Category: Digital Highlights

Digital Highlights: York Retreat

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The original building of the York Retreat. (19)

The care of the mentally ill has been a current topic in medical discourse for centuries. In the late eighteenth century, a Quaker named William Tuke opened the York Retreat in York, England, as a new type of mental health hospital. In 1892, Tuke’s grandson, D. Hack Tuke, who had been a visiting physician at the Retreat, wrote Reform in the Treatment of the Insane as a history of his grandfather’s pioneering efforts towards reforming the care of the mentally ill. Continue reading

Digital Highlights: The Biography of a Disease

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"Map of the Mountain and Pacific States Showing Distribution of Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever" (13)

In the early years of the twentieth century, diseases were being re-studied in light of advances in the fields of bacteriology, virology, and pathology. S. Burt Wolbach, at the time pathologist at the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital and the Boston Lying-In Hospital and later professor at Harvard Medical School, brought out Studies on Rocky Mountain Fever in the Journal of Medical Research in three successive issues in 1919 and then all three sections were brought together in this single volume. Continue reading

Digital Highlights: Care for Ailing Sailors

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Names of the wards and numbers of beds in each of the buildings of the Greenwich Hospital. (42)

Modern-day students of history learn the use of primary sources almost from the minute they enter an undergraduate program; some, from high schools with engaged history faculty or by taking part in programs like History Day in Massachusetts, before then. Analyzing, closely reading, considering, debating, and writing about primary sources is a key part of any history student’s education.

What makes today’s digital highlight particularly interesting, then, is that not only is it now a primary source in its turn but it uses primary sources in their entirety. Continue reading

Digital Highlights: Gambling, Duelling, and Suicide

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Title page of Hey's first dissertation.

Perhaps duelling is no longer the concern it once was, but gambling and suicide are still concerns for many people. With the rise of the Internet and widespread public access to a nearly global network of communication, both issues have been complicated once again with, among other things, the lure of online gambling. Continue reading

Digital Highlights: Shut your mouth and save your life

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A gallery of mouth-breathers adorns the cover of this strange work by George Catlin

Among the collection of works on hygiene and general health that the Francis A. Countway Medical Library has submitted to the Medical Heritage Library, one finds an eclectic mixture of theory and practice advocating everything from the reformation of cemetery burial to the donning of proper footwear; from water cures to treatment of diseases attendant to sedentary office life in the early 19th century. Through a simple subject search one can peer directly into a world where publishers and authors were attempting (often misguidedly) to apply the burgeoning scientific approaches of the day to every aspect of human health, with widely differing results. This work, which is dedicated to “the nervous and bilious,” promises to educate readers about the “art of invigorating and prolonging life by food, clothes, air, exercise, wine [and] sleep,” but nevertheless ends, somewhat ominously, with an extended section devoted to “the pleasures of making a will.” Continue reading

Digital Highlights: “I Do Believe in Spooks!”

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Title page of "Inferences from Haunted Houses and Haunted Men," by John Harris.

John Harris’ Inferences from Haunted Houses and Haunted Men is a great read as we look forward to the Halloween season. Harris’ work is best approached in a kind of smorgasbord state of mind: there is no single through-line argument, rather Harris has assembled a collection of anecdotes and evidence to discuss psychic phenomena of one kind or another including hypnotism, thought transference, and hauntings. Continue reading

Digital Highlights: Healthful Travelling

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Title page of "Change of Air."

A trip to “recover one’s health” seems to have been something of a hobby in the nineteenth century. In the United Kingdom, Europe, and America, the health retreat to a spa, a seaside resort, the mountains, or the beach was a reasonably regular occurrence — for those who could afford it, anyway.

In 1831, “physician extraordinary to the King” James Johnson wrote Change of Air, or the Pursuit of Health to reflect not only on the need for such trips but an excursion he had himself taken and “…remarks and speculations on the moral, physical, and medicinal influence of foreign, especially of an Italian climate and residence, in sickness and in health.” (i) Continue reading

Digital Highlights: Physical and Emotional

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"Diagram of the more important distributions of the autonomic nervous system." From Cannon's "Bodily Changes..." (24)

The experience of having a great meal disturbed by an argument is a common one and a headache can make a work-day seem like it lasts 10 times as long. In 1915, Walter B. Cannon wrote Bodily Changes in Pain, Hunger, Fear, and Rage to describe the physical changes that accompany certain emotions. Continue reading

Digital Highlights: Abduction!

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Title page of Ann Brookhouse's narrative.

Tabloid-style stories have been popular for far longer than what we think of as tabloid journalism. A Narrative of the Seizure & Confinement of Ann Brookhouse from the end of the eighteenth century is just such a piece. Purporting to be the true life narrative of a young female victim of abduction “as related by herself” and “written by a friend.” Continue reading

Digital Highlights: Nightmare Studies

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First page of Chapter 8 of "An essay..."

Almost everyone has nightmares. A lucky few, perhaps, have very rare or mild bad dreams; others may have them in such vivid form as to invade the waking world and become a serious problem rather than an occasional disturbance. Still, having one serious nightmare is enough to make you want to avoid having another!

John Bond, the author of An essay on the Incubus, or Night-mare, suffered from nightmares so extensively according to his own statement that he began to study the phenomenon and put together his researches in this book, publishing it in England in 1753. Bond traces the history of the nightmare back to pre-Grecian times, beginning with an examination of the word itself and the progress of a nightmare: Continue reading