Patently Innovative? Re-interpreting the history of industrial medicine

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The Centre for the History and Philosophy of Science, University of Leeds, collaborating with the Thackray Museum in Leeds aim to render more broadly accessible the museum's very substantial collections on innovation in medical technology. This project will be as much Knowledge Exchange as Knowledge Transfer since it will involve university researchers in HPS bringing knowledge and methods from their prior research, while Thackray Museum staff will bring their collections knowledge and knowledge of non-academic audiences and methods of communication. The museum's curatorial and education staff will develop new knowledge and skills in using patent data and interpreting information about developments in healthcare technology, which will improve their ability to interpret the history of medical innovations for a range of target audiences. Reciprocally University researchers will gain new skills and understanding in using research to generate public outputs, through involvement in audience consultation work and production of interpretation material for non-academic audiences. The principal research drawn upon is the recently completed AHRC-funded project Owning & Disowning Invention: intellectual property, authority and identity in British Science and Technology in the period 1870-1930. That explored the motivations for some innovators in electrical technology to patent innovations while others engaged in 'open' publicly shared innovation. Patenting was not governed by a single strategy nor did it have a simple meaning: it could be for profit, to sustain research, to support families, to attract capital investment, to develop commercial bargaining tools or to protect creative assets against predatory rivals. Other innovations went unpatented for similarly diverse reasons: they were not innovative enough to secure legal protection; the costs of patenting could not feasibly be recouped from royalties or litigation; it constituted an illegitimate monopoly of knowledge; or that innovations ought to be shared altruistically for the public good, or to protect 'gentlemanly' status. The last of these was the typical strategy of many medical practitioners as illustrated in the two recently completed PhD theses to be drawn upon for this knowledge exchange project. Dr Annie Jamieson's thesis shows that the introduction of unpatented X-rays and ultra-violet lamps to medical therapy and diagnosis in the 1900s was often to meet explicit and public patient demand. Dr Claire Jones' thesis 'Between Commerce and Professionalism' on trade catalogues shows, however, that the contemporary electrical industry promoted patented devices for lighting, therapeutics and hearing assistance in medicine driven primarily by motives of publicity and profit. The outcomes of these three completed research projects will be applied initially to three electrical artefacts in the Thackray collections to show how the industrial process of patenting entered mainstream healthcare from the late nineteenth century: hearing aids, electrotherapy, X-ray related apparatus. This will reveal the limitations of existing medical museum exhibits that refer only to the heterodox (quack) 'patent medicines' of the 18th and 19th centuries or simply to the hi-tech biopatenting characteristic of the Cold War era or its 21st century aftermath. This Knowledge Transfer project thus fills in the gap in the conventional museum narrative, enabling the Thackray Museum to explain to its many visitors how innovation in medicine has at least sometimes been driven extrinsically by industrial imperatives rather than by the humanitarian aspirations of physicians in healthcare. This will enable such museum visitors to reflect critically on their own experiences of advanced technologized medicine and its historical development, to ask how far the growth of intellectual property in healthcarehas centred on meeting patients' needs or instead on magnifying the profits of manufacture.