We would like to thank all our great speakers who showed up last Friday to make our first conference great! It was wonderful to hear about so many projects making amazing use of our resources; we can’t wait to hear how every one develops in the future.
Thank you also to everyone who showed up to participate and ask questions — it wouldn’t have been the same day without you.
If you missed the live conference, don’t worry: we’re working on editing and captioning the recording to get it up on YouTube as soon as possible. Watch this space!
Please join us from 11-5 (US EST) on November 13th for a celebration and exploration of medical history through the lens of our collections. The conference is free and open to all comers.
With thanks to Jessica Murphy and Stephanie Krauss of the Center for the History of Medicine, we’re delighted to open up two new ‘shelves’ of curated materials on our site.
We’re very excited to hold our first and birthday conference in November and we’d love to have you there, too! See our full CfP here and feel free to email us with any questions (medicalheritage @ gmail . com).
Kim celebrating a sunflower she grew in her backyard last year.
For a few years running, there has been minor scandal about Joe Biden’s wife. Jill Biden has a doctorate in education from the University of Delaware, and requests that she be addressed under her formal title: Dr. Biden. While the Obama White House listed her as “Dr. Jill Biden” on their official website, several newspapers, including the New York Times, refused to honor her wish, referring to her as “Mrs. Biden.” The Washington Post remarked that it reserves the title of Dr. for medical professionals, “if you can’t heal the sick, we don’t call you doctor.” While there is ample room for sexism in refusing Dr. Biden her proper title, there is also a long history of intellectual warfare between the arts and the sciences.
As the child of two physicians, I spent a lot of time defending my choice not to go to medical school, and instead pursue a PhD. When I earned my doctorate from the Department of English at NYU in the spring of 2019, I got a lot of well-meaning jokes about which Dr. Adams was the “real” doctor. It turns out the punchline might require a bit of medical history. At the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts conference last fall, a colleague told me that in the eighteenth century, it was reversed, “We were the real doctors, and they were not.”
I like to imagine myself as someone who, like C.P. Snow, has a foot in each of these “two cultures”: standing with the “real” doctors of the past and the present. Snow argued in 1959 that the intellectual life of Western culture was increasingly being split into two groups, the humanists and the scientists, who were utterly failing to communicate with each other: “one found Greenwich Village talking precisely the same language as Chelsea, and both having about as much communication with M.I.T. as though the scientists spoke nothing but Tibetan.” He observed this division not through an anthropological study of academic communities, but through the idiosyncrasies of personal experience: “plenty of days when I have spent the working hours with scientists and then gone off at night with some literary colleagues.” I, on the other hand, spend my working hours researching the Harlem Renaissance, and my evenings drinking with scientists (or at least I did before our current pandemic). Snow is a double agent: a scientist by day and a writer by night. I am another, newer kind of operative: a medical humanist.
I have crafted a scholarly identity that combines literature and medicine with the goal of speaking a language understood on both sides of the cultural divide. My dissertation, The Body Electric, examines the role of medical technology in American literature, from mesmerism to electroconvulsive therapy, Walt Whitman to Ralph Ellison. Sharing this research with a wider audience, I recently published a piece on the medical history of vibrators. In it, I argue that vibrators were asexual medical quackery from the 1890s to the 1970s when feminists repurposed them for masturbatory liberation. Last spring, I worked with my peers to organize a conference on the cultural history of pharmacology, where we heard papers about anesthesia in nineteenth-century American novels, the opium trade in colonial Korea, and crisis nursing at twentieth-century rock concerts. The conference confirmed my suspicion that the amazing material history of medicine deserves a wider audience.
The Medical Heritage Library brings an extraordinary range of material from the history and culture of medical science to the broader reading public. Scores of freely available, digital resources in the MHL collections, from medieval accounts of plague and quarantine, to early twentieth century studies of eugenics and “race suicide,” speak directly to our contemporary moment, and have a valuable role to play in shaping public discourse. As the Summer Outreach Fellow, I look forward to extending the MHL’s mission to share these resources with humanists and scientists alike, building a common language among the multiple, vibrant, cultures of the broader reading public
I wanted to thank all our MHL users for the support you’ve shown us over the past 11 years. We started in 2009 in an effort to bring a consortial model to digitization of medical heritage materials across different types of institutions. I began co-chairing the MHL in 2015 after the death of our leader, Kathryn Hammond Baker, who was Deputy Director of the Center for the History of Medicine at the Countway Library at Harvard University. Kathryn successfully guided the MHL in the early years, and with the governance committee, established our website, wrote several digitization grants, and generally set the path for our organization. Being relatively new to the organization and working full-time as Head of the Medical Historical Library at Yale University, I knew I needed help to fill Kathryn’s large shoes.
Working with Emily Novak Gustainis, current Deputy Director of the Center and MHL co-chair, we expanded the MHL’s footprint with our amazing partners. The MHL now has over 320,000 items in our Internet Archive instance and over 4,000,000 images drawn from these collections residing in our Flickr account. With the addition of the Wellcome Library and the Bibliothèque interuniversitaire de Santé (BIU Santé) as international governance members, the MHL includes fabulous collections from these illustrious institutions, accounting for over half of the MHL corpus. Our international and national governance members, including the National Library of Medicine, UCSF Library, the New York Academy of Medicine, the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University, the Cushing/Whitney Medical Library at Yale University (where I’m from), and the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine at Harvard, sustain the MHL, contributing funding, time, effort, collections, and resources to keep our organization going. We also appreciate all the content contributors that tag their collection in Internet Archive with the MHL tag.
In 2018, with particular help from Beth Lander, College Librarian at the College of Physicians, the MHL embarked on a journey to become a stand-alone, incorporated non-profit, which we achieved in 2019, ten years after our founding. I became the first president of the MHL in 2018, with my term ending on June 30th, 2020. The MHL started a fellowship program in 2018 to bring fresh voices to bear on every aspect of our work. Our fellows have delved into our user base to better understand ways to reach our audiences, created curated primary source sets on vaccination and disability, and analyzed the infrastructure supporting our Advanced search. We are happy to introduce Kim Adams as our fellow for this year, who will be helping us expand our outreach efforts and organize our first virtual symposium.
Please join me in welcoming our new President, Emily Novak Gustainis. She is an incredible person and will lead the MHL in amazing directions moving forward. We look forward to your continued support as our users, and encourage you to share stories on how you use the MHL in your research, teaching, learning, and world. Email us at medicalheritage@gmail.com.
The Medical Heritage Library grieves for the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery, all brutally murdered in recent weeks. Systemic racism is a public health issue; our historical collection does not represent black or brown voices well; instead, they are often excluded, muted, ignored, and buried in the records.
The Medical Heritage Library is the creation of elite academic institutions and as such has its foundation in a long tradition of academic complicity with institutionalized racism. We choose to work towards the end of systemic racism in our work and community. We stand in solidarity with those protesting police brutality and the deadly effects of systemic racism.
Our collections span seven centuries and we are eager to support you in your work, particularly at a time when medical history and medical humanities is at the forefront of everyone’s attention.
If you have questions or concerns, please don’t hesitate to be in touch with us at medicalheritage (@) gmail (.) com.
