Today we are pleased to continue with our three-part series from Tom Ewing, Sinclair Ewing-Nelson, and Veronica Kimmerly.
Part Two: “The Epidemic of Influenza” as an Editorial Intervention
On January 4, 1890, the Medical Record first noticed that the disease had reached the United States by publishing first-hand accounts by two New York City doctors of influenza cases under their care. Continue reading
We are pleased to present the first in a three-part series by E. Thomas Ewing, Professor of History and Associate Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, and Sinclair Ewing-Nelson, a student of applied math and history of science and medicine at Yale University and Veronica Kimmerly, who graduated from Virginia Tech in 2014, with degrees in math, German, and engineering, and is now studying in a graduate program at Edinburgh University in Scotland. You can find out more about the Russian flu project in the other parts of this series and at the project’s website!
Part One: Anticipating an Epidemic
In early January 1890, an especially widespread outbreak of influenza that had quickly spread across Europe now seemed likely to reach the United States. Responding to this perceived danger, the Medical Record, a weekly journal, published an editorial on January 4, 1890, by Dr. George F. Shrady, which proclaimed with great certainty that a disease “of such a mild type” did not pose any serious danger to the American people. Continue reading
As the summer winds down, I’m sure many of us are packing for a last vacation trip. The woman traveler can pick up some 19th century women’s travel and health tips from Tropical trials. A hand-book for women in the tropics.
With a cover featuring a gilded umbrella, palm trees, pyramids, and a list of the many tropical places one could travel in the late 19th century, including China, Burmah [sic], India, Melanesia, and Egypt, Tropical trials is a definitive travel guide for English women heading to exotic destinations.
While my travel essentials include sunscreen, a bathing suit, and a book, ladies in 1883 had exhaustive suggestions for traveling in comfort. Essentials include mosquito curtains, punkahs, an umbrella –silk with a cotton cover– and goggles to fight glare, dust and even “eye-flies.”
Tropical trials also includes remarks on diets (how to make a water filter), domestic economy (how to navigate a bazaar and hire a native chef), and how to treat simple maladies (including giddiness, nervousness, and sea-sickness). Trials particularly shows colonialist bias through its suggestions for the management and rearing of children in the tropics (including its warning against children acquiring Native Habits).
If you’re feeling up to traveling 1883-style, peruse the many suggestions, anecdotes, hints, and general remarks of Major Hunt below or follow this link to read Tropical trials. A hand-book for women in the tropics.
If you’re looking for the man’s guide to the tropics, Major S. Leigh Hunt and Alexander S. Kenny wrote On Duty under a Tropical Sun, also available via the Medial Heritage Library. The authors suggest that while each book are complete travel guides, On Duty especially addresses men’s issues while Tropical Trials is best suited for women.
Flip through the pages of Tropical trials below!
If you ever visit the Royal College of Physicians (RCP) in London, you may notice a room in the Denys-Lasdun-designed building with an interesting name: the Censors’ Room. This room is not, as the name may imply, a place for the coordination of censorship, rather it recognises a post in the RCP with a long history. When Thomas Linacre founded the RCP in 1518, the founding charter specified that four physicians known as censors would assist the president with standards for medical education and practice. The censors became the examiners of the RCP, and until the 1830s, candidates were faced with a nerve-wracking oral question and answer examination in the Censors Room. Censors also protected the public and they could pursue physicians for malpractice and enforce discipline. Some well-known censors of the past include William Harvey (1578–1657), the physician who discovered the circulation of the blood, and Sir Hans Sloane (1660–1753), the founder of the British Museum.
Now, as part of the UK Medical Heritage Library (UK-MHL) project, the work of some 19th century censors is available online for the first time. One of those former censors was Lionel S. Beale (1828–1906). Beale had a long working relationship with the RCP as censor (1881–82), and also as curator of the museum (1876–88). His skill as a physician was recognised by the RCP with Beale becoming Baly Medallist (1871) and Lumleian lecturer (1875).
As a pioneer of microscopy Beale developed techniques for staining and fixing of cells and tissues, showing how microscopes could be used by physicians in their day-to-day work. The pyriform nerve ganglion cells are called “Beale’s Cells” in his honour. One of Beale’s best known works Disease germs: their nature and origin (1872) is now online. In the introduction, Beale detailed how he examined tissues to try and discover the causes of disease. He concluded that it was probable that disease originated in either people or domesticated animals. This was contrary to the work of others who argued that “external” agents were the cause of disease. This book is a must see for anyone interested in the early debates around germ theory and it includes beautifully drawn coloured plates.
“Disease germs: their nature and origin.”
Walter B. Cheadle (1835–1910) was another censor. He was an adventurer, who explored the Rocky Mountains in Canada with Lord Milton in 1862. They published a very successful book, The North-West Passage by Land (1865), about their journey. In the field of medicine Cheadle was best known for his work on childhood illnesses. In the RCP, Cheadle was a censor (1892–93), a senior censor (1898) and a Lumleian lecturer (1900). As an early supporter of women in the medical professions, Cheadle was one of the first lecturers at the London Medical School for Women.
Child nutrition and its impact on disease was one of Cheadle’s areas of interest. His book, On the principles and exact conditions to be observed in the artificial feeding of infants (1902) detailed much of his pioneering work and practice. He connected childhood illnesses with poor nutrition and outlined how a better diet could help children recover. There are sections on uses of milk and beef teas, the benefits of sterilisation and commentaries on scurvy and rickets. It gives a fascinating insight into 19th century diets and the deficiency-based illnesses to which that children were prone.
“On the principles and exact conditions to be observed in the artificial feeding of infants.”
Sir William Broadbent was a physician who spent many years working with the RCP as Croonian lecturer (1887), Lumlelian lecturer (1891) and as senior censor (1895). He ran for the office of president in 1899, but he was defeated. Broadbent was a distinguished physician and among his patients he treated two Princes of Wales as physician-ordinary, and Queen Victoria as physician-extraordinary. Broadbent was also an expert in neurology. One of his contributions to the field was ‘Broadbent’s hypothesis’, an attempt to account for the distribution of paralysis in muscles and the immunity of some muscles to hemiplegia.
Cardiology was another area in which Broadbent excelled. Heart disease and aneurysm of the aorta, with special reference to prognosis and treatment (1906) was co-authored with his son John F.H. Broadbent. It grew from lectures delivered at the Harveian Society and the RCP. Broadbent reminisced about his early days as a physician – looking back to a time when there were no systematic ways of studying or treating heart disease. In this book Broadbent imparted his knowledge, and as cardiology developed new editions were issued with this cutting-edge information. The addition of colourful images illustrating what was being described makes this book a must read for those interested in the history of cardiology.
“Heart disease and aneurysm of the aorta, with special reference to prognosis and treatment.”
These are just three Censors who worked for the RCP in the 19th century, and many more will have their work included in the UK-MHL. The position of censor remains to this day and censors continue to work to improve medical education. However the RCP no longer holds examinations in the Censor’s Room; it is now used for ceremonial purposes.
Find out more about the RCP’s library, archive, and museum on our weekly blog, and follow @RCPmuseum on Twitter.
The following references were consulted along with the Munk’s Roll:
Kevin Brown, ‘Broadbent, Sir William Henry, first baronet (1835–1907)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/32077, accessed 21 May 2015]
Michael Worboys, ‘Beale, Lionel Smith (1828–1906)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/30656, accessed 19 May 2015]
We are grateful for the opportunity to cross-post content from the Wellcome Library’s blog about the UK MHL project! This post originally featured there on 5/13/2015.
The library of Royal College of Physicians (RCP) is delighted to be one of the ten UK partner organisations taking part in the UK-Medical Heritage Library (UK-MHL) project. Over next year, working with the Wellcome Library and the Internet Archive, the RCP will be sending books to be digitised and made available online for free.
The Royal College of Physicians was founded in 1518, which makes it the oldest royal medical college in England. The library was founded in the same year and grew mainly through donations and bequests. The Great Fire of London in 1666 destroyed much of the original collection, but the library survived and continued to grow through bequests and donations, as well as new purchases. Initially the collection was not limited to medical subjects, but from the 19th century it became focused on items relating to the work of physicians. The library is thriving today, offering access to contemporary resources for doctors and medical researchers and also historical items for those interested in the history of science and medicine. The RCP has many interesting and unique items which fall into the time period that the UK-MHL covers, 1780 to 1914.
I am project coordinator for the RCP and my role is very much a hands-on one. I am charged with hunting down all the books and pamphlets which are to be sent to the Internet Archive’s scan centre. Once I have located these items and gathered them altogether, I assess their suitability for digitisation. First, I check to see how tightly an item is bound. If it is too tight and the text is curling into the gutter, then unfortunately the platform on which the digitation process takes place will not be able to capture this text. This also applies to items which are larger than the platforms, so I make sure to have a ruler with me at all times checking the width of books and their gutters.
Next, I check to make sure there are no duplicate copies. If there are some duplicates, I must make a choice as to which copy will be sent for digitation. The decision can come down to condition or how tightly the item is bound. When all these things are equal I search for other distinguishing marks such as interesting annotations or a provenance which may interest readers. For example this copy of On a haematazoon inhabiting human blood : its relation to chyluria and other diseases is signed “with the author’s compliments”.
Once all the items have been checked and assessed as being suitable for digitisation, I set about packing the volumes. We use big, sturdy crates which hold about 50 items at a time. As these items are rare books I have to ensure that they are packed very carefully and securely. Layers of plastic sheeting, foam, and bubble-wrap are used to line the crate, with extra bubble-wrap used around the volumes, filling any gaps which may result to books sliding and being damaged. I must say this was the task that I was most nervous about carrying out but now, three batches later, I feel like I have mastered the UK-MHL packing technique.
One of the perks of being so hands on with the materials is that I get to take a look at all the wonderful information contained in the books and pamphlets. The RCP has a diverse collection; subject areas cover the breadth of medical and scientific enquiry, as well as topics such as heraldry, library science, linguistics, and religious texts. I am always on the look-out for interesting pictures, trivia, dedications and commentaries, and there is no shortage of these!
I particularly enjoyed looking at the books on therapeutic baths and spa trips. We have a number of these which covered healing spring resorts all over the world, and many even had helpful maps tucked away in pockets stuck to front covers. One book which stood out for me was Dress : its sanitary aspect. A paper read before the Brighton Social Union , January 30th, 1880. The book contains pictures of healthy bodies and what can happen to bodies after some styles of fashionable clothing are worn for long periods of time.
The aim of the project is to make historical resources available for researchers so that the understanding of the intersections of medicine, science and health can be enhanced. I must say that I am expanding my own knowledge on a daily basis through working with books such as The hygiene of the mouth: a guide to the prevention and control of dental diseases which detailed the types of dental treatment which were common for children in the 19th century and why.
As the project progresses we will be sharing some of the interesting items that we uncover through Twitter and the Library and Museum Blog. The books themselves will be available in their digitised formats through the Wellcome Library catalogue, the Internet Archive and, soon, JISC Historical Books. Make sure to check back regularly as books are continuously being updated. The original books will also be available for viewing in the RCP Library reading room.
Author: Alana Farrell is Project Coordinator UK-MHL, Royal College of Physicians London.
We are grateful for the opportunity to cross-post content from the Wellcome Library’s blog about the UK MHL project! This post originally featured there on 5/4/2015.
Over the next year the Library at the Royal College of Surgeons of England will be preparing almost 2,500 volumes to send to the Wellcome Library for digitisation as part of the UK Medical Heritage Library project. Carried out by a team-in-residence from Internet Archive at its Euston Road centre, this project will make our collections visible and accessible to a new, global audience.
Handling the items as I prepare them for digitisation is fascinating and I am frequently surprised at the variety of titles that I come across. While some may seem puzzling to today’s reader (for instance Joseph Sampson Gamgee’s 1852 inquiry “into the reasons why the horse rarely vomits”, with a further inquiry apparently necessary in 1857), others contend with issues still hotly debated even today, for example the effectiveness or necessity of vaccines, the form medical education should take, or who has responsibility for caring for the poor. Taking time to systematically examine the items is also proving useful for another on-going project at RCS England – a review which assesses the care, use, condition and significance of our entire collections (find updates and images of our [re]discoveries on twitter @HunterianLondon#CollectionsReview ).
Unusually, RCS England’s contribution will come entirely from its tracts and pamphlet collection, and consists of almost 22,000 individual titles bound in 2,500 volumes. This represents almost 80% of the pamphlet collection in total. Each item must be individually flagged with its unique identifier, a process that has caused the Library Collections Manager to scale new heights of expertise using Microsoft mail merge. The pamphlets are as diverse as they are numerous and their inclusion in the UK Medical Heritage Library indicates their rarity and interest.
Funding from the Wellcome Trust made it possible to catalogue RCS England’s tracts and pamphlet collection over four years, and the online visibility of these records has already resulted in higher usage of the collection. The UK Medical Heritage Library represents the next stage in enabling as many people as possible to use it. Items from our collection are already starting to appear on the Internet Archive site, and we are looking forward to even more people discovering some of its delights and using them in new ways.
Author: Dot Fouracre is Collections Review Assistant at the Royal College of Surgeons of England and also works part-time at the Wellcome Library.
Dr. Hiram Corson, an 1828 graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, made his first diary entry March 31, 1827, while he was still a medical student. His last entry was dated January 31, 1896. He died March 4, 1896. He was well-known nationally and was highly respected by such illuminati as Sir William Osler.
The diaries of Dr. Hiram Corson give many insights into the man, the society and times in which he lived, the Civil War, and most especially into medical education and the medical profession of the nineteenth century. More than any other man in America, Hiram Corson was responsible for women physicians gaining recognition and being accepted into the medical profession.
Undaunted by reprisals or scorn, Hiram Corson was an outspoken abolitionist. His sense of justice caused him to respond to many issues. His public awareness throughout his long life is reflected in his diaries, which contain a treasure of information.
For more than thirty years he worked for the better care for the mentally ill. In 1877 Pennsylvania Governor John F. Hartranft appointed Dr. Hiram Corson to the Board of Trustees of the State Lunatic Asylum at Harrisburg “in recognition of his life-long interest and zealous efforts in behalf of the insane.”
Flip through the pages below or follow this link to read any one of the three volumes of Hiram Corson’s diaries.
The London School of Tropical Medicine was founded by Sir Patrick Manson, the “father of tropical medicine” and
‘Two dozen anti-plague rules’ from Japanese textbook on plague, with, Pathogenic horticulture : in two parts (1905)
opened in 1899 at the Seaman’s Hospital in London’s Albert Dock. In 1921 the Athlone Committee recommended the creation of an institute of state medicine, which built on a proposal by the Rockefeller Foundation to develop a London-based institution that would lead the world in the promotion of public health and tropical medicine. Thus the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine was formed and granted its Royal Charter in 1924. The Library and its collections can be found in the LSHTM building in Keppel Street, Bloomsbury, built for us between 1926 and 1929.
We were the third library to send titles to the UK-MHL project for digitisation, the books included in the project reflect the School’s work on infectious diseases and its activities in public health, epidemiology, and tropical medicine. Since we started filling crates in November 2014 we have sent just under 1,000 titles from our collection, half of which are already digitised and available to view. By the end of the project, we hope to have approximately 3,000 items digitised and available to view.
There are two main collections of rare books and pamphlets: a general collection of pre-1900 items, some of which were donated and others purchased by staff on formation of the Library at the Seaman’s Hospital. A second collection was collected by Dr Richard J. Reece on smallpox and vaccination and donated by his widow. The Reece collection does not just contain works by notable vaccination physicians such as Edward Jenner, the surgeon and pioneer of smallpox vaccination, but also contains the furious outpouring of pamphlets by the 19th century’s opponents and sceptics to vaccination. Already digitised are texts by William Tebb, Alfred Wallace, and Charles Creighton. Alexander Paul, in The vaccination problem in 1903 and the impracticability of compulsion, describes the ‘conscientious objector to compulsory vaccination’ as ‘hounded from pillar to post as a free trader in smallpox’.
‘The conscientious objector’ from The vaccination problem in 1903 and the impracticability of compulsion / by Alexander Paul (1903)
Parallels with the current debates around vaccination are not hard to find.
The School was closely associated with the British Colonial Office in its early years, and the rare book collections reflect that colonial past. There are reports and publications from Africa, India, and Ireland. Look out for more items to come.
Of course, there are a significant number of reports by UK local and national government on sanitation, epidemics and social conditions in Britain from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. They include the social investigator Charles Booth’s analysis of the origins of poverty in London, collected through surveys and house to house visits, Life and labour of the people in London.1 It found that up to a third of London’s inhabitants were living in poverty, documenting the changing city of the early twentieth century. The physician Sir Thomas Oliver, (1853–1942) served on a number of official enquiries into industrial disease, including those recommending the restrictions on female employment in the lead industry and the banning of damaging substances from pottery glazes. He was the editor of Dangerous trades: the historical, social, and legal aspects of industrial occupations as affecting health. Many more items from our collections on all aspects of public health are scheduled to be digitised throughout 2015, including texts by John Simon and Edwin Chadwick.
Our most popular titles so far are various volumes from The Golden Bough, James Frazer’s seminal anthropological text examining the waning of belief in magic and witchcraft as science has replaced the old stories about how the world works. Although his evolutionary sequence is no longer accepted, he compared and synthesised a wide range of religious and magic practices.
We are excited to be able to make these texts more widely available through the Medical Heritage Library project and hope that people will find them useful for a wide variety of tasks. We would love to hear from anyone who has used any of our texts, tweet us @LSHTMLibrary.
Frontispiece from Tropical diseases : a manual of the diseases of warm climates / by Patrick Manson (1898)
1. Jose Harris, ‘Booth, Charles (1840–1916)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, Jan 2008 [accessed 24 Feb 2015], doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/31966.
We are delighted to be able to offer our readers this cross-posting from The New York Academy of Medicine blog series on Innovation in Digital Publishing.
There are so many opportunities and—if we’re honest—challenges for innovation in digital publishing it’s hard to pick one and stick with it, but that’s exactly what I’m going to do because some things are worth sticking with. Open access is the best facilitator of, and the biggest opportunity for, innovation in digital publishing. Publishing research open access means anyone in the world with an Internet connection can read it, instead of just the comparatively infinitesimal group of people who have access to a reasonably wealthy university library. Opportunities don’t get much bigger than that.
Much of the research the Wellcome Trust funds is in the biomedical sciences, but we also support research in the medical humanities. This is frequently published in monographs, and monographs now commonly have print runs in the low to mid hundreds. You won’t find these books in the public library or your local bookshop. You might find them in your university’s library if you’re lucky enough to have access. You will probably find them online but you might balk at the price. This lack of access is a problem!
We believe the research we fund is outstanding, and think everyone should be able to access it (and build upon it). Accordingly, we recently extended our open-access policy to include monographs (and book chapters). The first monographs covered by this policy are only just being published open access, but initial usage data gives some indication of the opportunities open access affords. For example, Fungal Disease in Britain and the United States 1850-2000 by Aya Homei and Michael Worboys was published open access with Palgrave Macmillan in November 2013, and made freely available through PMC Bookshelf and OAPEN (as well as the publisher site and e-retailers like Amazon). So far, the free ePub version has been downloaded from Amazon 300 times. Another 600 PDF copies have been downloaded drom the publisher and repository sites, and nearly 3,000 individuals have accessed the HTML chapters. The true readership across digital platforms may be much greater yet, as the Creative Commons Attribution license (CC BY) means readers and other content providers and aggregators can share the work. Readers who prefer the printed page have also purchased hard and paperback copies from Palgrave.
Innovative open access publishing can provide avenues other than the traditional monograph or research article to disseminate research. Mosaic is a Wellcome Trust initiative that publishes longer narrative-based science journalism under the CC BY license. This license allows other platforms to take the content and republish it—with remarkable results. An article by Carl Zimmer on why we have blood types was republished on the BBC, io9, Pacific Standard, and The Independent, among others. Stories have been translated into Spanish, French, Polish, and Hungarian. The point is not just that more people read it, but that the content can be taken to the many different places where the people who are interested in this topic gather.
We are delighted to be able to offer our readers this cross-posting from The New York Academy of Medicine blog series on Innovation in Digital Publishing.
The overwhelming tendency toward openness in digital networks presents both opportunities and challenges for contemporary scholarship, and in particular for the traditional structures that have facilitated and disseminated scholarship such as membership-based scholarly societies. Some of the challenges are obvious, and have been discussed in many other fora. The increasing demand for free access to products around which revenue models have long been built, for instance, challenges organizations to reinvent their fundamental orientation toward their stakeholders. For scholars, the network’s openness presents an increasing potential for information overload and an increasing difficulty in finding the right texts, the right connections, the right conversations at the right time.
All of these challenges are of course balanced by opportunities, however, as the network also presents the possibility of greatly improved access to scholarship and more fluid channels for ongoing communication and discovery amongst scholars. These opportunities suggest that an important role for scholarly societies will be in facilitating their members’ participation in these networks, helping to create new community-based platforms and systems through which their members can best carry out their work. Insofar as scholarship has always been a conversation—if one often conducted at a most glacial pace—the chief value for scholars should come in the ability to be full participants in that conversation: not simply getting access to the work that other scholars produce, but also having the ability to get their work into circulation, in the same networks as the work that inspired it, and the work that it will inspire. For this reason, the value of joining a scholarly society in the age of the network is less in getting access to content the society produces (the convention, the journal) than in the ability to participate.
However, this opportunity points toward a deeper, underlying challenge, for societies and scholars alike: building and maintaining communities that inspire and sustain participation. This is nowhere near as easy as it may sound. And it’s not just a matter of the “if you build it, they won’t necessarily come” problem; problems can creep up even when they do come. Take Twitter, for instance, which developed a substantial and enthusiastic academic user base over a period of a few years. Recently, however, many scholars and writers who were once very active and engaged on Twitter have begun withdrawing. Perhaps the drop-off is part of an inevitable evaporative social cooling effect. Perhaps at some point, Twitter’s bigness crossed a threshold into too-big. Whatever the causes, there is an increasing discomfort among many with the feeling that conversations once being held on one’s front porch are suddenly taking place in the street and that discussions have given way to an unfortunate “reign of opinion,” an increasing sense of the personal costs involved in maintaining the level of “ambient intimacy”that Twitter requires and a growing feeling that “a life spent on Twitter is a death by a thousand emotional microtransactions.”
What is crucial to note is that in none of these cases is the problem predominantly one of network structure. If we have reached a “trough of disillusionment” in the Twitter hype cycle, it’s not the fault of the technology, but of the social systems and interactions that have developed around it. If we are going to take full advantage of the affordances that digital networks provide—facilitating forms of scholarly communication from those as seemingly simple as the tweet to those as complex as the journal article, the monograph, and their born-digital descendants—we must focus as much on the social challenges that these networks raise as we do on the technical or financial challenges. To say, however, that we need to focus on building community—or more accurately, building communities—is not to say that we need to develop and enforce the sort of norms of “civility” that have been used to discipline crucial forms of protest. Rather, we need to foster the kinds of communication and connection that will enable a richly conceived panoply of communities of practice, as they long have in print, to work in engaged, ongoing dissensus without reverting to silence.
