Category: Digital Highlights

Digital Highlights: The Shape of the Skull

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Title page of Phrenology Applied to Painting and Sculpture

Title page of Phrenology Applied to Painting and Sculpture

Phrenology was a popular scientific subfield during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; phrenology promised to reveal the inner secrets of the character and the mind through recognition of the particular shape of an individual’s skull. Specific portions of the brain, often referred to as “organs,” were believed to connect to certain tendencies in character — acquisitiveness, jealousy, hysteria, sexual desire, and so forth — and to bring a particular shape and proportion to the skull itself.

In 1855, George Combe published his Phrenology Applied to Painting and Sculpture, a work based on letters he had originally written to the Phrenological Journal. Phrenology was not a widely respected field and Combe sought to protect something he saw as an important window into the human character. He wrote several other books on the subject and gained a reputation as a noted defender of phrenology and champion of its originators, Franz Joseph Gall and Johann Spurzheim. Combe himself was one of the first to bring phrenology into the United Kingdom. Himself a Scotsman, he helped to popularize and bring attention to phrenology, acting as one of the cofounders of the Edinburgh Phrenological Society in 1820.

Phrenology Applied discusses the fine arts with particular reference to the “cerebral organs” thought to be responsible not only for the creation of the artwork in particular but for the appreciation of it in a viewer. For example, in his first chapter, Combe discusses color theory at length, developing his argument that the viewer need have certain well developed portions of the brain in order to appreciate the coloring of a work of art appropriately.

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

Digital Highlights: a peculiar approach to healing, and an important early work on surgery

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The Center for the History of Medicine has digitized nearly 400 works on the subjects of surgery and the treatment of wounds and injuries as part of our ongoing contributions to the Medical Heritage Library. Two titles of note, both from the Boston Medical Library collection,  recently passed through the scanning lab: Addinell Hewson’s 1872 work, Earth as a topical application in surgery, and Thomas Gale’s Certaine workes of chirurgerie (1563).

The arm of a patient 15 days after Hewson amputated his hand.

Hewson, a once noted Philadelphia surgeon, describes in detail his practice of using powdered clay both to pack infected wounds and as a topical, post-surgical application. The idea that introducing “earth” to open wounds might have presented any medical benefit was at odds with what were at the time new and increasingly widely accepted ideas about antiseptics. Interestingly, the successes in accelerating the healing process that he describes in the book have been attributed by at least one modern researcher to the probable presence of naturally-occurring antibacterial agents in the clay that would have been unknown to Hewson at the time, and which preceded breakthroughs in modern antibiotics by nearly 75 years.

Another noteworthy feature of Earth as a topical application is that it contains a striking series of woodburytypes depicting the post-operative state of four patients who Hewson treated. Viewable on pages 45, 51, 112, and 164, these portraits render his patients in an unusually stark and artistic light.

The second title of note, Gale’s Certaine workes of chirurgerie, is the first printed book on

The wound man illustration from Gale's work on surgery.

surgery known to have been both written and published in English, a fact that sets it apart from the many English translations of foreign-language surgical texts from that era. It is a strange and whimsical work, composed in the form of a free-flowing conversation in which Gale discusses various maladies and their most suitable treatments with John Yates and John Feilde. In the course of the dialogues, Gale expounds upon various types of fractures (classifying them at times by their resemblances to the stalks of certain plants and vegetables), provides detailed instructions on the preparation of medicinal salves and unguents, and gives historical perspectives on then-current medical treatments.

A surgeon in the army of Henry VIII, Gale had first-hand knowledge of the traumatic injuries associated with 16th century warfare. Pictured at right, the title page of Certaine workes contains a commonly used thematic illustration that is generally referred to as “wound man.” Serving as a grim reminder of the perils that once faced soldiers of the late medieval and early modern eras, wound man was used in many early medical texts to depict the array of battlefield injuries common at that time. This version of wound man suffers simultaneous arrow-piercings, bones smashed by clubs, truncheons, hammers, and cannon balls; flesh rended by sword slashes and spear wounds, as well as various other grievous and unpleasant injuries.

Related topics:

surgery – wounds and injuries – asepsis and antisepsis in surgery – gunshot wounds

plastic surgery – facial reconstruction – dissection – anatomy – military surgery

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

(Cross-posted from the Center for the History of Medicine blog.)

Digital Highlights: Revelatory Writing

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G. Mackenzie Bacon, M.D., acted as Medical Superintendent of the County Asylum in Cambridgeshire, England. In 1870, he wrote a short treatise called On the Writing of the Insane. Bacon wrote a short introduction to his volume, but even with that, it isn’t entirely clear who he felt he was writing for. Nor is it entirely clear what point Bacon intends to make. He presents many documents that have come to his attention in his duties as Superintendent of the County Asylum, and feels very free to criticize the writers, but proposes no particular therapeutic approach or considerations other than institutionalization.

Page from "On the Writing of the Insane"

Letter from a patient. Reproduced in On the Writing of the Insane.

The book is made up of a single lengthy essay by Bacon, illustrated with examples of, literally, the writing of the insane. By “writing,” Bacon means both penmanship and composition, making something of a portmanteau word out of the single term. Bacon critiques both aspects of writing, but focuses more on the content of the letters and memoranda composed by his patients.

While Bacon does not use names or what we would now consider to be private patient information, he comments on the productions he cites in what seems like an unusual professional manner.

In one case, he quotes at length a letter he received from the relative of a patient and goes on to say,

This woman, married, and able to attend to her family…though from her letter it might be supposed she was incapable of any exertion. Now, such a state of mind is more nearly allied to insanity than anything else, and some light is found on its nature by the fact of her brother being insane. (8-9)

The productions Bacon cites are fascinating to examine and the tangled stories some of his patients have managed to achieve to explain their situations and problems are compelling to read. The patient whose letter is reproduced in the image above, for example, was producing writing of baffling complexity, full of images and phrases — to say nothing of the modern art style in which he wrote them! — which were presumably significant in some way to him, but which Bacon considers to be the productions of a deeply deranged mind.

It is interesting to note, too, in his afterword, that Bacon apparently considers poor spelling to be a sign of incipient insanity, quoting in full three letters from the relatives of patients, and describing them as being from “…what is called the sane portion of the public.” (23)

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

Digital Highlights: Health and Safety, 1915

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In 1915, The Health Series of Physiology and Hygiene published the latest in its series, Making the Most of Life, written by M.V. O’Shea and J.H. Kellogg. O’Shea was a professor of education at the University of Wisconsin; Kellogg was the superintendant of the Battle Creek Sanitarium in Michigan.

Photograph from "Making the Most of Life"

Text and photograph from Making the Most of Life.

Making the Most of Life was designed as a student text on health, complete with follow-up questions for each chapter, project suggestions, and a glossary at the end of the book. Chapter titles included “Taking the Measure of a Man,” “The Value of a Life,” and “Handicaps in the Race of Life.” The text is heavily illustrated with graphs, anatomical drawings, and black-and-white photographs which reinforce specific points in the text. For example, look at the image on the right: the photograph is meant to illustrate the relationship between body weight and symmetry of form.

The tone of the volume is lecturing, even hectoring at times, as O’Shea and Kellogg strive to inculcate their future students with contemporary values of health and well-being, including total abstinence from substances including tobacco, alcohol, cocaine, and caffeine. High-protein diets are decried and the benefits of much fresh air, exercise, and yoghurt promoted. Efficiency in modern living is invoked in the introduction to the volume, bringing to mind the concern at the time about American involvement in World War I, to say nothing of changes in working habits and technology.

Making the Most of Life also includes a brief but accurate description of the germ theory of disease and emphasizes the need for hygienic measures to be taken to halt the spread of diseases like tuberculosis. The book ends with a chapter called “Safety First,” which lists 10 rules for healthy living, including frequent handwashing and avoiding anyone with a sore throat.

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

Digital Highlights: “Burking”

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“Burking” was a term invented after the discovery of the crimes committed by William Burke and William Hare between 1827 and 1828 in Edinburgh, Scotland. The two, recent immigrants from northern Ireland, made short-lived but lucrative careers out of providing bodies for the dissection laboratories at the medical school; Burke and Hare killed over 15 men and women to keep up their trade. “Burking” came to be used as the shorthand term for their preferred method of murder: a quiet type of suffocation which left the body unmarked.

Title page

Title page of The Trial, Sentence, and Confessions of Bishop, Williams, and May.

The Trial, Sentence, and Confessions of Bishop, Williams, and May provides first-hand documentary evidence of another grave-robbing trial, this one from the city of London in 1831. John Bishop, Thomas Williams, and James May were arrested and tried for the “burking” of Carlo Ferrari, a young Italian boy who had been working as a street-peddlar.

The Trial includes a didactic introduction which decries the horrors of the crime as well as a reconstruction of the trial, the confessions of Bishop and Williams, and an account of the executions of Bishop and Williams. May was tried but respited after the confessions of Bishop and Williams demonstrated that he was innocent of the death of Ferrari. After the description of the hangings of Bishop and Williams, the compilers of The Trial added in “…a few historical facts relative to the previous lives and occupations of all three of the men…” (p. 47).

The Trial is titillating reading, similar to a modern true-crime novel or television show; all it lacks is the team of dedicated detectives and forensic specialists trailing the three criminals back to their lair. It features a wealth of medical and scientific detail, as well as an almost minute-by-minute reconstruction of the crime itself, both in the trial and in the confessions of Bishop and Williams. The detection of the “Burkers” or “resurrection men” depends upon the scientific skill of the detectives and of the medical men to whom Bishop and Williams attempted to sell cadavers. Evidence from the trial, for example, features the testimony given by several surgeons who examined the body and offered minute detail about the condition of Ferrari’s corpse and what they deduced from it.

For contemporary readers, particularly those living in metropolitan areas like London, Edinburgh, or other large cities like Manchester and Leeds, it must have been a pleasantly thrilling read but also a warning that the city was a dangerous place.

For more from the Medical Heritage Library, please visit our full collection!

Digital Highlights: Defoe and Plague

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Title page of Journal of the Plague Year

Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year is a factitious account of 1664-1665 in England, a period when mainland Britain experienced some of its worst outbreaks of plague infection. Hot, dry weather and the behavior of English citizens, particularly those living in London and other large seaports, inadvertently helped the spread of disease. People fleeing from infected cities took infection with them, bringing it inland, away from the ports that were the classic loci of illness. Historians studying the outbreak generally suggest that the fire of London in 1666 helped to stem and break the tide of infection, although it may have been ebbing naturally before then.

The trick with the Journal is that Defoe was only 4 or 5 years old in 1665; while he may have been precocious, writing an entire novel about experiences he may have only barely understood at the time would have been a real feat! The Journal was written in the early 1700s, within living memory of the plague years of the 1660s but not in the heat of the moment. The edition featured here was republished in 1888 under the aegis of Henry Morley, an educator, writer, and lecturer who popularized a series of reprints called Morley’s Universal Library:

Titles in Morley's Universal Library

Morley wrote pedagogical introductions to his volumes — which span a wide range of topics and titles as the above list demonstrates — and planned a 14-volume history of England, but died before he could finish it.

This copy of the Journal provides insight into the history of publishing in Britain: what titles might have been popular, what was being marketed to what audience — Victorian Britain had a strong sense of the need for self-improvement and entire societies were dedicated to educating the working- and lower-classes in particular, traditionally seen as undereducated or even ineducable for anything higher than manual labor. And, of course, the Journal provides scholars  with a valuable digital copy of a text which provides a fascinating look at the plague experience in England, a fictionalized account to set next to Samuel Pepys’ recollections in his famous diary.

For more from the Medical Heritage Library, please visit our full collection!

Digital Highlights: The Physician’s Answer

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Title page for The Physician's Answer

Title page from The Physician's Answer.

This slim volume, called The Physician’s Answer, was originally published in 1913 by the International Committee of the Young Men’s Christian Association. The subtitle adds a little more information: Medical Authority and Prevailing Misconceptions about Sex.

It looks like — and might have been sold as — a Q and A-style manual of sex education, something like a far fore-runner of Our Bodies, Ourselves or a similar modern publication. In fact, it’s more like a moral treatise on the necessity of physical continence and self-restraint. While both genders are mentioned, Dr. M.J. Exner, author of the small volume, spends most of his 50-something pages talking about young men.

Dr. Exner spends most of his time exhorting young men, in terms that have a distinct tinge of muscular Christianity, to keep themselves clean and pure with married life in mind:

There is but one normal sex life for the young man–normal in relation to his own highest interests and to his social responsibilities–and that is the life in which his sex problem is left wholly to the care of nature, in which his sex impulses are controlled and transmuted into finer stuff by resolute will and high ideals of life as a whole. (5)

While the bulk of the text is devoted to young men — an exact age range is not specified, but it seems fairly clear from context that Dr. Exner has in mind adolescents and young men; anyone married is, obviously, beyond his purview in this case! — there is some commentary on women:

Womanhood outside of marriage does not demand any concessions from society regarding the sex life. Woman expects to control her sex impulses and does control them and every self-respecting man expects and demands that she do so. (18)

The text reflects a real concern with, in essence, what young men might be doing with their time when not at school or work. Anyone looking for day-to-day helpful advice, though, should probably look elsewhere; Dr. Exner has a high philosophical tone and manages to avoid any kind of detail that might have been described as salacious or even specific.

The assumptions about the sex lives of women, too, are fascinating material for historians of gender and women’s studies; the fact that women are so little mentioned in a volume which presumes heterosexuality is interesting in and of itself! The possibilities for study in this volume are widely varied: not only women’s studies historians but also historians interested in youth, medicine, and community organizations would find something here to interest them.

For more from the Medical Heritage Library, please visit our full collection!

Digital Highlights: Detectives of Europe and America

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With the successful “reboot” of Sherlock Holmes in the BBC’s transatlantically successful Sherlock (2010), a particular volume from the MHL’s collection seems appropriate for the digital highlight this week: Detectives of Europe and America, or, Life in the Secret Service.

Detectives of Europe and America

Title page of Detectives of Europe and America.

Published in 1878, the preface says it all:

Many partial friends of mine have thought I might do some good…to the cause of human happiness…by the detail of certain wily “offenses against the law and good order of society,” while demonstrating therein how sure of final discovery and punishment are the criminally vicious,…in these days, when the art of police detection has become almost an exact science.

The “author” is one Officer George S. McWatters, described on the flyleaf as “late member of the American Secret Service.” The volume itself is a selection of Officer McWatters’s more interesting cases — as collated and edited by a “well-known public writer,” admits the Publisher’s Introduction, due to the modesty and forebearance of McWatters who apparently didn’t want to blow his own trumpet enough to suit the Publishers.  The table of contents includes stories titled, “Twenty-one Years of Illegal Imprisonment Suffered by a Beautiful Young Lady of the Polish Nobility,” “The Gambler’s Wax Finger,” and, simply, “The Skeleton.”

The stories have a certain Conan Doyle-ish flair to them, too, with passages such as:

“This, gentlemen,” thus I ended my story, “is all I have to tell; further particulars you may hear from the victim herself, who is now in the lunatic asylum, and from the witnesses who are all here.”

The tales center around midnight abductions, mysterious financial transactions, Eastern potentates, and innocent young heiresses and their traducers. Officer McWatters never fails to work his way through the intricacies of the case, working to establish the powers of justice, law, and order to their rightful place with the skillful use of 19th century forensic science.

You could define this as a 19th century version of Bones with Officer McWatters using his technical skill and scientific ability to dazzle lesser law officers and, potentially, his reading audience. Perhaps, too, Officer McWatters had a similar effect on actual forensic scientists as his television and movie counterparts do today. Nevertheless, the volume demonstrates that the scientific side of detective fiction is not a modern-day development in the genre.

Despite the possibility of making the reading public expect miracles from its police force by way of deduction, the adventures of Officer McWatters make for highly entertaining reading as well as a fascinating look at the continuing appeal of detective fiction in all its various guises.

For more from the Medical Heritage Library, please visit our full collection!

Digital Highlights: Interdisciplinary Possibilities

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Title page of "The Closing Years of Dean Swift's Life"

Title page of The Closing Years of Dean Swift's Life

One of the fascinating things about a collection like the Medical Heritage Library is how many interdisciplinary opportunities it offers.

The history of medicine is an incredibly diverse field in and of itself — a quick glance down the list of subjects in the Library illustrates that. What may not be so immediately obvious is how many cross-disciplinary opportunities for investigation the collection affords.

Take, for example, The Closing Years of Dean Swift’s Life, by William R. Wilde. The volume was first published in 1849 in Dublin, at a time when Ireland was experiencing country-wide hardship as a result of catastrophic harvest failures in 1845 and 1847.

Dean Jonathan Swift, of course, is probably best known as the author of A Modest Proposal, an economic satire which proposed the Irish sell their infant children as provisions for the English. During his youth, Swift was secretary to Sir William Temple, an English diplomat who became well-known for the correspondence between himself and his wife which reveals details of life during the end of the seventeenth century in England. Swift himself was a polarizing figure during his life-time and continues to attract the attention of scholars in many fields.

William Wilde was a well-known Irish physician specializing in the eye and ear. He was a prolific author, writing not only about medicine but also about anthropology and Irish folklore. Wilde’s wife, Jane, published as a poet under the name “Speranza” and was well-known for the fiery nationalism of her work. Wilde is now better known as the father of Oscar Wilde, author of The Importance of Being Earnest and The Portrait of Dorian Gray.

One volume, then, connects to three separate individuals in widely diverse fields alone — and that’s simply on an examination of the title page! Who knows what more volumes could reveal?

For more from the Medical Heritage Library, please visit our full collection!

Digital Highlights: Who is Francesco Durante or, What Can We Learn from Download Statistics?

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Francesco Durante (1844-1934); frontispiece from vol. 1 of "Per il XXV Anno Dell'Insegnamento Chirurgico di Francesco Durante"

Internet Archive, where the Medical Heritage Library’s content now resides, has a neat feature that allows you to see what has been downloaded most often.  With almost 8,500 volumes digitized by February 1, 2011, I thought it would be interesting to see what content in MHL was being most heavily used.

The results are surprising.  Among the top ten most downloaded volumes are three Columbia University catalogues (numbers 2, 5, and 10); three anatomical works: John McGrath’s Surgical Anatomy and Operative Surgery (1902) in the number 3 spot; the 1913 US edition of Henry Gray’s classic Anatomy, Descriptive and Applied (number 6); and Florence Fenwick Miller’s colorful An Atlas of Anatomy or Pictures of the Human Body (1879) in the number 8 position.

But the number one most downloaded volume in the Medical Heritage Library — a whopping 420 times —  is a comparative rarity: volume 2 of Per il XXV Anno Dell’Insegnamento Chirurgico di Francesco Durante nell’Università di Roma. 28 Febbraio 1898, edited by Roberto Alessandri. The second most downloaded item — the aforementioned Columbia University catalogue — can only boast 274 downloads.

No doubt you’re thinking Who? History of medicine mavens — at least those in the US — don’t need to be abashed if they have never heard of Durante.  While he is little known outside neurosurgery circles in this country, Durante (1844-1934) was a pioneering surgeon, esteemed teacher, and leading political figure in his native Italy.

The child of parents of modest means (his father helped build the first road to their isolated Sicilian village), Durante received his medical degree from Naples, studied with Virchow in Berlin, Billroth in Vienna, and Lister in London before being called to teach at the University of Rome in 1872. Twelve years later, in June 1884, he was the first surgeon to successfully remove a cranial base meningioma, an operation that caused an international sensation.

His 25th anniversary as a teacher at the University of Rome in 1897 was commemorated by the publication of the hefty 3 volume festschrift recently digitized by the MHL.  It contains contributions from several dozen surgeons on a wide variety of surgical topics.  While most of the authors were Italian, Durante’s fame was enough to elicit contributions from Philadelphia surgeon W.W. Keen and the French neurosurgeon Auguste Broca.

Why volume 2 of this title should have been downloaded so frequently will remain a mystery, but surely its rarity outside Italy — OCLC locates only four copies of the set in North America and another in Paris — played a factor.  It shows that there is a need for electronic access to even the most seemingly esoteric publications.

For more of the Durante festschrift click here:  http://www.archive.org/details/perilxxvannodell02ales

For all the holdings in the Medical Heritage Library click here: http://www.archive.org/details/medicalheritagelibrary