Category: Digital Highlights

From Remedia: “Prescriptions: Fat Folios”

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Remedianetwork is a group blog project that tries to bring the history of medicine into dialogue with its present. This piece is the first in a semi-regular series of cross-posted content.

Obesity is often thought to be a twenty-first century disease. Our “modern lifestyle,” so the theory goes, with its rich diet, lack of exercise, and sedentary occupations, has led to the spread of a fatal condition. How far back would you date the beginning of this new epidemic? 20 years? 30? 50? Turns out, obesity was a concern as early as 1816. These medical tracts, held by the Center for the History of Medicine at the Countway Library, and published online in the Medical Heritage Library attest to longstanding anxiety. Go on, leaf through! Continue reading

Digital Highlights: Electricity in Medicine

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Frontispiece from “An essay on electricity, the theory and practice of that useful science, and the mode of applying it,” by George Adams, 1785, shows a physician applying current generated by an “electrical machine,” to a patient’s arm.

“The Society having heard from some of their Correspondents in Germany that what they call a Vegetable Quintessence had been fired by Electricity, I take this Opportunity to acquaint you, that on Friday Evening last I succeeded, after having been disappointed in many Attempts, in setting Spirits of Wine on Fire by that Power.” Continue reading

Digital Highlights: Among the Rappers

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Dedication from “The Rappers.”

Table-rapping, table-turning, spirit writing, and other forms of communication with “another world” were common and popular forms of spiritualistic activity in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Some consider that the rapping done by the Fox sisters in the late 1840s as the beginning of the spiritualist movement in the United States. The girls later admitted that their “spirit communication” was fraudulent but by that time — the 1880s — the admission had little effect: the movement was an independent thing. Continue reading

Digital Highlights: Walter Murray Gibson’s Sanitary Instructions for Hawaiians

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Hawaiian language title page of Walter Murray Gibson’s He mau olelo ao e pili ana i ke ola kino ona kanaka Hawaii [i.e., Sanitary Instructions for Hawaiians]. (Honolulu: Paiia e R. Grieve, 1881).

English language title page of Walter Murray Gibson’s Sanitary Instructions for Hawaiians (Honolulu: P. C. Advertiser, 1881).

The English and Hawaiian language editions of Walter Murray Gibson’s Sanitary Instructions for Hawaiians represent interesting milestones in Hawaiian public health. Continue reading

Digital Highlights: Civil War photography from the Army Medical Museum

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Photograph and case history of Private Samuel Decker. He posed for this portrait at the Army Medical Museum along with the prostheses he developed after losing both hands to an artillery accident during the battle of Perryville. — vol. 5, image 5.

The Center for the History of Medicine recently digitized a remarkable collection of Civil War-era images titled Photographs of surgical cases and specimens. Nearly 150 years after it was first published, this six-volume set provides a sobering look at the state of the art in surgery during and after the war. Continue reading

Digital Highlights: “The Wilderness Cure”

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Title page of “The Wilderness Cure.”

At the end of the nineteenth century, concerns were common over the enfeeblement of the human form — often the male human form — particularly of those who lived in cities or worked in factories or offices, those “new” and “unnatural” environments.

In 1881, Marc Cook, an office-worker in New York City, wrote The Wilderness Camp, his own personal tale of health revitalized through retreat from the city and return to the country. Continue reading