ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Negotiating Autoimmunity: Experiential Knowledge and Material Practice in Reshaping Rheumatoid Arthritis in the U.S., 1950-1970

• In Event: Shifting Perspectives on Disease Entities

English Abstract

Autoimmune diseases became a well-established disease category in the late 1950s and 1960s. While historians have examined autoimmunity as part of late-twentieth century cultural and intellectual shifts, this study adopts a different approach by expanding the range of actors and material practices involved in the production of knowledge about rheumatologic diseases.

This paper examines the co-production of autoimmune disease knowledge by physicians and patients in Dr. Joseph Hollander’s climate-controlled chamber studies in 1960s Philadelphia, drawing on patient correspondence, research grants, and published materials. Hollander’s studies involved the “voluntary incarceration” of two women with rheumatoid arthritis inside a specially designed climate-controlled room at the University of Pennsylvania Hospital to evaluate the patient-reported claim that weather changes worsened arthritis symptoms. Blending experiential knowledge with the use of precision scientific instruments, Hollander assessed patients under varying atmospheric conditions using diagnostic techniques such as synovial fluid analysis, and through symptom diaries collected from patient volunteers.

I argue that, in validating patients’ knowledge that the weather affected their arthritis, the climate control studies incorporated patients’ voices into the instrumental apparatus of clinical knowledge production, while also reinforcing the notion that lived knowledge was imprecise and required scientific corroboration. By reshaping the landscape of diagnostic tools for assessing the disease, the studies contributed to the growing recognition of rheumatoid arthritis as an immunological disorder. In shifting the perspective on biomedical knowledge toward this multivocal apparatus, this paper contributes a new lens on disease entities as negotiated historical objects.

Author

• Sofia Grant, Johns Hopkins University