The Corner Society "A Calculus of Compassion: Medicine, Emotion, and Identity in Nineteenth-century America"

Courtney E. Thompson, Associate Professor, Mississippi State University

 A Calculus of Compassion: Medicine, Emotion, and Identity in Nineteenth-century America

Healthcare access and outcomes in the contemporary United States are intimately connected to questions of identity. This presentation examines the historical development of health inequities influenced by the affective component of the doctor–patient relationship, particularly how white, male physicians of the past encountered and reacted to their patients, who were often non-white, female, or of non-normative gender or sexual identity. How did physicians feel about their patients? And how have patient identities—whether age, class, gender, race, disability, or sexuality—inflected this calculus of compassion as it was tallied across time and place? To explore these questions, this talk will discuss emotions in medical history and their implications for current healthcare disparities through a case study of one physician’s life and work in the late nineteenth century South and West.

Courtney E. Thompson is Associate Professor in the History Department at Mississippi State University, where she also chairs the Medical Humanities Minor program. She is a historian of nineteenth-century science and medicine, with research interests in the history of gender and the history of emotions, as well as ethics and historical methodology. Her first book is An Organ of Murder: Crime, Violence, and Phrenology in Nineteenth-century America (Rutgers University Press, 2021); her most recent publication, co-edited with Dr. Kylie M. Smith, is Do Less Harm: Ethical Questions for Health Historians (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2025). Her current book project focuses on the influence of identity and emotion on the doctor/patient relationship in nineteenth-century America.