Category: Digital Highlights

Digital Highlights: Ambroise Paré

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This week, check out original sources on Ambroise Paré:

You can click through the pages above or follow this link to see Claude Stephen Le Paulmier’s Ambroise Paré; d’après de nouveau documents découverts aux Archives nationales et des papiers de famille (1887).

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

Digital Highlights: The Hahnemannian Monthly

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This Friday, check out one of our journals:

This volume of the Hahnemannian Monthly includes, among other things including articles on the therapeutic use of vinegar, a full specimen of the human cerebro-spinal nervous system. The illustration is from the leading article in the February 1889 issue, “A New Preparation of the Nervous System,” by. A.R. Thomas, MD, Philadelphia.

The cadaver used was that of a 35-year old female; Dr. Weaver wanted to prepare the cadaver in the manner he did in order to demonstrate the complexity and structure of the human nervous system.

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

Digital Highlights: Culpeper’s Complete Herbal

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This week, have a close look at one of the lovely herbals that are part of our collection:

You can turn the pages above or follow the link below to flip through the volume.

Nicholas Culpeper, author of Culpeper’s complete herbal: with nearly four hundred medicines, made from English herbs, physically applied to the cure of all disorders incident to man; with rules for compuounding them: also, directions for making syrups, ointments, &c was a seventeenth century English apothecary and herbalist.

He went against the express desire of Royal College of Physicians to popularize herbal medicine and medicine in general, preparing his own texts on astrology and midwifery as well as herbalism. Culpeper believed that the contemporary Dissenter trend towards making religious discourse available to all should be taken seriously by other fields of expertise, too.

The Royal College didn’t take this kindly and tried several times to discredit Culpeper and his works. It probably didn’t help Culpeper’s case that, without the College’s permission, he translated their Pharmacopoeia Londonesis into English.

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

Digital Highlights: Habituation to the Glass

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dts In the nineteenth century, concern about alcoholism was widespread in the United States. The history of alcoholism — in America or elsewhere — has a much longer history, but the nineteenth century, with the explosion of cheap print materials and faster methods of communication, had generous possibilities for public discussion and sensationalism. Continue reading

Digital Highlights: Regimen Sanitatis Salerni

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In 1871, John Ordronaux, professor of medical jurisprudence at the Law School of Columbia College, published a bilingual (Latin and English) edition of The Code of Health of the School of Salernum. The volume was found valuable enough even to run to a special edition of only 210 copies, printed on “extra large superfine tinted paper” for $5 a copy. Continue reading

Digital Highlights: Health Aristocracy

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Title page of “The Aristocracy of Health.”

“The new blood cell will be red of color and round of form.” (9) With these words, Mary Newton Foote Henderson exhorts the readers of her 1904 The Aristocracy of Health; a study of physical culture, our favorite poisons, and a national and international league for the advancement of physical culture to work towards a holistic vision of physical culture. Continue reading