Welcome to 2019 and we hope you all had a lovely winter break (that is assuming you had one, of course) and are back and ready to stare down January. We’re switching to a new posting schedule starting right now! We’ll be putting up fresh content here on the blog on Tuesdays and Thursdays. If you are interested in writing for us, please get in touch via comment or email (medicalheritage (at) gmail (dot) com).… Continue reading
We’d like to wish all our readers and users a happy end of 2018 and a good beginning to 2019 — we’ll be back with fresh content in January! Continue reading
~This post is courtesy Polina Ilieva, UCSF Archivist. This is a guest post by Aaron J. Jackson, PhD student, UCSF Department of Anthropology, History and Social Medicine. Figure 19 – San Francisco Chronicle, Monday, November 11, 1918 One hundred years ago, on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, the “war to end all wars” effectively came to an end as the Armistice went into effect. This momentous occasion would go on… Continue reading
Saturday, December 1, is World AIDS Day; no matter how you spend the day, the MHL will be making historical medical resources available for researchers of all kinds. Here are a couple of links you may find helpful: MHL items related to AIDS and HIV State medical society journal items related to AIDS and HIV Continue reading
~This post is courtesy Polina Ilieva, UCSF Archivist. This is a guest post by Aaron J. Jackson, PhD student, UCSF Department of Anthropology, History and Social Medicine. One-hundred years ago, the First World War raged into its fourth year. Millions perished in the conflict as the armies of the “civilized” nations applied industrial efficiency to the brutality of warfare. The first weeks of conflict in 1914 shattered traditional conceptions of war. While battlefield success once depended… Continue reading
If All about gateaux and dessert cakes (1910) doesn’t scream #NationalCakeDay, we don’t know what does. Continue reading
~Jonathan Jones is a 2017-2018 Research Fellow and is a Ph.D. Candidate in History at Binghamton University. We would like to extend our thanks to him for permission to repost this piece. Dark rumors of Civil War veterans’ addiction to morphine and opium riveted Americans during the Civil War’s aftermath. Many observers believed the so-called “morphine habit” was a kind of “insanity” to which veterans were particularly susceptible, made so by the dangerous medical practices… Continue reading
Check this out: The “Ui Breasail” home recipe cookery book, published in 1910 in Dublin, Ireland, during the heyday of what is often called the “Irish Renaissance” (alternately, the “Celtic Twilight”). The advertisements as well as the recipe write-ups put this book squarely in the Irish-Ireland movement, a fascinating mixture of home rule politics, nationalism, and a drive towards turning Ireland’s culture inwards. “Ui breasail” translates roughly to “Hy Brasil or ‘The Blessed Isle,” a land… Continue reading
This time of year, many of us in the US start pulling out recipe books, making ingredient lists, and trying to remember just how that really good pie we made last fall went. If you’re looking for inspiration, the MHL has you covered! Try the 1890 Recipe book from the Gloucestershire School of Cookery and Domestic Science: fruit pie? gingerbread pudding? boiled whiting? Maybe you want something a little more old-timey? Try the 1908 An old-world… Continue reading
NLM has digitized and made publicly available for the first time, one of four known copies of Shadows from the Walls of Death: Facts and Inferences Prefacing a Book of Specimens of Arsenical Wall Papers, 1874. In this three-part series learn more about the origins of this rare book, the digitization effort, and the arsenic pigments of the 19th century. By Krista Stracka ~ Krista Stracka is a Rare Book Cataloger for the Rare Books and Early… Continue reading
