“Shackle-Breakers” and “Adventure-Makers”: Fantasies of the US West at Oregon Health and Science University

Abstract

“Shackle-Breakers” and “Adventure-Makers”Fantasies of the US West at Oregon Health and Science University Pamela Pierce (bio) In the 1970s the Department of Radiology at Oregon Health and Science University produced a training video for transluminal angioplasty (Dotter). In addition to showing how to open up a blocked blood vessel with a small, flexible plastic tube, the training video also displayed lofty shots of Mount Hood paired with the rousing sounds of the “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” The “Battle Hymn of the Republic” gives the wilderness shown in the training video an almost religious significance, “at a time when the force of religion seemed vitiated by the new scientism on the one hand and social conflict on the other, wilderness acquired special significance as a resuscitator of faith” (Nash 157). For the University of Oregon Medical School (later known as Oregon Health and Science University [OHSU]) the West was a frontier and a wilderness.1 The video starts with a wide panning shot over Mount Hood. The camera shows the viewer the famous mountain and the endless vista of lofty peaks beyond. Next, the camera travels down the Columbia River, getting closer to Portland, panning down to a street view of what looks like Burnside Street, the main road in Portland. The camera gets closer to one particular man and a voice-over shares, “This man is in pain” (Dotter). It’s time for an angioplasty. Once the angioplasty wraps up, the chords of the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” strike up again, and it’s time to go back to Mount Hood. This time two elderly white men, one of whom might be Charles Dotter, head of the Department of Radiology at the University of Oregon Medical School, hike the mountain. One of them lifts the sunglass covering of his glasses up and stares pensively off [End Page 29] into the distance. The scene cuts to a nurse watching a patient literally skipping down a hallway. Finally, the camera returns to the mountain, where it all began. The words “filmed in Oregon” appear over a final shot of Mount Hood. This training video and other archival items held at Oregon Health and Science University demonstrate how OHSU’s western representation intersected with classic ideas of the West as a proving ground for educated white men seeking to define themselves, a mythology that left many people out. In Wilderness and the American Mind, Roderick Nash discusses this wilderness cult with Theodore Roosevelt as a major proponent. A widespread discontentment with civilization resulted in the view of wilderness “as a source of virility, toughness, and savagery . . . [and] an increasing number of Americans invested wild places with aesthetic and ethical values, emphasizing the opportunity they afforded for contemplation and worship” (Nash 145). The frontier myth provided opportunities for masculine self-definitions. Peter Bayers explains that, influenced by the mythology of white western masculinity, “farmers and ranchers have sought to embody a masculine independence propagated by the frontier myth, with the rancher exemplifying a particularly rugged version of masculinity, given the lineage that links him to the cowboy and his predecessor, the hunter. . . . the farmer and hunter immerse themselves in nature, ‘regressing’ to a state of innocence through which they regenerate their masculine self-definition” (375). When the mythology of white western masculinity is mentioned, scholars often highlight Roosevelt’s essential role in propagating these myths with his buckskin costumes and references to the time he spent ranching in North Dakota (“Theodore Roosevelt in North Dakota”; “Theodore Roosevelt in the West”). As a sickly New York City child and an adult fan of Owen Wister’s The Virginian, Roosevelt firmly believed in the West as a proving ground and a place where things he had only read about could come to life. Literature shaped Roosevelt’s worldview throughout his life. Slotkin explains, “Roosevelt’s prior and primary engagement was with mythology; that is, with the narrative literature in which the frontier and its people existed as fantasy-projections. His reading led him from Cooper’s [End Page 30] Leatherstocking and the Norse/German sagas to Francis Parkman” (Slotkin 611). Roosevelt’s masculine western imaginary did not leave space for women...