From Our Partners: “Measure of Power? Gender, Phrenology and 19th Century Cultures of Medicine”

~This post courtesy Joan Ilacqua, Archivist for Diversity and Inclusion, Center for the History of Medicine at the Francis A. Countway Library of Harvard Medical School.

We would like to cordially invite you to our upcoming Women in Medicine Legacy Fellow’s lecture, given by Carla Bittel, PhD, our current fellow working at the Countway Library.

Her lecture, “Measure of Power? Gender, Phrenology and 19th Century Cultures of Medicine” will take place at the Countway Library of Medicine on May 16 from 4 to 6pm.

Phrenology, considered a “science of the mind” in the nineteenth century, purported to measure the “power” of human mental faculties. This talk will examine the role of gender in the making of those measurements, and demonstrate how middle-class women—as practitioners and consumers—merged phrenology with multiple forms of medical and domestic knowledge.

Carla Bittel is Associate Professor of History at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. She is a historian of nineteenth-century America, specializing in the history of medicine, science, and technology. Her research focuses on gender issues and she has written on the history of women’s health, women physicians, and the role of science in medicine.

Register now: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/measures-of-power-gender-phrenology-and-19th-century-cultures-of-medicine-registration-59297285778

Sponsored by the Women in Medicine Legacy Foundation, in partnership with the Center for the History of MedicineCountway Library.

From Our Partners: Ferenc Gyorgyey travel grant for research at Yale’s Cushing/Whitney Medical Historical Library

~Post courtesy Melissa Grafe.

Looking for funds to research at Yale’s Medical Historical Library? The Medical Historical Library of the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University is pleased to announce its twelfth annual Ferenc Gyorgyey Research Travel Award.

The Medical Historical Library, located in New Haven, Connecticut, holds one of the country’s largest collections of rare medical books, journals, prints, photographs, and pamphlets. Special strengths are the works of Hippocrates, Galen, Vesalius, Boyle, Harvey, Culpeper, Priestley, and S. Weir Mitchell, and works on anatomy, anesthesia, and smallpox inoculation and vaccination. The Library owns over fifty medieval and renaissance manuscripts, Arabic and Persian manuscripts, and over 300 medical incunabula.  The notable Clements C. Fry Collection of Prints and Drawings has over 2,500 fine prints, drawings, and posters from the 15th century to the present on medical subjects.  The larger Prints, Posters and Drawings collection contains over 7,000 additional images, some related to international public health, protest and activism and social justice.  The Library also owns an extensive Smoking and tobacco advertising collection, the Robert Bogdan collection of Disability photographs and postcards, medical imagery from popular publications donated by Bert Hansen, and smaller collections of patent medicine ephemera from noted collector William Helfand.

The 2019-2020 travel grant is available to historians and other faculty, medical practitioners, graduate students, and other researchers who wish to use the collections of the Medical Historical Library.  There is a single award of up to $1,500 for one week of research during the academic fiscal year July 1, 2019 – June 30, 2020.  Funds may be used for transportation, housing, food, and photographic reproductions. The award is limited to residents of the United States and Canada.

Applicants will need to apply through our fellowship site, and upload a curriculum vitae and project description, including the relevance of the Medical Historical Library collections to the project, as well as provide two references attesting to the particular project. Preference will be given to applicants beyond commuting distance to the Medical Historical Library.  This award is for use of Medical Historical special collections and is not intended for primary use of special collections in other libraries at Yale.  Applications are due by Monday, APRIL 29TH, 2019.  They will be considered by a committee and the candidates will be informed by early June 2019.  Winners may be asked to do a blog post discussing their research.

The application period is now open!  Please apply online by April 29th, 2019.

Requests for further information should be sent to:

Melissa Grafe, Ph.D
Head of the Medical Historical Library and John R. Bumstead Librarian for Medical History
Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library
Yale University
P.O. Box 208014
New Haven, CT 06520-8014
Telephone: 203- 785-4354
Fax: 203-785-5636
E-mail: melissa.grafe@yale.edu

Additional information about the Library and its collections may be found at: https://library.medicine.yale.edu/historical

From Our Partners: Upcoming Bullitt History of Medicine Club Lecture

~Courtesy Dawne Lucas, Special Collections Librarian, Wilson Special Collections Library at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Join us on Tuesday, April 16 at 12:00 p.m. for our last Bullitt History of Medicine Club lecture of the Spring 2019 semester. The lecture will take place in the Health Sciences Library, Room 527. Sandwiches will be provided.

Dr. Kurt Gilliland will present “Skeletons in our Closet: Anatomical Eponyms.”

While many eponyms are no longer taught or used in medicine, certain structures in anatomy, embryology, histology, and neuroscience will always be better known by their eponyms than by their descriptive names. The scientists and physicians after whom structures are named remind us of the fascinating history of medicine.

Kurt Gilliland is Associate Dean of Curriculum and Associate Professor, Department of Cell Biology and Physiology for UNC School of Medicine, and the co-author of the 2010 bookAnatomists and Eponyms: The Spirit of Anatomy Past.He teaches anatomy and directs cell biology and histology in several courses for 1st-year and 2nd-year medical students. His educational scholarship evaluates curriculum interventions, and his basic research focuses on the development of the lens of the eye and cataract development. Recent awards include the Academy of Educators Educational Scholarship Award (2018) and the Academy of Educators Foundation Phase Teaching Award (2017).

From Our Partners: Rawley Springs and Massanetta Mineral Springs Company

This is one of a great series of posts from the College of Physicians of Philadelphia Historical Medical Library blog called #TravelTuesday. This post by Caitlin Angelone.

Rawley Springs is an unincorporated community in Rockingham County, 9 miles west of Harrisonburg, Virginia, and was once known for its lavish medical resort. European men began to settle the land in the early 19th century. One of the earliest settlers was Benjamin Smith, who sent his wife Elizabeth to the springs for her health in 1810. Doctors were perplexed on what was causing her illness, but within six weeks of staying at the springs and drinking the water she was cured. Shortly after, people began to set up summer camps by the springs. Joseph Hicks is credited for purchasing land and officially advertising the small village as a resort community in 1824.

The chalybeate waters of the spring are high in iron and salts, acting as a natural tonic which has been bottled and marketed as a cure all for disease, including maladies peculiar to females, liver disease, and diseases by poverty of the blood and nervous system. The springs usually remain around “earth temperature” which is 54 degrees, making it a popular destination for a summer dip or a place to escape the diseases of summer in larger cities. The B & O and A & M Railroads reached nearby Harrisonburg, or people also had the option of taking the Rawley Springs Turnpike, which was $3.00 for a one-way trip.

Rooms cost $2.50 a day, $15 for a week, or $50 for a four week stay. The resort also housed a post office, toll house, pottery shed, and distillery.  The grand dining hall could host dinners for up to 389 people and was a local attraction for a night out.

In 1886, 2 days before the grand season re-opening on June 10, a fire destroyed the dining room along with two of the three hotels. The resort struggled, but rebuilt its dining hall with the insurance money collected. The resort continued to struggle, and was sold to Massanetta & Rawley Springs Company in 1914, and the same year another fire destroyed the rest of the remaining buildings. The company did not rebuild and instead divided the land in 1918, which was sold for smaller cottage homes.

Today, Rawley Springs remains a popular attraction. The large and risky rock formations make it popular for hikers, while places like the “Blue Hole” in the Dry River still attract people for fishing and swimming.  Commercialization of the area is not allowed, meaning there are no longer hotels and resorts on the land. All buildings of the former resort have been destroyed, and only stone land markers remain outlining the hotels. Private homes still remain and are actively used for summer homes by nearby Harrisonburg residents.

Sources:

Rafuse, Diana. “A Brief History of Rawley Springs.” 2007.

Rafuse, Diana. “Mixing Pleasure and Profit at the Springs: The Harrisonburg-Rawley Connection.” The Harrisonburg-Rockingham Historical Society Newsletter. Vol. 31, No. 2, 2009.

Rawley Springs. (Medical Trade Ephemera Collection) Historical Medical Library of The College of Physicians of Philadelphia, Philadelphia, PA.

“Rawley Springs, Virginia.” Harrisonburg, 1995. Website. 11/29/18.  http://www.harrisonburg.org/rawley/

From Our Partners: Human Tissue Ethics in Anatomy, Past and Present: From Bodies to Tissues to Data

Anatomy as a science and as an educational discipline in the medical curriculum is forever in transition. One of the greatest areas of change in recent decades has been the systematic evaluation of ethical questions in anatomy. At the center of these deliberations is the status of the dead human body, which is no longer only seen as a mere “object” or “material” of research or as an educational “tool.” Rather, it is described as a body that still has connections with the person who once inhabited it, thus becoming part of a social network of knowledge gain and requiring respectful treatment.

This change of perspective will be explored in the symposium, “Human Tissue Ethics in Anatomy, Past and Present: From Bodies to Tissues to Data.” An international group of scholars will discuss the ethical aspects of existing questions, explore the relevance of non-profit and for-profit body donation, and examine newly emerging technologies in anatomy that may need innovative ethical approaches. The aim of this symposium is to present evidence for the insight that transparent and ethical anatomical body and tissue procurement is indeed at the core of medical ethics in research and education.

Speakers include:

  • Michel Anteby, BostonUniversity
  • Thomas Champney, University of Miami
  • Tinne Claes, Katholieke Universiteit
  • Glenn Cohen, Harvard Law School/Petrie-Flom Center
  • Jon Cornwall, University of Otago
  • Dominic Hall, Harvard Medical School
  • Sabine Hildebrandt, Harvard Medical School/Boston Children’s Hospital
  • David S. Jones, Harvard University
  • Scott H. Podolsky, Harvard Medical School
  • Joanna Radin, Yale University
  • Maria Olejaz Tellerup, University of Copenhagen
  • Dan Wikler, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health

Details:

Thursday, April 4, 2019
9:00am-3:00pm  

Register here.

From Our Partners: “Explore Medieval and Renaissance Medical and Scientific Manuscripts”

~ This post courtesy Melissa Grafe

The Cushing/Whitney Medical Library is pleased to announce that our medieval and Renaissance manuscript collection is now online!  The effort to digitize the manuscripts and make them freely available worldwide was generously funded by the Arcadia Fund.

Scream of mandrake root killing a dog
The scream of mandrake root killing a dog. MS 18, ca. 1400.

The manuscripts contain early medical and scientific knowledge on a variety of topics, including surgery, gynecology, medicine, herbs and remedies, anatomy, healthful living, astronomy, and mathematics.  They are handwritten in Latin, Italian, Greek, German, and English.  Some are illustrated, like MS18, De herbis masculinis et feminis [and other botanical and zoological works, including the Herbarium of Apuleius].  Turning the pages of this manuscripts reveals numerous hand-colored drawings of plants and animals, including the mandrake root. The mandrake root was valued for a variety of medical uses, including as an aid for reproduction. Mandrake root, as depicted in Harry Potter and in legend, would let out an ear piercing, killer scream when uprooted.   Other manuscripts are filled to the very edges of the paper with text, including marginalia and commentary, like MS11, which has 24 different texts including Aristotelian treatises.

image of medieval manuscript
Opening of the Bamberg Surgery. MS 10, 2nd half of the 12th cent., f. 26v.

The earliest work is the Bamberg Surgery, dating from the 12thcentury and purchased, like most of this collection, by Library founder and famed neurosurgeon Dr. Harvey Cushing.  As medieval medical scholar Monica Green writes, “The Bamberg Surgerydoesn’t get a lot of love in histories of surgery, because of its patchwork character. As [George] Corner himself said, “it is a notebook, a partially organized collection of notes, memoranda, prescriptions, and excerpts from other books.” 

Please explore these manuscripts on Cushing/Whitney Library site on Internet Archive, as part of the Medical Heritage Library.   You can also find other Arcadia-funded digitized texts, including Yale Medical School theses and early Arabic and Persian books and manuscripts, in this collection.  The Library plans to make the medieval and Renaissance manuscripts available through Findit, Yale University Library’s Digital Collections site.

From Our Partners: Ferenc Gyorgyey Research Travel Award

Looking for funds to research at Yale’s Medical Historical Library? The Medical Historical Library of the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University is pleased to announce its twelfth annual Ferenc Gyorgyey Research Travel Award.

The Medical Historical Library, located in New Haven, Connecticut, holds one of the country’s largest collections of rare medical books, journals, prints, photographs, and pamphlets. Special strengths are the works of Hippocrates, Galen, Vesalius, Boyle, Harvey, Culpeper, Priestley, and S. Weir Mitchell, and works on anatomy, anesthesia, and smallpox inoculation and vaccination. The Library owns over fifty medieval and renaissance manuscripts, Arabic and Persian manuscripts, and over 300 medical incunabula.  The notable Clements C. Fry Collection of Prints and Drawings has over 2,500 fine prints, drawings, and posters from the 15th century to the present on medical subjects.  The larger Prints, Posters and Drawings collection contains over 7,000 additional images, some related to international public health, protest and activism and social justice.  The Library also owns an extensive Smoking and tobacco advertising collection, the Robert Bogdan collection of Disability photographs and postcards, medical imagery from popular publications donated by Bert Hansen, and smaller collections of patent medicine ephemera from noted collector William Helfand.

The 2019-2020 travel grant is available to historians, medical practitioners, and other researchers who wish to use the collections of the Medical Historical Library.  There is a single award of up to $1,500 for one week of research during the academic fiscal year July 1, 2019 – June 30, 2020.  Funds may be used for transportation, housing, food, and photographic reproductions. The award is limited to residents of the United States and Canada. Applicants will need to apply through our fellowship site, and upload a curriculum vitae and project description, including the relevance of the Medical Historical Library collections to the project, as well as provide two references attesting to the particular project. Preference will be given to applicants beyond commuting distance to the Medical Historical Library.  This award is for use of Medical Historical special collections and is not intended for primary use of special collections in other libraries at Yale.  Applications are due by Monday, APRIL 29TH, 2019.  They will be considered by a committee and the candidates will be informed by early June 2019.  Winners may be asked to do a blog post discussing their research.

The application period is now open!  Please apply online by April 29th, 2019.

Requests for further information should be sent to:

Melissa Grafe, Ph.D
Head of the Medical Historical Library and John R. Bumstead Librarian for Medical History
Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library
Yale University
P.O. Box 208014
New Haven, CT 06520-8014
Telephone: 203- 785-4354
Fax: 203-785-5636
E-mail: melissa.grafe@yale.edu

Additional information about the Library and its collections may be found at: https://library.medicine.yale.edu/historical

From Our Partners: James Jackson’s Memoir of James Jackson, Jr.

~This post courtesy Hanna Clutterbuck-Cook, processing assistant at the Center for the History of Medicine at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. (She is also the Project Co-ordinator for the MHL).

Center staff are currently working on a new finding aid for the James Jackson papers; Jackson was born October 3, 1777 in Newburyport, Massachusetts, to Jonathan Jackson (1743-1810) and Hannah Tracy Jackson. Before beginning his medical career, he worked as a clerk for his father who continued to work in the state government after he had been a representative of Massachusetts at the Continental Congress. Jackson taught school at Leicester Academy for a year in 1797. He received all of his degrees from Harvard University: his A.B in 1796 and M.D. in 1809. After establishing his own general practice, and while working at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), Jackson was named the first professor of clinical medicine at Harvard Medical School. He was Hersey Professor of the Theory and Practice of Physic (1812-1836) and dean of the Medical School (1820-1821).

After earning his A.B. from Harvard in 1796, James Jackson first studied medicine in Salem under physician Edward Augustus Holyoke (1728-1829). Before completing his M.D., he moved to London and took a job as a surgeon’s dresser at St. Thomas’s Hospital; during his time in
London, Jackson paid particular attention to the emerging practice of vaccination. Jackson returned to Boston in 1800 and opened his own medical practice, which he continued until 1866. He developed expertise in vaccination and became one of the earliest people in America
to investigate the practice experimentally. In 1802, before finishing medical school, he was appointed physician to the Boston Dispensary. In 1803, he became a member of the Massachusetts Medical Society, and in 1810 he helped to reorganize the Massachusetts Medical Society and to relocate Harvard Medical School from Cambridge to Boston. In 1810, Jackson began the process of founding Massachusetts General Hospital and Somerville Asylum with John Collins Warren. Jackson was the first physician of Massachusetts General Hospital and practiced there from 1817-1837.

Jackson had an extensive publishing career and Center staff were pleased to find that many of his titles had been digitized and were freely available in the Medical Heritage Library, including Jackson’s 1835 memoir of his son, A memoir of James Jackson, Jr., M.D. : with extracts from his letters to his father, and medical cases collected by him. James Jackson, Jr. had been studying medicine in Paris and returned to Boston to enter medical practice with his fater. Unfortunately, Jackson fell ill almost immediately upon his return to the United States and died before he could open his practice.

The memoir includes extracts from Jackson, Jr.’s letters home from Europe as well as lengthy “footnotes” added by Jackson and case notes from Jackson, Jr.’s study. The “footnotes” are almost conversational in nature, opening with something like an open letter to Pierre Charles Alexandre Louis, his son’s teacher in France, about why Jackson, Jr. had not taken some health advice Louis had given him.

From Our Partners: Event: “Remembering the Dead”

Epidemics are dramatic unfolding of events and are of interest not only to historians and scientists but playwright, novelists, and artists.

-Howard Markel, Quarantine!: East European Jewish Immigrants and the New York City Epidemics of 1892

Over 20,600 New Yorkers died in just two months in the fall of 1918 from influenza. Today, in a city dotted with monuments to war dead or shrines to those lost in terrorist attacks, it is rare to find memorials to those who died from infectious disease or artworks commemorating those living with disease. Artist and activist Avram Finkelstein, and essayist Garnette Cadogan join moderator David Favaloro for a conversation about the experiences of those affected by infectious disease, the role of stigma in social and institutional responses to illness, and who is remembered, forgotten, and commemorated.

This program accompanies the exhibition Germ City: Microbes and the Metropolis(opens September 14, 2018). The program is presented by The New York Academy of Medicine and the Museum of the City of New York, and supported by Wellcome as part of Contagious Cities. To view all of the programs in this series, click here.

About the Speakers

Avram Finkelstein is an artist, activist and writer living in Brooklyn, and a founding member of the Silence=Death and Gran Fury collectives, and is featured in the artist oral history project at the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art. His book, After Silence: A History of AIDS Through Its Images, is available through University of California Press. He has work in the permanent collections of MoMA, The Whitney, The Metropolitan Museum, The New Museum, The Smithsonian, The Brooklyn Museum, The Victoria and Albert Museum and The New York Public Library, and his solo work has shown at The Whitney Museum, The Cooper Hewitt Museum, Yale University Art Gallery, FLAG Art Foundation, The Museum of the City of New York, Kunsthalle Wien, The Harbor Gallery, Exit Art, Monya Rowe Gallery, and The Leslie Lohman Museum.

Garnette Cadogan is an essayist whose research explores the promise and perils of urban life, the vitality and inequality of cities, and the challenges of pluralism. Named by the literary magazine Freeman’s as one of 29 writers from around the world who “represent the future of new writing” in 2017, he writes about culture and the arts for various publications.

About the Moderator

David Favaloro is Director of Curatorial Affairs and the Hebrew Technical Institute Research Fellow at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum. He is responsible for interpreting the history of the tenements at 97 and 103 Orchard Street, with an emphasis on research and exhibit development. He also oversees the museum’s preservation, conservation, and collections management programs. He holds a Master of Arts in American History and an Advanced Certificate in Public History from the Univesrity of Massachusetts-Amherst.

Details:

Venue

The New York Academy of Medicine 1216 Fifth Avenue at 103rd Street, New York NY 10029

Cost

$15 General Public | $10 Museum Members, Library Donors, Academy Fellows & Members

Free for Students and Educators (with ID): emailculturalevents@nyam.org to register

At check out, MCNY members must enter the discount code provided by the Museum to receive their discount. Contact culturalevents@nyam.org for questions.

Fellows, Donors, and Members:enter your email address below and click ‘Confirm Email’ to be taken to event registration at your discounted rate. Your discount will be applied at checkout.

From Our Partners: “William Osler, Medicine, and Fairy Tales”

– by Wood Institute travel grantee Ryan Habermeyer*

Several years ago, in a daze of dissertation research, I stumbled upon a passing comment by William Osler, pioneer of modern medicine: “To talk of diseases is a sort of Arabian Nights entertainment.” What a curious coupling, fairy tales and medicine. As much as I tried to forget it and press forward with my dissertation I kept returning to that idea. How is pathology a bedfellow to fairy tales?

Here is my best conclusion: For centuries, disease was almost indistinguishable from magic – spontaneous, metamorphic, at times exotic, powerful, and mysterious. For centuries, disease provoked both wonder and fear; it elicited a kind of grotesque enchantment. Disease, I like to think Osler is suggesting, tells a story. It has traceable beginnings, chaotic middles and dramatic ends. To us, the victims, it is the villain which must be vanquished; but I imagine if diseases could talk they would cast themselves as the heroes and heroines struggling to survive against impossible odds.

Comments like Osler’s speak to me because I am admittedly something of an odd academic specimen. I am neither physician nor historian nor literary theorist nor medical researcher. I teach creative writing. I write fiction. Speculative, weird, absurdist fiction. Imagine Bruno Schulz, Italo Calvino, Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, and Kurt Vonnegut got together with the Brothers Grimm and had an illegitimate love child. After publishing my debut short story collection, The Science of Lost Futures—a book that explores the intersections of history and folklore, science and magic, the human and inhuman—I wanted to attempt something different. True, that book has stories about a woman collapsing into the black hole growing on her shoulder, a family that adopts a former Nazi as a pet, and a woman who discovers one morning her womb as fallen out; but yes, I wanted to do something very different.

I started drafting sketches, anecdotes and vignettes all circulating around Osler’s idea of the entanglement of medicine and fairy tale. But as these fragments evolved into a novel I found the medium of the storytelling needed a peculiar form. It has since morphed into a satirical fin de siècle medical encyclopedia of sorts and tells the story of a family of physicians wrestling with questions of medicine, race and religion through various case studies, letters, pharmaceutical recipes, scrapbooks and miscellaneous medical notes. Such experimentation was fun but problematic. How to create an authentic-looking encyclopedic novel that successfully captures the look and feel, as well as the style and tone and voice of late-Victorian medical ephemera? And where to begin researching such a strange novel?

For a novice in the history of medicine, the Historical Medical Library and the Mütter Museum at the College of Physicians of Philadelphia seemed an obvious choice.

I hoped to discover in the archival collections an archaic medical jargon and stylized vocabulary; a medical dialect of sorts. Once more, William Osler did not disappoint. His massive casebook of patient visits was full of idioms and observations as strange and poetic as anything in Grimms’ tales. There he prescribes “a gargle of witch hazel” for sore throats, diagnoses gastrointestinal distress by making “a percussion over the abdomen,” chastises a patient for being a “worshipper of Bacchus” and philosophically ponders how a man was asphyxiated by “illuminated water.” The terse prose with its detached scientific nonchalance is both comedic and horrific, often simultaneously so. How else to describe chloroform drops prescribed for an ankle sprain, or a soap suds enema with turpentine to cure irregular bowel movements? Sadly, physicians no longer recommend that men soak their penises in boiling milk for fifteen minutes to cure gonorrhea. But Osler did.

Unbeknownst to him, Osler’s mundane patient records had cataloged a rich repository of that most nebulous and elusive element of fictional craft: voice. That intangible thing that makes a story feel authentic, palpable, come alive.

Page from William Osler patient records from the Hospital of University of Pennsylvania (MSS 2/145-01), 1887-1889.
Page from William Osler patient records from the Hospital of University of Pennsylvania (MSS 2/145-01), 1887-1889.

Had I only examined Osler’s casebook, my visit would have been worthwhile. But I was delighted to discover the intersections of folklore and (pseudo)science manifesting in pharmaceutical recipe books by George B. Green, John Ecky, and John Dauntesey. Asthmatic elixirs, electrobiology therapies, herbal poultices, arsenic tinctures, and a splendid cure for hydrophobia involving pulverized oyster shells are a few of the fascinating portraits of alchemical echoes in pre-modern medicine. As is Charles Asher Knight’s casebook, which records multiple accounts of maternal impression, a medieval theory that mental, emotional or physical stimuli on the mother imprints on the developing fetus in the form of defects or disorders. In one particularly rich encounter, Knight recalls a pregnant patient looking out a window when suddenly surprised by a bee that lands on her nose and dances there for a moment before flying away. Her child, Knight observes, is born with a small divot on the tip of its nose, as if pricked with a bee stinger. I am confident such an episode will find its way into my novel.

Many of the casebook entries have the poetic compression of a folktale and end just as abruptly with an equally disconcerting ambiguity that borders on poetry. Page after page patients arrive, hemorrhaging blood from the bowels or suffering from vertigo “wrought by an extra-marital affair with a younger man” or “drowned in a sea of melancholia.” One woman visits Osler after experiencing “womb trouble” and describes symptoms which Osler does not appear to recognize as ovarian cancer. He prescribes her a tonic and sends her on her way. What happened to them, these diseased pilgrims? Such entries remind me of the Russian short story master Anton Chekhov who, in his letters on fictional craft, stated that the only proper way to end a story was to return characters to “the open destiny of life.” Other times the ambiguities are of a more humorous flavor. “Removed imbedded speck from left eye to relieve conjunctivitis. Removed with knife under cocaine,” Osler writes. Does that mean he anesthetized the patient with cocaine, or himself? I guess we will never know, and that is part of its magic.

Any lingering doubts about coupling medicine and fairy tale into fiction were emphatically laid to rest by the “Grimm’s Anatomy: Magic and Medicine” exhibit in the main gallery of the Mütter Museum. Curated by Anna Dhody and Linda J. Lee, this marvelous exhibit does with images and objects what I hope to accomplish with words. With any luck, my novel will not just medicalize the fairy tale but fairytale-ize turn of the century medicine.

*Ryan Habermeyer is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Salisbury University.  He received an F.C. Wood Institute Travel Grant from the College of Physicians of Philadelphia in June 2018.