Category: Digital Highlights

Police procedurals — such as the popular CSI series and its spin-offs and imitators — were not the cultural presence in turn of the century America that they are today. The development of the detective story and the crime novel are fascinating topics in and of themselves, but so is the development of “legal medicine” — what we might now call “forensic pathology.”

Frank W. Draper was one of the original practitioners of legal medicine in Massachusetts. He held positions at Harvard University, first in 1877 as a lecturer in legal medicine under Professor Walter Channing and then in 1884 as a professor of the same subject. When the Office of the Massachusetts Medical Examiner was created in 1877 to replace the officer of the coroner, Draper was appointed as the first ME for the Commonwealth.

Draper wrote one of the original North American texts on legal medicine, A text-book of legal medicine in 1905 — as with many professors since his appointment, he had to create the textbook for the classes he taught.

Flip through the pages below or visit A text-book of legal medicine to read Draper’s full text.

A Quarter of a Century with the Free Hospital for Women is a small picture book published in 1900, not long after the hospital had finished construction of its grand, new facility by a pond in Brookline, Massachusetts. The volume, held in the rare books collection at Harvard Medical School, Center for the History of Medicine, was recently digitized by the Brigham and Women’s Hospital Archives and made available online via the Medical Heritage Library. It will be of special interest to students of the history of institutional architecture, and to those interested in the history of the Brigham and Women’s Hospital. The Free Hospital for Women is one of BWH’s organizational “grandmothers.”

If you’ve ever wondered what a state-of-the-art hospital looked like a hundred plus years ago, flip through the photographs in this little book. See elegant arches and woodwork, gas lights, fireplaces, a grandfather clock, and Tiffany windows. There is a patient sitting room with a piano, a dining room with linen tablecloth and flowers, patient ward beds with gauzy white curtains, and a sitting porch with a view of Riverdale Park. All together the hospital seems more like a resort found in the Berkshires than anything resembling hospitals as we have come to know them in the 21^st century.

Amazingly, this beautiful facility was designed exclusively forpoor women. From 1875 to 1919 those without means were taken care of by the FHW at no charge. By 1919 the hospital had become so successful at its core mission of treating the diseases of women that patients of all economic levels were eager to be admitted there and the by-laws were amended to allow some who could pay.

In 1966 the Free Hospital for Women and the Boston Lying-in, a local maternity hospital, merged to form the Boston Hospital for Women. In 1975, the Boston Hospital for Women merged with the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital and the Robert B. Brigham Hospital. By 1980, all three hospitals had centralized operations and moved to one location in the Longwood area of Boston. The original FHW building was sold to a luxury condominium development company, but the enduring medical legacy of the Free Hospital for Women was reflected in the new name chosen for the combined institutions, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, a teaching affiliate of Harvard Medical School.