Digital Highlights: Household Hints

Title page of “Talks to My Patients.”

In response to what she described as widespread patient request, Mrs. Rachel B. Gleason wrote Talks to My Patients in 1870. The volume, according to Gleason, is based on “Parlor Talks,” but she says little else about them.

It is also unclear what basis Gleason has for giving medical advice — as she continues on to do in the rest of the book. She does not sign herself with a medical title, nor does she give her medical background or affiliations although she does dedicate the book to her patients.

She says that she writes “for those friends who want Hydropathic or Hygienic hints to help them meet their home duties.” (vi) Perhaps she was one of the many “eclectic” or alternative physicians active in the United States at the end of the nineteenth century.

Gleason’s chapters are an interesting melange of topics, including her first chapter on “Growing Girls,” where Gleason makes what appears to be an unintentionally humorous observation by writing after observing a child doing sums in the schoolroom: “While talking with the principal of the school we said to him that a child with such small calf of the legs ought not to do such large sums…” (16)

Gleason’s advice is simple, straightforward, and solidly in keeping with the late Victorian tenor of her times: clean living, confidence in parents, and solid religious values are the key to a good life. Girls need not be educated too well and too much exercise is harmful. Despite the fact that her book is nominally aimed towards women at all stages of life, Gleason is clearly talking more to mothers — and to mothers of girls — than to any other audience.

As always, for more from the Medical Heritage Library, please visit our full collection!

Update: Stephen Novak from Columbia, one of our partner libraries, was kind enough to leave us the following comment with much more information about Rachel Gleason:

“Actually, Rachel Brooks Gleason (1820-1905), was a well-known figure in the mid-19th century water cure movement in the US. She and her husband, Silas Orsemus Gleason, owned several water cure establishments in Upstate New York, eventually settling in Elmira where their Elmira Water Cure survived (as the Gleason Health Resort) until WWII. More importantly, she was the fourth American woman to receive a medical degree – from the Syracuse Medical College in 1851. All this, and more, about Gleason can be found in Christopher Hoolihan’s erudite and fascinating “Annotated Catalogue of the Edward C. Atwater Collection of American Popular Medicine and Health Reform” (3 v., University of Rochester Press, 2001-2008).”