Category: Digital Highlights

Digital Highlights: Disquisitions on Ancient Medicine

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What we might now call “history of medicine,” Richard Millar in 1811 thought of calling “medical archaeology.” His work in the field was inspired by “some singular traits” he felt he had discovered in ancient Greek medicine that he thought had parallels in other “rude, or semibarbarous, tribes…” and he wrote a book to prove it.

He starts at the beginning: “This will commence with the earliest trace of tradition or history,…” (29)

Flip through the pages below or follow this link to read Disquisitions in the history of medicine. Part first, Exhibiting a view of physic, as observed to flourish, during remote periods, in Europe, and the East.

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

New to the MHL: Anatomy, Myology, and Operative Surgery

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The Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library has recently added several important volumes in the history of medicine to the Medical Heritage Library.  Though the Health Sciences Library participated in MHL’s Sloan Foundation and NEH funded digitization projects, the size of these items precluded them being digitized at that time.

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From the Albinus anatomy.

Bernhard Siegfried Albinus’ monumental anatomical atlas of 1749, Tabulae Sceleti et Musculorum Corporis Humani [Plates of the Skeleton and Muscles of the Human Body], is one of the best-known works in the history of anatomy. It features striking engravings of human skeletons standing before tombs, cherubs, and the first living rhinoceros to reach Europe.

Another volume includes two works by Jacques Gautier-D’Agoty: Anatomie de la Tête (1748) [Anatomy of the Head] and Myologie Complette en Couleur (1746) [Complete Myology in Color].  Gautier-D’Agoty was an artist and engraver, not an anatomist, and his works, while scientifically unimportant, are noted for their bold use of color and sometimes weird and fantastic images of the human body.

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From the D’Agoty anatomy.

Joseph Pancoast’s Treatise on Operative Surgery (Philadelphia, 1844) is a landmark of 19th century American surgical writing.  It’s particularly noted for its excellent chapters on plastic surgery, but also contains significant sections on neurological and ophthalmic operations.  The 486 illustrations on 80 plates are known for their accuracy and detail and made this work an American medical best-seller with about 4,000 copies sold over nine years.

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From the Pancoast treatise.

The digitization of these works is a collaborative effort among the Columbia University Libraries’ departments. It is part of an ongoing project to restore and repair larger quarto and folio rare books held by the Health Sciences Library’s Archives & Special Collections.  The volumes are first treated by professional conservators at Columbia University Libraries’ Conservation Laboratory. They are then digitized by the Imaging Laboratory, part of the Libraries’ Preservation & Digital Conversion Division.

Besides being accessible through the Medical Heritage Library, the volumes can be found via CLIO, the Columbia University Libraries Online Public Access Catalog.

The Health Sciences Library’s conservation project is funded by the Jerome P. Webster Endowment, bequeathed to the Library by Dr. Webster, Columbia’s first professor of plastic surgery, prominent historian of medicine, and bibliophile.

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

Digital Highlights: Tea with Mrs. Quantock

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Any fan of E.F. Benson’s Lucia series will remember Daisy Quantock, Lucia’s next-door neighbor in the village of Riseholme. Benson describes Daisy as being a middle-aged woman in perfect health and therefore devoted to whatever diet or exercise fad comes her way. In the opening chapters of Queen Lucia, the first novel in the series, Daisy is a firm believer in cleansing, particularly in cleansing uric acid from her system. Her husband is quite impatient with the system since it means a longer reign of a bad cook hired when Daisy was under the sway of Christian Science and endless lectures from his wife on the dangers to his system of the foods he craves.

Perhaps Daisy and her cook would have pored over something like The Apsley cookery book (1905), a collection of 448 recipes for those on the uric-acid-free diet. The authors provide recipes for everything from soup to nuts, quite literally, along with introductory chapters extolling the virtues of the diet, suggesting proper cookware, and a table of “food values.”

Flip through the pages below or follow this link to read The Apsley cookery book.

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

Digital Highlights: “The Magic Monitor”

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This is a small book; but it contains as much reading as a large and heavy volume of five hundred pages, printed in large type. I mention this fact so that you will not mis-estimate the amount of labor I have performed to get it up. No one but myself can ever understand, or form a correct idea of, the research, study, experiment and experience that have been expended on these pages.

Most authors probably feel this way about their published works, but H. Monnett wanted to be sure there was no possibility for confusion when it came to his The magic monitor and medical intelligencer : containing wonderful and elaborate revelations concerning the following subjects–love, courtship & marriage, how to prevent an increase of family, how to cure self-abuse and its results, the detection, prevention & cure of all private diseases, etc.

The heading for his first chapter is almost equally eyecatching, in part declaring MERCURY! Beware of it. Monnett himself espouses a herbal system. He goes on to make brief mention of a number of Desultory Items, including that the healthiest children are born in the spring (February through May), that marriage blunts the imagination, and that “consumption” (presumably tubercular infection) has been corrected in both men and women through marriage.

Given that The magic monitor was published in 1857 it is, perhaps, depressing in its familiarity for the modern reader to find Monnett enthusiastically promoting the doctrine that a woman cannot become pregnant from a rape. Certainly the idea is nothing new.

Flip through the pages below or follow this link to read The magic monitor.

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

Digital Highlights: Who Wants to be a Mesmerist?

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Who doesn’t want to finish up the summer with a new skill? Why not try mesmerism! Thomas Welton is here to help with his 1884 Mental Magic: “The public again, after a lapse of 20 years, being much interested in the above subject, and having no clear explanation given to them on it or how to produce for themselves far higher Phenomena of the same class, I venture to hope that this work will not be unwelcome…”

Welton not only offers step-by-step instructions on how to mesmerise, but also instructions on using the planchette, a divination tool popular among spiritualists. The planchette was something like a wheeled Ouija board, the idea being that the spiritual power would transfer through the medium and into the board through touch and then make itself known by writing on a sheet of paper laid below.

Flip through the pages below or follow this link to read Mental magic: a rationale of thought reading, and its attendant phenomena and their application to the discovery of new medicines, obscure diseases, correct delineations of character, lost persons and property, mines and prings of water, and all hidden and secret things.

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

Digital Highlights: Overworking Your Brain

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“Brain-work” may not be something we’re thinking about in the middle of the summer but the dangers of overwork are always with us — at least, so thinks Horatio C. Wood. In 1880, he published Brain-work and overwork to publicize his view of the causes and cures of mental over-exertion which include gluttony and artificial stimulants — it seems unlikely that his arguments against coffee and tea made many converts. Still less attractive to the modern readers are his criticisms of the modern working woman: “Among the saddest wrecks of our modern civilization are the faded, heartless, helpless, and hopeless women…” (73)

Flip through the pages below or click this link to read Brain-work and overwork.

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

Digital Highlights: “Every Man Can Be His Own Doctor”

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Who doesn’t enjoy a good self-help read from time to time? This one comes stocked with suggestions for home medical treatment, rules for healthy living, and suggestions on how to take out stains (among other recipes)!

Flip through the pages below or follow this link to read The American household adviser : an ever ready guide for the wants of the family (1875).

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

Digital Highlights: Anyone for Tea?

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Around this time of year, most of us enjoy some good iced tea from time to time: perhaps green or black, maybe with lemon, maybe with mint, or maybe some southern “sweet tea” (which I’ve never gotten to taste!)

A. Ibbotson’s 1910s (possibly 1912? but there’s no date given) volume on Tea, from grower to consumer could be a nice light read to have with your tea, illustrated with photographs of tea plantations and starting with a beautiful frontispiece of the tea plant.

Flip through the pages below or follow this link to read Tea, from grower to consumer.

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

Digital Highlights: “The Hospital Pupil’s Guide Through London”

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The hospital pupil’s guide through London, in a seres [sic] of letters : from a pupil at St. Thomas’s Hospital to his friend in the country ; recommending the best manner of a pupils employing his time, and interspersed with amusing anecdotes relative to the history and oeconomy of hospital’s [sic] (1800) claims to be a collection letters sent from a medical student in London to a friend who is planning to come to London and matriculate in the same medical school. There is no author name, although the initials “J.C.” are appended to a brief introductory letter directed to the country student’s sister. (The country student did not survive to come to London.)

J.C. (assuming those to be the initials of the author) writes an amusing and highly readable account of his time in London, discussing the student hierarchy (“The only persons more priveledged [sic] than Dressers are the Apprentices…” (11)), the order of his lectures (“…almost before I am awake, I go to the Midwifry [sic] Lecture…” (13)), and the design of London hospitals (“The entrance to Mr Guys [sic] Hospital is certainly very grand…” (34)). He describes student life, talks about his classes, and gives his friend advice over how and when to matriculate and with what professors for which subjects.

Flip through the pages below or follow this link to read The hospital pupil’s guide.

Digital Highlights: News for (Alumnae) Nurses

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In February of 1907, the Alumnae Association of the School for Nursing at the New York Hospital agreed upon the publication of a newsletter for their alums: “It is hoped that the paper, if continued, may help to keep the members of the association in closer touch with one another…” Eight members were appointed to “gather news.”

This inaugural issue included notes about a fund for sick nurses, and brief notes about alumnae clubs and members: “The new Club rules have been drawn up, and submitted to the nurses for approval. Mrs. Robinson is abroad for an indefinite time.”

As time went on, the newsletter included more content: news about the school, notification of upcoming meetings and events of interest to alumnae, and general pieces about the state of the nursing profession.

Click through the pages below or follow this link to read The Alumnae News.

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