Category: Digital Highlights

Weekend Reading

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Most of us in the US are looking at some amount of time off in the next week or so and I don’t know about you but one of my first priorities is always to get myself well stocked with reading material.

Try one of these suggestions from our recent additions to the MHL!

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

Digital Highlights: A Fungous Nose

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Arise Evans had a fungous nose, and said it was revealed to him that the King’s hand would cure him: and at the first coming of King Charles II. into St. James’s Park, he kissed the King’s hand and rubbed his nose with it; which disturbed the King, but cured him [Evans].

It does seem a little forward on a first acquaintance without even an “excuse me,” but the legend of the curative powers of the royal touch was a strong one and no doubt Charles felt a certain amount of need to propitiate his new subjects.

John Corry’s The detector of quackery : or, Analyser of medical, philosophical, political, dramatic, and literary imposture is a lighthearted examination of the faux in medicine. Corry was already the author of A satirical view of London at the commencement of the nineteenth century, a humorous look at the capital at the beginning of a new century.

Corry cites Samuel Johnson in his “Advertisement” before the text: “Cheats can seldom last long against laughter” and Corry’s text is still amusing, although at this point it may be just as much for what he gets wrong — making jokes about oxygen being the “philosopher’s stone” — as what he gets right — debunking Mesmer.

Click through the pages below or follow this link to read Corry’s The detector of quackery.

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

Digital Highlights: The Form of the Face

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The physiognomical manual of John Caspar Lavater provides rules for judging by the phsyiognomy: is someone’s nose a little to the left? perhaps their eyebrows are not quite symmetrical? or their ears are set far back on their head? These are all guides to their inner character, how they are likely to behave in almost any situation.

Lavater’s handbook provides not only visual illustrations so you can match the face against the characteristic, it also promises “One Hundred Physiognomonical [sic] Rules” to help you detect obstinacy, worthless insignificance, hypocrisy, and voluptuaries among others.

Flip through the pages of Lavater’s guidebook below or follow this link to read Essays on physiognomy (1853).

Digital Highlights: Measure Twice…

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We’re well into October now — in the United States, we’re looking forward at November and December which, for many of us, involve a bout of cooking unlike anything seen in the rest of the year.

To help you out with this, we offer up this handy guide.

Click through the pages of A.T. Simmons’ and Ernest Stenhouse’s The science of common life (1912).

And if you haven’t done it yet, please take five minutes out of your Friday and fill out our quickie user survey!

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

Digital Highlights: “The State and the Doctor”

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Title page from the Webbs’ book.

Sidney and Beatrice Webb were pioneer social researchers in England at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries. They published indefatigably, both together and separately, to create an impressive historical and analytical body of material, including multiple volumes on English legal history, the poor law, and modern sociological topics. Continue reading

Our Reading List

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We can’t hope to be as exhaustive as Whewell’s Ghost or The History Carnival, but all this talk of going back to school has us thinking in reading lists. Here’s some of what we’re looking at online this week.

If that last piece piques your interest, we have lots of 19th century medical journals already in the collection and more coming in all the time! Check out issues of the Philadelphia journal of the medical and physical sciences (1820), the New York journal of medicine (1856), the Maryland medical journal (1901), the American journal of the medical sciences (1827), or the New Yorker medizinische Monatsschrift (1891).

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

New to the MHL!

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Have you checked out the latest items added to our collection? Here are a few highlights:

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

Digital Highlights: Analyzing the Tea Leaves — and the Coffee Beans

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Modern food packaging regulations did not come from thin air: one of the parent pieces of legislation in the United Kingdom was the Adulteration Act of 1860. Previous to formal legislation on the subject, adulteration of foodstuffs — bread, coffee, tea, cheese, processed meats, alcohol — was a widespread problem. Continue reading

Digital Highlights: South for Health

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“Sick people have but a single wish–that they may get well…” William Francis Hutchinson of Rhode Island starts his Under the Southern Cross: a guide to the sanitariums and other charming places in the West Indies and Spanish Main with a clear indication of his intended direction and audience: having benefited himself from travel in southern hemisphere, he intends to provide guidance for others. The title page provides Hutchinson a boost by adding, after his name, a list of memberships: the American Climatological Association, the American Medical Association, and the American Public Health Association.

Hutchinson makes a point of mentioning how many conditions can be helped by tropical travel including simply exhaustion — but doctors are too prone, he feels, to prescribe such travel to anyone who can pay for it: “Careful and thorough consideration should precede decision where to send invalids for climate treatment.” (17)

Despite this demurrer, Hutchinson writes as one in love with his surroundings, describing beaches, hotels and quiet nights with the pleasure of the true convert. He illustrates his book, too, both with photographs and personal sketches of plants and places.

Flip through the pages of Hutchinson’s book below or follow this link to read Under the Southern Cross.