Category: Digital Highlights

Digital Highlights: Home Health Care for All

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Illustration of the spine from "The Cottage Physician."

In 1900, the United States had a fair number of physicians — licensed and otherwise — operating within the various states. Still, people living in rural areas or the urban poor could not expect to be able to take their ailment or injury to a practising physician, whether due to location, cost, or some other barrier.
To try and fill this gap in some fashion, Doctors Thomas Faulkner, president of the Royal Medical Council in London, England, and J.H. Carmichael of the American Institute of Homeopathy put together The Cottage Physician: Best Known Methods of Treatment in all Diseases, Accidents and Emergencies of the Home, with a modest subtitle: prepared by the Ablest Physicians in the Leading Schools of Medicine: Allopathy & Homeopathy, etc., etc. Continue reading

Digital Highlights: Letters from Harvey

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By 1912, William Harvey had been dead for over 200 years but the life and work of an English physician maintained a persistent interest for historians and physicians since his death in 1657. Harvey had been a practicing physician during the period in England immediately succeeding the death of Queen Elizabeth I; the reigns of James I and his son Charles I were increasingly troubled, culminating in a coup d’etat led by Oliver Cromwell and the creation of an English Commonwealth in 1649 with no king at the head of the government.

Despite Harvey’s position as physician to King James, his most enduring medical legacy was the description of the circulatory system. With this work, Harvey established his place in medical history and became a figure of enduring interest. It was probably with this in mind that S. Weir Mitchell published his Some Recently Discovered Letters of William Harvey with Other Miscellanea in 1912 as part of the Transactions of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia. Continue reading

Digital Highlights: “Improved Under-Clothing”

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Title page from Mrs. Flynt's manual.

In 1882, styles of clothing for women were restrictive to say the least: tight bodices and long sweeping skirts restricted breathing, made it hard to move freely, and, in some cases where lacing was taken to the extreme, might even crack ribs or damage internal organs. Whether or not all women adhered to the dominant style all the time is, of course, impossible to say; probably most women made adjustments as necessary for individual figures, injuries, or the daily work they had to complete. Serious dress reform for women was some years off, though, and many people thought that strict lacing and tight corsets were necessary for women’s health, particularly to brace up weak backs or prevent hysterics, to say nothing of the fact of keeping in line with the fashion which called for tiny waists. Continue reading

Digital Highlights: Food and Fitness

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Title page from Keeping Fit.

Published in 1914, Orison Swett Marden’s Keeping Fit is a part-handbook, part-sermon, and part-“to do” list.

Marden himself was a leading exponent of “New Thought” in the late 19th and early 20th century. “New Thought” believers argued that thought had a direct influence on life: if you thought you were happy, successful, and well-liked, the odds were in favor of all three of those things being true. “New Thought” also had some similarity with Christian Science insofar as the philosophy held that sickness was a matter of wrong thinking and bodily infirmity could be cured with proper mental effort. Continue reading

Digital Highlights: Searching for John Franklin

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Frontispiece from An Arctic Voyage, showing the Devil's Thumb taken from an original sketch by Robert Goodsir.

Robert Goodsir did not, however, technically go in search of Franklin himself but, rather, in search of his own brother who had embarked with Franklin on his ill-fated 1845 voyage from England to discover the Northwest Passage. Sir John Franklin was a noted — and notoriously unlucky — Arctic explorer whose last voyage ended in complete disaster: his two ships were missing for over ten years and even when the deaths of Franklin and his crew were confirmed, the true circumstances of the horrific end to the mission were elided from the public version. British officers were not meant to turn cannibal, no matter how desperate the straits.

Before the loss of both ships was confirmed, though, multiple missions were launched in search of Franklin and his ships, the Erebus and the Terror. The Royal Navy was responsible for several of them and Lady Jane Franklin, Sir John’s second wife, was responsible for others. While Goodsir mentions Lady Jane, it is unclear from his narrative if she gave financial support to this mission as she did to several others. Goodsir’s ship was captained by William Penny, who went out twice as a ship’s captain in the search for Franklin in the Advice, the ship Goodsir sailed on in 1849, and the Lady Franklin in 1850. When Goodsir shipped out in the late 1840s, Franklin’s fate was not yet confirmed and many still held out hope that he had found the Northwest Passage and was simply engaged in a long northern circumnavigation of Canada and would still turn up in Alaska, Hawaii, or California.

Goodsir, in his account titled An Arctic Voyage to Baffin’s Bay and Lancaster Sound, discusses the weather, the Arctic wildlife, meetings with the Inuit, and life on board ship. The Advice touched land at Greenland and Goodsir makes a very full description of the locals, including Danish settlers and missionaries as well as the Inuit tribespeople living near the coast. Goodsir is also clear, as the ship begins to work its way farther north, about the dangers into which they are sailing, not the least of which is the Arctic ice. The ship was in momentary danger of being crushed between floes as they formed or being caught in a crush and frozen in for the winter, a process the vessel might or might not survive. Goodsir seems to have served his ship as medical officer, making mention of tending wounded sailors or being requested by passing whaling ships for sick or hurt men.

Goodsir’s narrative is a fascinating account of a voyage into the Arctic at a time when relatively little of the area was known; the coastline was not fully mapped and the water was not well understood by all sailors, let alone all captains.

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

 

Digital Highlights: American Surgeons in Paris

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Inscription by Dr. Elliott C. Cutler to President Emeritus Eliot on flyleaf of journal.

In spring 1915, a deputation of surgeons and nurses from the Harvard Medical School travelled to Paris to join the service at the American Ambulance Hospital, giving medical aid to injured soldiers from battles taking place across Europe. The unit had been invited by Dr. Joseph Blake, one of the surgeons already working in Paris.

One of the surgeons who came from Harvard was Dr. Elliott Carr Cutler. In 1916, he put together a journal of the expedition, publishing it as A Journal of the Harvard Medical School Unit to The American Ambulance Hospital in Paris. The unit totalled 17, including surgeons, medical staff, and four nurses to work at the Hospital at Neuilly.

The Journal starts with the departure of the unit from Boston in March 1915 and concludes with an epilogue written in Canada in July of the same year, after the unit had taken over the hospital service for the intervening three months.

Cutler describes the trip, the difficulties the unit had even in getting into France through Spain (customs officers insisted on opening some boxes of chocolates that had been given as gifts and the Harvard unit only retained them with difficulty), and the final arrival and work at the Hospital. The unit took over all aspects of the Hospital work, including devising a filing system to record and store patient information. Some of the doctors took opportunity of their time in France to make tours, some to historical sites, including Versailles, but often visiting other hospitals and medical services, some very close to the front, or the front itself, under appropriate supervision from armed services.

The day-to-day medical services given to wounded soldiers receive attention, too. Cutler is dispassionate in recording what cases are brought in and what can be done for them, even saying once when discussing some discharged soldiers who were returning for further work on old wounds, “It was a considerable blow to our hopes for more cranial work, though to be sure they were wounded in the head.” (32) Despite this early breeziness, as time goes by Cutler is clearly affected by what he is seeing. As the major “season” for battles over the spring and summer advances as the weather improves, Cutler notes that the wounds become worse and the number of patients higher. Long days in the surgery are mentioned and Cutler sometimes waxes philosophical about what the overall “point” of the war might be, when the major outcome seems to be shattered bodies.

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

Digital Highlights: Diseases of Genius

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Title page from the Inaugural Essay on Genius and Its Diseases.

According to Thomas Middleton Stuart’s 1819 essay on Genius and Its Diseases there are four reasons for mental genius to become disordered: inactivity, imperfection, artificial excitement, and excessive exercise. Having cited such examples for genius as Newton, Franklin, and Homer, Stuart’s suppositions as to the sources of mental disturbance seem reasonable!

The essay was originally written to complete Stuart’s medical degree. The title page notes that it was “submitted to the examination of Samuel Bard…” and several other faculty members of the “College of Physicians and Surgeons of the University of the State of New York.” Stuart devotes most of his text to enumerating and discussing the causes and types of mental disease arising from genius and only in the last few pages turns to prevention and healing, finishing his argument by citing “…the writings of Rush…” as key to healing the mental upset that will undoubtedly follow from ignoring or abusing the call of genius.

What may seem somewhat odd to the modern reader is that Stuart spends comparatively little time in defining his subject matter. The actual definition of genius delays his argument for only a few pages; he finally settles on a definition borrowed from Dr. Johnson, “…‘a mind of superior general powers.‘” Stuart deepens the definitely by adding that invention seems to be a key component of genius; given that he includes no men (or women) best known for visual talent and very few literary figures in his list of figures he considers to be geniuses, invention is a key commonality between the other men he discusses.

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

Digital Highlights: The Several Ways of Preserving Dead Bodies

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In 1705, Thomas Greenhill, surgeon, published Nekpokedeia: or, the Art of Embalming in London. Greenhill’s subtitle is even more informative: Wherein is Shown the Right [sic] of Burial, and Funeral Ceremonies, Especially That of Preserving Bodies After the Egyptian Method. And it goes on from there — there are a full 44 pages of front matter, including a poem, dedication to Greenhill’s patron, the Earl of Pembroke, and a list of subscribers and contributors to the volume, before Greenhill starts his discussion.

Fold-out frontispiece from Nekpokedeia.

Greenhill’s discussion of funerary customs and rites wanders in a fascinating manner from Biblical history to ancient Greece, Rome, and Egypt, through modern times. He brings up issues that are probably of less concern to our present-day morticians and funeral home directors including the need to double or even triple-check that the body is dead before funeral rites are started.

In his opening chapters, Greenhill emphasizes that there are many reasons for burial or embalming: chief among them being respect for the corpse and the need to protect others from contamination due to the processes of putrefaction. Respect for the corpse, for Greenhill, does not necessitate the Western under-ground burial: he allows that traditions in other parts of the world, such as mummification or disposal through fire, have their roots in the community and may be acceptable methods of corpse disposal in their place.

His interest in “putrid air” marks Greenhill very much as a man of his time when it was thought that disease and ill-health could be spread through exposure to “bad air” which could be anything from the night air in the open country to the atmosphere around an open cesspit. It was not until the late 19th century that the idea of the infectious nature of “bad air” was conclusively challenged and, even then, the concept hung on well into the 20th century. The difficulty of making clear the difference between infectious matter being spread in the air and the air itself being somehow to blame for the infection was probably key in this confusion.

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

From the Stacks: A Survivor of the Harvard Fire of 1764

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Engraving of Richard Mead, 1754. Boston Medical Library in the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine.

Engraving of Richard Mead, 1754. Boston Medical Library in the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine.

The Center for the History of Medicine staff members report that as they review and examine the rare books in the Center’s holdings for inclusion in the Medical Heritage Library digitization project, surprising things continue to come to light:

Our copy of the 1708 second edition of A mechanical account of poisons in several essays, Richard Mead’s tract on vipers, tarantulas, and mad dogs, will soon be appearing in the MHL, but in looking through one of the copies of the fourth edition of 1745 we found the volume to be a presentation copy from its author.  The endpaper bears an inscription from William Shrimpton in 1748, stating “My Uncle Mead desir’d me to present this book to the College Library in New England,” with the addendum, “Forwarded by yr. humble serv’t, John Hunt, by desire of my uncle, Mr. William Shrimpton of London.”  Richard Mead (1673-1754) was physician to King George II of England, and the volume was probably commended to the care of Boston merchant, John Hunt (1715-1763), a graduate of Harvard College in 1734, whose mother was a Shrimpton.

Of possibly even greater interest, though, is the inscription on the volume’s Harvard bookplate, stating “This book belonged to the Library before the fire of Jan. 24, 1764.”  On that night, during a storm of snow and high wind, Harvard Hall, containing the College’s books and scientific apparatus, caught fire.  Over 5,000 volumes were destroyed, with only 404 surviving, the books being either on loan or recent donations not yet unpacked.  Many of those new acquisitions, which helped to rebuild the library, were gifts of Thomas Hollis (1720-1774), who also endowed Harvard’s oldest book acquisition fund.  His name and generosity are perpetuated through Harvard’s library catalog, HOLLIS (which also is an acronym for the Harvard OnLine Library Information System.)

To see an early edition of Richard Mead’s text along with other titles digitized for the Medical Heritage Library, see http://www.archive.org/details/medicalheritagelibrary.