Category: Digital Highlights

Illustration from Part IV of Foote’s “Plain Home Talk.”

Edward B. Foote’s Plain home talk about the human system, published in 1870, is one of the large number of nineteenth century home advice manuals. Such manuals usually covered a wide variety of topics, potentially including not only medical advice, but also notes on home brewing, child-rearing, animal husbandry, and cooking.

Plain home talk doesn’t include any of these topics, but does not focus on disease and curatives either. Foote has an axe to grind on the subject of sexual education and modern family structure.

Foote’s entry into the genre has an incredibly detailed table of contents that starts off predictably enough with “Disease–Its [sic] Causes, Prevention, and Cure” with subsections on the causes of disease, the problems in contaminated food, and “the bad habits of children and youth.” Foote then goes on to the Prevention of Disease and Common Sense Remedies. In Part III of the book, he branches out into what he calls “plain talk,” what might be called now sex ed or family planning: The Sexual Organs, History of Marriage, and the Demerits of Monogamy. Part IV details his suggestions for the improvement of marriage, starting with a long disquisition on the importance of adaptation (the couple to each other) in marriage.

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

Medical social work was a burgeoning field in the early decades of the twentieth century; what might now be considered a ‘holistic approach’ to medicine — dealing with the patient’s social background, life experience, job, and so on — was beginning to be regarded as a necessary corollary to medical treatment.

Ida M. Cannon published her Social Work in Hospitals in 1913 which, with the benefit of hindsight, seems to be unfortunate timing; within a year for many of her reading audience, the question will be numbers of hospital beds, recovery facilities, and medical staff, not so much how they treat their patients in a social context. Cannon followed her brother, Walter Bradford, to Boston from the family home in Minnesota. She supplemented her nursing education in Boston at the School for Social Workers and went on to work with Doctor Richard C. Cabot at the Massachusetts General Hospital. In 1914, a year after the publication of her book, she was named Chief of Social Service at the hospital; she held the position for over thirty years.

In her book, Cannon gives a brief overview of the history of medical social work starting with religious communities and their historical role as supporters of the sick. She presents the social worker as a valuable adjunct to the physician, able to interact with the patient in different ways and supplement medical care with social assistance.

Flip through the pages of Cannon’s book below or follow this link to read Social Work in Hospitals.

Illustration of artificial leg.

The rise in demand for artificial limbs — hands, legs, feet, and arms — after the American Civil War can readily be imagined. Recent scholarship in medical history has explored the medical care of the time.

For those who survived serious battlefield wounds, substitutes had to be provided and entrepreneurs in the field stepped forward; among them, was Marks’ Patent Artificial Limbs which issued a small pamphlet in 1867 advertising its wares, announcing the recent winning of a gold medal prize, and offering many testimonials from surgeons and patients of the excellence of the Marks’ limbs.

The writer of the pamphlet clearly does not want to be labelled as a war profiteer; he says early and often that he is drawing on the experience of fourteen years in the business of artificial limbs. He even takes it upon himself to give some advice to surgeons as to the best way to perform amputations with an eye to fitting with a suitable replacement limb after healing.

You can read the entire pamphlet here or look through more of the Medical Heritage Library’s resources on Civil War medicine.

If you happen to be in the United States, you may be aware that this Friday is the Fourth of July, a traditional celebration of barbecue, fireworks, and sunburn.

In case you feel like lashing out and making your own fireworks (if it’s legal where you are, of course!), we’ve gotcha covered.

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

Frontispiece picture of “The American Instructor.”

The American Instructor promises to teach a little bit of everything except, perhaps, how to have a successful marriage: The American instructor, or, Young man’s best companion : containing, spelling, reading, writing and arithmetic, in an easier way than any yet published ; and how to qualify any person for business, without the help of a master ; instructions to write variety of hands … ; how to write letters on business or friendship ; forms of indentures … releases, &c. ; also merchant’s accompts, and a short and easy method of shop and book-keeping ; with a description of the several American colonies ; together with the carpenter’s plain and exact rule … ; likewise the practical gauger made easy … ; to which is added, The poor planter’s physician … and also prudent advice to young tradesmen and dealers ; the whole better adpated to these American colonies, than any other book of the like kind.

In 1770, this must have seemed like quite a deal: over 400 pages of instructions in one book. The author even takes the time to explain that the book has been specially edited for an American audience; information from a “British” edition that was of no relevance to North America has been left out. One wonders what a book like this would look like if written in 1780.

The opening section, on how “…to spell, read, and write True English” is a glimpse at the standardization and codification of the English language: there are paragraphs describing the silent ‘g,’ as in ‘reign’ and ‘sign’ and lists of words which must be written with a particular letter; for example, ‘cinnamon’ calls for ‘c’ although ‘s’ has the same sound.

Flip through the pages below or follow this link to read The American Instructor.