Category: Digital Highlights

Digital Highlights: Bathing Medicine

  By

Image of a hypocasium from a Roman bath at Chester.

The history of ‘alternative medicine’ does not begin in the twentieth century. The arguments between allopaths and homeopaths formed part of mainstream medical dialogue in the nineteenth century and alternatives to ‘heroic’ medicine or mainstream medical treatment have always enjoyed a greater or lesser degree of popularity. Today, therapies like acupuncture and medical massage are receiving critical attention; in the nineteenth century in Britain, the Turkish bath enjoyed a similar vogue. Continue reading

Digital Highlights: Doctor’s Orders

  By

Title page of "Letters To A Young Physician..."

James Jackson’s 1855 Letters to a Young Physician Just Entering Upon Practice makes for great reading. The volume consists of 27 “letters” of advice from Jackson to the newly qualified medical graduate. Jackson covers a variety of subjects and starts with a lengthy dedication to his  friend, John Collins Warren, enumerating his colleague’s accomplishments, thanking him for his friendship, and giving the reasons for his publication of the work in hand. Continue reading

Digital Highlights: The Fascination of Crime

  By

Table of contents from "Narratives."

Narratives of Remarkable Crimes, selected from the German works of Anselm Ritter von Feuerbach and published in 1846 in London, consists of 14 of the trials in Feuerbach’s original 1300 page work chosen and translated by Lady Duff Gordon. She provides a brief overview of the German justice system in her preface, commenting on the role of witnesses, judge, and the system of appeals. She spends only a brief paragraph explaining her reasons for choosing the trials here published, mentioning only the influence of an article from the influential and popular Edinburgh Review and her desire to “[choose] those trials which appear to me to have the greatest general interest…” (10) Continue reading

Digital Highlights: Pioneer Doctor

  By

Frontispiece portrait of Owens-Adair.

Dr. Bethenia Owens-Adair, born in Missouri in 1840, published her life-story in 1906, writing down her experiences of life with pioneering parents and her medical education as one of the first women to aim for a medical degree. She was married as a teenager and left her husband before she was twenty. She began attending school after leaving her husband and received funding from family friends and admirers, allowing her to set herself up as a school teacher and pursue her own further education. Continue reading

Digital Highlights: Healthy Plays

  By
Page from “The Pied Piper of Health.”

In 1920, a contest was held in New York City under the guidance of the Child Health Organization to present plays supporting the “Milk and Child Health Campaign.” The resultant plays were donated by their authors, public school teachers, for republication in an anthology called Health Plays for School Children (1921). The volume also includes a reprint of the short pamphlet “Milk: The Master Carpenter” which was meant to be the inspiration for the plays. Continue reading

Digital Highlights: “Sex in Education”

  By

Chapter 1 of "Sex in Education."

Education for women was a hot-button topic in the nineteenth century in much the same way that mandatory testing is today. In 1875, Edward H. Clarke capitalised on the public’s interest in this topic with a lecture that he turned into a book, Sex in Education: or, a fair chance for girls. The book makes for entertaining but rather disturbing reading. Continue reading

Digital Highlights: Water and Politics

  By

One of the most popular alternative cures in the nineteenth century involved water — lots of water. Balneology, balneotherapy, or “the cold water cure” was popular on mainland Europe, in England, and in the United States. Spas flourished in England, for example, and scientist Charles Darwin credited the cold water cure with the recreation of his system after serious digestive problems left him almost prostrate and unable to work.

Frontispiece portrait of Priessnitz.

In Six Months at Graefenberg, H.C. Wright tells about his own cure at a German cold water spa run by a balneologist called Priessnitz (there’s an interesting article on Priessnitz and water therapy in the first volume of British Journal of Balneology and Climatology from 1897.)  Continue reading