Music, Sound, and Medicalized Trauma in Global and Historical Contexts
Chair(s): Erin Johnson-Williams (University of Southhampton), Michelle Meinhart (Trinity Laban)
Organized by the AMS Music, Sound, and Trauma Study Group.
Trauma and medicine have long been intertwined. Victorian surgeons speculated on links between psychological trauma and “railway spine,” while Jean-Martin Charcot and other nineteenth-century neurologists made pivotal contributions to emerging conceptions of trauma via their work at Paris’s Hôpital Salpêtrière. Researchers in medical fields have investigated physical, mental, and emotional symptoms of suffering, and contributed to practices for treating trauma. Yet medical practitioners and institutions have often produced or exacerbated trauma as well, from pathologizing discourse to medical trauma itself. Within these connected histories of trauma and medicine, music and sound play crucial roles. Charcot and other doctors at the Salpêtrière used tuning forks and other sonic devices in their experiments, while the emerging field of music therapy experimented with different methods of addressing trauma beginning in the mid-twentieth century. And scholars such as Michelle Meinhart and Ailsa Lipscombe have analyzed music and sound’s connections with trauma, medical institutions, and medicalized apparatuses in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Building on these observations, this Music, Sound, and Trauma Study Group session confronts the topic of medicalized trauma. How have music and sound been weaponized within medical spaces? How have medical practitioners or people with trauma employed or resisted the use of music and sound as healing? How have spaces beyond hospitals, clinics, and medical research institutions become medicalized through trauma discourse and/or music-making? How have medical establishments been represented in media, and how have music and sound played roles in these representations? How have inequities in global and historical healthcare systems been shaped, represented, exacerbated, or addressed through music and sound? This 90-minute session, chaired by Erin Johnson-Williams, will feature five lightning talks that address these questions, followed by discussion between panelists and audience members.
Presentations of the Symposium
The Socio-Cultural and Liturgical Response to the English Sweats or Sudor Anglicus, 1485-1551
Samantha Bassler
New York University and Rutgers University at Newark
In 1485, two important events shook England. Henry Tudor established his reign after defeating the Plantagenets in the War of the Roses, and the first outbreak of the ‘Sweating Sickness’, the ‘Sweats’ or, in Latin, Sudor Anglicus occurred. While the official cause of the sweating sickness is unknown, some epidemiologists speculate that the War of the Roses contributed to it, since the first outbreak in August 1485 followed the battle. Still other scientists suggest that the hantavirus is the culprit, a virus from rats.
The following chapter will investigate the liturgical and, subsequently, musical response to the sweating sickness. The pandemic began at a tumultuous time in England’s history, and continued throughout an even more significant period: the English Reformation, when English worship and liturgical practice was changing drastically and its people were adjusting to not only a deadly virus with a mortality rate of 30-50%, but also the destruction of their places of worship and other familiar cultural landmarks. While there has been musicological research on the bubonic plague, this is the first research that examines sweating sickness from the specific point of view of musicology.
Sonic Healing and Resistance: Music and Sound in Asian Healthcare Contexts
Hippocrates Cheng
Binghamton University
This proposal investigates how medical practitioners and individuals experiencing trauma in Asia have employed or resisted music and sound as tools for healing. Across diverse Asian healthcare traditions, sound has played a pivotal role in mediating physical and psychological suffering. From the use of Tibetan singing bowls in Himalayan healing practices to the incorporation of Gamelan music in Indonesian therapeutic rituals, sound is deeply embedded in cultural approaches to wellness. Yet, the introduction of Western medical models has often marginalized these practices, leading to both adaptation and resistance.
This talk explores how traditional sound-based healing practices, such as mantras in Ayurveda or qigong sound therapy in China, have been integrated into or excluded from modern healthcare systems. It also examines how individuals and communities have resisted the medicalization of trauma by reclaiming sonic practices as acts of cultural preservation and empowerment. Case studies include the use of music therapy in Japanese palliative care and the resurgence of indigenous sound healing in post-colonial contexts.
By analyzing these dynamics, this presentation highlights the tensions and synergies between traditional and modern approaches to trauma and healing in Asia. It underscores the transformative potential of music and sound as both tools of care and sites of resistance within global healthcare systems.
Charting Trauma’s Embodied Imprints: The Endemic Era and its Sonic Cartographies of Medicalization
Ailsa Lipscombe
University of Cincinnati’s College-Conservatory of Music
Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic—and since its evolution into what Monica Ghandi has called the “endemic era” (2023)—sound and music have played a significant role in both identifying and experiencing a changed world (Guzy 2020; Chiu 2020). From once busy streets suddenly rendered silent to neighborhood musicking across balconies and hospital wards filled with the hiss and release of ventilators, the COVID-19 pandemic reorchestrated familiar environments into sites of discomfort and dis-ease. Underpinning many of these acoustemological transformations is a phenomenon I have elsewhere called “the medicalization of the everyday” (Lipscombe 2025), where the sights, sounds, and behaviors most readily associated with “traditional” medical facilities saturated quotidian spaces and altered quotidian experiences.
In this lightning talk, I introduce one facet of this phenomenon by focusing on the ways trauma prompts medicalized reinterpretation of sound in the everyday. Building on conversations with my research interlocutors, and in dialogue with somatic theories of trauma’s embodied imprints (Menakem 2017; Rothschild 2000, 2021; Van Der Kolk 2014), I contend that familiar sounds become triggers of traumatic stress when heard within these newly-medicalized frames. In doing so, I reveal sound as critically implicated within processes of “associative interference” that have flourished in the endemic era (Laufer 2020), whereby existing meanings have been rewritten in the face of overwhelming, medicalized contexts—where trauma is experienced, and then re-experienced, through its sensory echoes.
A Match Made in Medical Doubt: WWI Musico-Therapy and Shell Shock
Briana Nave
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Shell shock, the neurasthenia (nervous exhaustion) diagnosis of World War I, was the first great test for musico-therapy, as the early field was then called. For scientific medicine, shell shock was a dubious condition, and musico-therapy a dubious treatment. Doctors initially believed that shell shock resulted from brain injuries incurred from exploding shells. That organic basis became increasingly doubtful when medical examination did not reveal brain or nerve lesions. Medical humanists have argued that medicine expects symptoms—bodily signs—to signify identifiable medical conditions (Zilcosky 2021, Belling 2012). Neurasthenic patients frustrated that expectation by presenting with medical symptoms—tremors, palpitations, insomnia, memory loss—for which no organic source could be found. This frustration of bodily semiotics made physicians uncertain whether the symptoms they observed were fundamentally physical or psychological. They faced a similar uncertainty regarding musico-therapy. While the therapists insisted their treatment physically soothed shellshocked nerves, physicians wondered if it was mostly a “mental salve.” I draw on William Davis’s (1987, 1993) and Annegret Fauser’s (2013) work on early twentieth century musico-therapy, the published work of musico-therapists such as Eva Augusta Vescelius, and WWI-era news reports of musical treatment to reveal musico-therapy’s neurological strategies of self-validation. I argue that shell shock and musico-therapy legitimized one another within a scientific-medical establishment that doubted whether the condition or its treatment warranted medical attention. My work contributes to medical humanities by offering WWI musico-therapy as a case of musical negotiation between patients and scientific medicine in the mind-body borderlands where traumatic conditions reside.
Collective Isolation and the Sonic Environment: Headphones at Waverly Tuberculosis Sanatorium
Kristen Strandberg
University of Evansville
Waverly Sanatorium, a now-abandoned tuberculosis hospital on the outskirts of Louisville, Kentucky, housed and treated patients from the 1920s to the 1960s. Thanks to a wealth of firsthand patient accounts written in the late 1920s and early 1930s, we can learn a great deal about the patient experience including the sonic environment.
The hospital, built in 1926, boasted all the latest innovations in medical treatments and patient amenities. Incredibly, headphones were installed next to each bed that connected patients to the radio as well as in-house guest speakers and, by the mid-1930s, even adult education courses sponsored by the Works Progress Association. The selection of radio station or programming was controlled by a central office so that all patients heard the same broadcasts simultaneously.
Based on primary source materials including firsthand patient accounts, I argue that the bedside headphones provided a sense of normalcy for patients, while also highlighting their isolation. On the one hand, headphones allowed them to escape the sounds of medical equipment and other patients’ suffering and established a connection to the outside world; patients discuss keeping up with current events and listening to baseball games and music. At the same time, this connection to the outside world showed them exactly what they were missing. Further, although the patients who listened most were in isolation, the radio connected them to each other as a common experience.