed
to be yes, like the the that surgically, the heart
and the pericardium are one organ. They are two parts
of the greater whole. Yeah, yeah uh, And I mean,

(20:57):
I guess if you're gonna well, actually something. The more
of the well actually is that there had been other
surgeries on the pericardium before this that he just did
not know had happened when he did them right, or
when he did the one that he wrote the paper about.
There were I think at least two other surgeries to
repair someone's pericardium that he did after that, the one

(21:19):
that he became most known for. That person lived another
something like thirty eight years, and one of his other
patients reportedly lived another fifty years. The fact that we
didn't have antibiotics at that point also pretty incredible, even
with all of the all of the steps that he

(21:41):
was taking for for hygiene and antiseptic procedures during the
say itself. That's also where it starts to be a
little infuriating to see the way that politics led to
this person who was incredibly bold as a practicer of

(22:04):
medicine medical practitioner in ways it was saving people having
him like literally nickeled and dimed in terms of like,
I don't know, there was a box of envelopes that
went missing while you were here, Like, it just seems
so petty and stupid and gross. At that point, it
also seemed like there was petty infighting at every single

(22:29):
medical facility. Yeah, that was part of this, and it
just kind of made me think, this explains why there's
so many doctor shows full of interpersonal dynamics. I know
that that's not really realistic. What's happens on the doctor shows,
But it seemed like every single one of them, you know,
if it was a facility of any size at all,
there were people who hated each other and were trying

(22:51):
to undermine each other got them, regardless of the prominence
of the hospital or who worked there. In my naive
I'm like, shouldn't you be about the greater mission of
caring for people's health instead of trying to be the
most one or whatever it is you're after, right, But again,

(23:13):
that's a very naive way to look at it. Yeah. Anyway, Hey,
whatever's happening on your weekend, I hope it is as
absolutely as good as possible. We are recording all these
at least two weeks ahead of when the weekend is coming,
so I have no idea what's happening in the world

(23:34):
on this Friday, of our Friday behind the scenes. But
we will be back with a Saturday Classic tomorrow. I
think the Saturday Classic tomorrow is going to be about
William Montague Cobb, and then we'll have something brand new
on Monday. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a
production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the

(23:58):
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