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The Cow says, “Ouch!” Animals in the History of Vaccines

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~Kelly Hacker Jones.

Following the “animal turn” in historical research, more work has been done in the history of medicine on animals as research subjects. In the realm of vaccination, this history should be immediately apparent: it’s right there in the name. Edward Jenner in his 1798 treatise, An Inquiry into the Causes and Effects of the Variolae Vaccinae, applied a Latin name to the cowpox: variolae vaccinae (smallpox + from cows), from which the noun “vaccination” is derived. Jenner developed the first vaccine against a disease after observing that dairymaids and farm hands who had contracted cowpox from livestock were not susceptible either to smallpox infection or inoculation. Jenner’s innovation, as those familiar with the story know, was not greeted with universal enthusiasm. 

Image 1: harvesting cowpox lymph from a calf for use in smallpox vaccine. Source: J. Aitchbee, What is Vaccine Lymph? Kilmarnock, Scotland: Joseph Scott, 1904, p. 6

For one thing, just because a substance prevented deadly disease did not make all individuals wild about having it injected into their bodies. The author of “What is Vaccine Lymph?” certainly thought lymph collected from live cows was not suitable for human use.  Referencing illustrations from a government report on the process of vaccine collection (see above), he explained that 18-month-old calves were walked alongside a rotating table, strapped to it, and then elevated into a horizontal position. This position and the restraints made it easier for the cultivators to inflict small cuts and rub cowpox matter into them, encouraging more cowpox sores to grow, and later harvested the lymph for use as smallpox vaccine. Once the cow had recovered from its cultivated cowpox, it was, according to this author, sold to the slaughterhouse. 

In all likelihood, the original intent of the photographer was to reassure officials that the vaccine was collected in a regimented manner, but the photos were spun differently by Aitchbee.

The reader was expected to conclude that cultivating vaccine lymph was not only cruel to animals, but that the matter potentially contained the germs of other diseases, such as tuberculosis – cows were also a vector for that terrible disease – and thus posed a danger to human health. Visions of filthy stockyards and the sickly cattle from which vaccine lymph was harvested abound in anti-vaccination literature. One critic argued that inoculation with “puss,” whether from animals or humans, was unnatural and compulsory vaccination, therefore, constituted “assault and a crime in the nature of rape.”

Unsurprisingly, there was a great amount of overlap between anti-vivisectionist societies and anti-vaccination societies in the early twentieth century.

Contrast with this, the story of the diphtheria antitoxin. Whereas Jenner’s discovery took advantage of knowledge from farmers confirmed through his own clinical experiments and observations, the diphtheria antitoxin was developed in laboratories in France and Germany, using then-cutting-edge scientific techniques. As the antitoxin must be generated in an animal body, horses were used as they produce large quantities of blood and generate a fairly quick immune response to the antibodies (for a short history of the New York City Health Department’s diphtheria antitoxin farm, click here). 

The antitoxin’s equine origin was not hidden from the public: newspapers coverage from 1895 included photographs of horses standing patiently, allowing their blood to be collected for use in serums that would save the lives of sick children. 

Image 2: preparing a horse to harvest diphtheria antibodies for use in manufacturing antitoxin. Source: The Preparation of Diphtheria Antitoxin and Prophylactics (film), produced by G.B. Instructional Ltd., 1945. 

Western cultural perceptions of horses as opposed to cows – horses are beautiful and dignified and cows are clumsy and well, unintelligent (I personally do not endorse either of those positions) – may have had an influence on how the public reacted to news that the latest vaccine on the market was also cultivated in animals. Portrayals of horses nobly giving their blood for the sake of innocent children would have gone a long way towards assuaging any qualms about their use as cultivators. Adding to the image of valued service, these horses, once they had given several serum donations, were retired to rural pastures.  

Anti-vaccinationists still referenced cultivation in animals generally, but illustrated anti-vaccination sources in the MHL collections only use images of cattle for the purpose of discomforting the reader. 

A 1945 educational film produced in collaboration with the Wellcome Physiological Research Laboratories gave audiences a first-hand look at the conditions in which horses were kept during the process of cultivating and harvesting diphtheria antitoxin. The horse was led into a clean tiled room, the site for injections and blood draws was scrubbed and sterilized, and the veterinarians and technicians wore surgical scrubs. The horse is removed from the barnyard and becomes part of the laboratory (I will caution you that the film is overall horrendously dull, as one might expect from a 1940s-era educational film).* 

Image 3: Vaccinating a sheep against anthrax. Two men working together in this method could immunize up to 150 sheep in an hour, assuming the remaining 149 stood still after watching this procedure. Source: George Fleming, Pasteur and His Work, from an Agricultural and Veterinary Point of View (London: William Clowes and Sons, 1886), p. 51.

So far I have highlighted the history of perceptions of the use of animals in the production of vaccines, but what about the effects of vaccines on animals themselves? As both vectors and victims of contagious diseases, animals have been recipients of vaccines to prevent illnesses such as rabies, anthrax, and distemper. Agriculturalists early realized the potential benefits to humans from vaccinating livestock: herds would live longer, healthier lives and produce more young. 

Agricultural and veterinary historians have no doubt included vaccines in their accounts of the development of modern animal husbandry, but how have human and animal health alike been affected by vaccines? While the usual metaphor of the two-way street is an overstatement, given greater human agency, these sources indicate an inter-relationship between humans and the animals we’ve vaccinated.  

*For more on mass media and its effects on popular perception of medicine, see Bert Hansen, Picturing Medical Progress from Pasteur to Polio (Rutgers University Press, 2009). 

“What I did on my Summer Vacation”: MHL Education and Outreach Fellow Edition

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~Kelly Hacker Jones

I’ve spent the first month of my fellowship culling through documents in the Medical Heritage Library Collections that illustrate moments in the history of vaccine development and use. These have ranged from notices in state medical society journals about new serums and state laws to scientific reports to anti-vaccination tracts. In selecting items for inclusion in the exhibit, I gravitated towards those that were representative of key events or themes in vaccine history and that had visual appeal. 

I want this collection to meet two goals: 1) making primary sources on the history of vaccines more accessible to the public, and 2) showcasing the different types of sources that are available through the MHL’s collections. This is why, for example, I chose to feature three editorials from state medical society journals to depict trials of the Salk polio vaccine trials in the early 1950s. I also leaned heavily, whenever possible, towards documents that clearly lay out a position (e.g. for or against vaccination) or that explain a development using case studies and statistics (Edward Jenner’s 1798 pamphlet is, conveniently, a useful example). This is for the benefit of K-12 instructors who may be looking for materials that students can evaluate for argument or to explain the scientific method. 

These mini exhibits do not contain all there is to find on the history of vaccines; researchers with an interest in public policy and federal aid to promote vaccination will find ample sources documenting that history. Nor are the MHL collections – despite including nearly 300,000 items – comprehensive on this topic. I especially wanted to find more public education ephemera and PSAs, but few have been added to the collection to date. Such is the nature of historical collections.

From Our Partners: Journals Digitisation at the Wellcome Collection

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~This post courtesy Paul Horn, Digitisation Support Officer, Wellcome Collection.

We are at the beginning of a project to digitise Wellcome’s collections of journals – the periodical publications of a range of societies, organisations, and academic disciplines concerned with health.  The project is exciting because of its scale, the new challenges it presents, and the benefits it will offer to researchers and other users.

The journal holdings are substantial and are representative of Wellcome’s wide-ranging and unusual collection.  Whilst some have a narrow focus on a geographic region and/or special interest, such as the Annual report and transactions of the Plymouth Institution and Devon and Cornwall Natural History Society, others are overtly miscellanies.  The Gentleman’s Magazine (first published in 1731) pioneered such an approach: its emphasis was to create a monthly digest of news, commentary and satire for the educated public.

Contributions to that magazine take the form of letters to the editor, Sylvanus Urban (the pen name of its founder, Edward Cave), and range in one volume (selected at random) for 1790, from a consideration of ‘The Celibacy of Fellowes of Colleges’, to remarks on Jamaican vegetable soap from a correspondent in Bermuda, and an illustrated account of a new apparatus ‘for communicating Heat to Bodies apparently dead.’  Debates carried out through its letters could run for several issues.  It was the first periodical to use the term magazine (from the French, meaning ‘storehouse’), and utilised a vast distribution system, established by Cave, being read throughout the English-speaking world.

For now, we are focussing only on digitising runs of journals which start and end before the beginning of the twentieth century.  Based on the average page count per item, average number of items per serial, and the in-scope to out-of-scope ratio of the material we have assessed so far, we expect the journals currently selected for digitisation to take around a calendar year to photograph, accounting for 4 million individual images.  The remainder of titles that begin before 1900 but continue into the twentieth century, and those that begin and end after 1900 would, if we were to digitise them, take almost 7 years to produce nearly 30 million more images.

The journals digitisation project follows on from our work with the Internet Archive to digitise our nineteenth century books collection, which concluded this spring after four years spent preparing, photographing and ingesting 12 million images from 35,000 monographs charting the history of medicine.  Whilst the journals share physical characteristics with these books, they differ in ways which present new challenges. Different categories of metadata pertain to them, and the library only holds a single serial level catalogue record for each of the publications we are digitising.  Therefore, it is necessary for us, when assessing the material, to decide whether the journal divides most naturally into volumes or issues, and then, using the serial records as templates, to create new records in our digitisation database for each new item, adding volume, issue, edition, and date information.  The level of existing metadata is not consistent from one serial to another, so we must maintain attention to detail.  The journals are a large collection with limited catalogue information.  Therefore, forecasting the duration of the project and refining the schedule is an ongoing process.  Creating new records with enhanced metadata not only facilitates scheduling but enables us to develop a more detailed picture of Wellcome’s own holdings.

Together with the Internet Archive, whose staff photograph the journals in a dedicated studio on-site at Wellcome, we have worked towards an easily searchable and browsable way to display the digitised journals on their website.  Included as part of the ‘scan list’ we send to the Internet Archive when delivering each batch of journals are composite titles for each item automatically generated from the metadata concerning the journal name, date range, volume, issue and edition.  These descriptive titles replace the simpler serial titles in Wellcome’s catalogue when the Internet Archive pull the records for ingest, and are displayed on the Internet Archive site as the main heading for each item.  The journals are collected and searchable as part of the main MHL collection at http://www.archive.org/details/medicalheritagelibrary.  When we have the capability to do so, they will be displayed on Wellcome’s own site, too.

The journals project has the potential to provide an excellent resource for researchers and other users.  Journals lend themselves to fruitful speculative keyword searches which can reveal interesting and unexpected connections, including the juxtaposition of articles with pictorial content such as adverts.  They also attract browsing more than other forms – researchers will want to flick through titles to see what changes from volume to volume, month to month, week to week, etc. 

As our journals become available online, a more detailed picture of the varied nature of science writing across history will emerge, and researchers will be able to use the breadth of collection to situate material in its cultural context.

From Our Partners: Bullitt History of Medicine Club fall lecture schedule

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~This post courtesy Dawne Lucas, Technical Services Archivist, Wilson Special Collections Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Tuesday, September 3, 2019  12:00 NOON-1:00 PM  Bondurant G-100 (light lunch provided)

Bringing Big Data to Asylum Studies: Historical Possibilities, Ethical Challenges

Dr. Robert C. Allen, James Logan Godfrey Professor of American Studies and Co-Director of the Community Histories Workshop, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Sarah E. Almond, Assistant Director, Community Histories Workshop, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Using material from the State Archives of North Carolina, Dr. Allen and Ms. Almond have overseen the creation of what they believe to be the first comprehensive, searchable patient database of a nineteenth-century American insane asylum, some 7200 admissions between 1856 and 1918. Complementing the database is a collection of some 5500 extended intake forms (1887-1918), and hospital/state administrative records, including a hospital cemetery inventory of more than 700 interred patients, minutes of hospital board meetings, comprehensive medical staff meetings and interviews with patients (1916-17), and records of the N.C. Eugenics Board (1958-59). Utilizing a multi-disciplinary approach, Allen and Almond, together with their students, are exploring these unique materials and their ethical use in research, graduate and professional teaching/training, and public engagement. 

Dr. Robert C. Allen is the James Logan Godfrey Professor of American Studies and Co-Director of the Community Histories Workshop. He co-founded and was Director of the Digital Innovation Lab (2011-2016) and Co-PI of the Carolina Digital Humanities Initiative (2012-14). His work on “Going to the Show,” an online digital resource documenting the history of moviegoing in North Carolina, was awarded the American Historical Association’s Rosenzweig Prize for Innovation in Digital History in 2011.

Sarah E. Almond is the assistant director of UNC’s Community Histories Workshop. She previously served two years as the program coordinator of the Dorothea Dix Park History Initiative. She is a recent graduate of the joint Masters program between NCSU and UNC-SILS, and holds a MA in Public History in addition to a MSLS with a focus on archives and records management. Her primary interests include archival accessibility and representation, implementation of community archiving practices, and digital humanities pedagogy. She holds certificates in Digital History (NCSU) as well as Digital Curation (UNC-SILS), and is the designer and co-creator of Redlining Hayti, which links discriminatory lending practices and urban renewal in her hometown of Durham, NC. She holds a BA, summa cum laude, in Literature and Language from the University of North Carolina at Asheville.

Tuesday, October 15, 2019  12:00 NOON-1:00 PM  Bondurant 2025 (light lunch provided)

Artificial Hearts: A Controversial Medical Technology and Its Sensational Patient Cases from Haskell Karp to Dick Cheney

Shelley McKellar, PhD, Hannah Professor in the History of Medicine, Schulich School of Medicine & Dentistry, Western University, London, Ontario, Canada

Today artificial hearts are a clinical reality after decades of contentious development. Former U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney told reporters that it ‘saved his life’ when asked about living with an artificial heart device for 20 months in 2010-2012. But not all artificial heart implant patients, like Haskell Karp and Barney Clark, enjoyed such successful recoveries.

In this presentation, McKellar examines the clinical use of artificial hearts since the 1960s, situating the triumphant narrative of this technology and its ‘resurrectionist capacity’ alongside technical device challenges and difficult patient experiences. Who would not want a life-saving, off-the-shelf device fix for a loved one dying of heart failure? The appeal was the promissory nature of artificial hearts as a life-sustaining treatment, a medical technology that might alter the usual course of events that when a person’s heart failed, that person died.

McKellar argues that desirability—rather than feasibility or practicality of artificial hearts—drove the development of this technology. Artificial hearts were (and are) an imperfect technology, and its controversial history speaks to questions of expectations, limitations and uncertainty in a high-technology medical world.

Shelley McKellar, PhD is the Hannah Chair in the History of Medicine at the Schulich School of Medicine & Dentistry at Western University. She is also a Full Professor in the Department of History at Western University. She earned her PhD degree in History from the University of Toronto, after which she worked on a documentary history project at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, and then she accepted her academic position at Western University in London, Ontario, Canada.

Her research focuses on the history of surgery, medical technology and the material culture of medicine. She is the author of several books and articles: her first book, entitled Surgical Limits, is a biography of Canadian surgeon Gordon Murray, one of Canada’s most prominent and controversial surgeons, who was also dubbed Canada’s ‘blue baby doctor’ for fixing congenital heart malformations in the era before open-heart surgery; she co-authored the book Medicine and Technology in Canada, 1900-1950, which highlights medical devices and practices in Canada, such as insulin, TB x-ray screening, and the use of iron lungs. Her most recent book, Artificial Hearts: The Allure and Ambivalence of a Controversial Medical Technology published by Johns Hopkins University Press, traces the potential and promise of this medical technology from the 1950s to present day.

At Western University, she teaches history of disease courses that focus on epidemic outbreaks and social response to history students in the Faculty of Social Science. She also teaches the history of medicine, the medical profession, and related historical aspects of ‘doctoring’ to medical students in the medical school at Western University. She is also curator of the Medical Artifact Collection at Western – a small research and teaching university collection – that allows her to play with amputation saws, toothkeys, bloodletting instruments and more with her students.

Tuesday, November 12, 2019  12:00 NOON-2:00 PM  Fearrington Reading Room, Wilson Special Collections Library (light lunch NOT provided for this one!)

Drop by to compare what you’ve seen in the gross anatomy lab with historical representations of human anatomy over the centuries. Materials are drawn from holdings at the Wilson Special Collections Library. You don’t want to miss this fun and educational open house event.

About the Bullitt History of Medicine Club

The Bullitt History of Medicine Club is a student organization within the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s School of Medicine. The club promotes the understanding and appreciation of the historical foundations upon which current medical knowledge and practice is constructed, by encouraging social and intellectual exchanges between faculty members, medical students, and members of the community. The club’s annual McLendon-Thomas Award recognizes the best unpublished essay on an historical topic in the health sciences written by a UNC-Chapel Hill student. Please visit the Bullitt History of Medicine Club website for more information.

From Our Partners: Dr. Brooks’ Sanatorium

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~by Caitlin Angelone

This month we are heading to New Canaan, Connecticut. The original building that later held Brooks’ Sanatorium was built in 1898 by a wealthy summer resident, Ellen Josephine Hall. Hall purchased the 11 acre property with the intention of opening a sanatorium for her nephew, Dr. Charles Osborne. They left town and the building was sold to Dr. Myron J. Brooks and his wife, Marion.

The Brooks’ Sanatorium opened shortly after, specializing in the recovery of tuberculosis patients and other lung diseases. The sanatorium boasted it was “not for the care, but…for the modern and scientific treatment of Disease of the Lungs.” Aerotherapy (use of hot air and climate to treat diseases), hydrotherapy (use of water for pain treatment), suralimentation (forced feeding of nutrients), and inhalation-therapy (use of nebulizers with drugs to treat lungs) were practiced regularly along with detailed attention to sanitation practices. Dr. Brooks became New Canaan’s health officer and medical examiner during World War l and kept the title until 1929.

He closed his practice during this time and made it a private residence, living there until the death of his wife in 1935. After his death in 1937, local developers bought the land and named the road, Brooks Road, after the doctor. Since then, the home has been the Buttonball Inn, Three Hundred Inn, and Carlton Manor Inn.

In 1956 it was sold as a private residence and has remained a private residence since, with its caretakers paying special attention to its rich history.

Sources:

Brooks’ Sanatorium. (Medical Trade Ephemera Collection) Historical Medical Library of The College of Physicians of Philadelphia, Philadelphia, PA.

Dinan, Terry. “South Avenue Landmark: Brooks Sanatorium, Reincarnated.” New Canaanite, April 8, 2018. Website. March 29, 2018. https://newcanaanite.com/south-avenue-landmark-brooks-sanatorium-reincarnated-1936

NLM and Medical Heritage Library to Expand Public Access to Collections

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The National Library of Medicine (NLM) signed a three-year memorandum of understanding with the Medical Heritage Library (MHL) to promote free and open access to quality historical resources in medicine and the human health sciences.

Under the agreement, the MHL will include digitized NLM historical materials and associated metadata in its free and open archive of historical resources. Additionally, staff of the organizations will exchange expertise to ensure and share accurate metadata for the materials, data-driven analyses of usage of the materials, as well as transparent and open engagement efforts with researchers who could benefit from knowing about the free availability of the materials.

MHL—a nonprofit organization—is a digital curation collaborative among some of the world’s leading medical libraries promoting free and open access to quality historical resources in medicine.   Through the partnership with the MHL, the NLM strengthens its connections to U.S. and international peer institutions and their communities, including Harvard University, the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, the New York Academy of Medicine, the Wellcome Library in London and the Bibliothèque interuniversitaire de Santé in Paris.

NLM holds collections spanning ten centuries of global medical history. “This agreement supports the shared goals of NLM and MHL to open these collections to new audiences and provide access that supports a variety of current and developing research methods,” said Jeffrey S. Reznick, PhD, Chief of the NLM History of Medicine Division.

“This agreement with the NLM strengthens the MHL’s core mission, as a collaborative digitization and discovery organization committed to providing open access resources in the history of healthcare and the health sciences,” said Melissa Grafe, PhD, President of the Medical Heritage Library and Head of the Medical Historical Library at Yale. “Since 2010, the NLM’s world-renowned collections have been—and with this memorandum of understanding will continue to be—a core part of the nearly 300,000 freely and openly available digitized items in the Medical Heritage Library, used in research and education throughout the world.”

Since its founding in 1836, the National Library of Medicine https://www.nlm.nih.gov has played a pivotal role in translating biomedical research into practice and is a leader in information innovation. NLM is the world’s largest medical library, and millions of scientists, health professionals and the public around the world use NLM services every day.

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Big News!

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We are excited to announce the end of a big transformation for the Medical Heritage Library!  Last year, our governance board decided to incorporate the Medical Heritage Library, separating the organization from our parent non-profit educational and cultural institutions.  As our own stand-alone entity, and to continue our mission as a collaborative digitization and discovery organization committed to providing open access resources in the history of healthcare and the health sciences, we applied for 501(c)(3) non-profit status.  In early June we finally received the great news from the IRS that our non-profit status was approved.  We want to take this opportunity to thank Dustin Lauermann, formerly an associate with Blank Rome in Philadelphia, and now an associate with Seyfarth Shaw in Los Angeles, for his – and Blank Rome’s – pro bono support of this effort. We look forward to continuing our work through grants and support from our users and other organizations.

From Our Partners: CfP: Memory Lives On: Documenting the HIV/AIDS Epidemic

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~This post courtesy Polina Ilieva, Head of Archives and Special Collections, University of California, San Francisco.

Deadline for submissions extended to June 17

Memory Lives On: Documenting the HIV/AIDS Epidemic is an interdisciplinary symposium exploring and reflecting on topics related to archives and the practice of documenting the stories of HIV/AIDS. 

The task of documenting the history of HIV/AIDS and thinking about the present and future of the epidemic is daunting. The enormity and complexity of the stories and perspectives on the disease, which has affected so many millions of patients and families around the world, present significant challenges that demand continual reexamination. Questions of “what do we collect and from where” and “whose stories do we know best.”  The ways in which we handle documentary evidence and produce knowledge from that evidence has profound effects on a huge range of social, economic and health outcomes. In examining and reflecting on our knowledge of the history of the HIV/AIDS epidemic and its future, we hope to improve our understanding of the true effects of the disease, and what it can teach us about future epidemics.

The program committee invites submissions for presentations addressing the HIV/AIDS epidemic from the wide-ranging perspectives of historians, archivists and librarians, artists, journalists, activists and community groups, scientific researchers, health care providers, and people living with HIV. We invite proposals from individuals with diverse experience and expertise on the HIV/AIDS epidemic in scholarship, research and advocacy. Proposals will be considered in a variety of forms including paper presentations, panel discussions and posters. 

The Symposium will take place in Byers Auditorium in Genentech Hall at the UCSF Mission Bay Campus in San Francisco, October 4th and 5th 2019.  The program will be an afternoon session and evening reception the first day, followed by a full day of presentations the second. 

The Program Committee has identified the following themes to consider when developing your proposal, though we encourage creativity and experimentation in exploring themes, partnerships, and narrative ideas. 

  • Documenting the epidemic: Gaps, silences and unheard voices
  • Creating an interdisciplinary narrative of an epidemic
  • Silent no more: Community, caretaker and patient stories 
  • The San Francisco Bay Area’s Response to the AIDS Epidemic 
  • Biomedical story: From mystery disease to cure 
  • From local to global: Learning from AIDS to address future epidemics

The Program Committee welcomes proposals for individual papers, panel discussion and posters. Individual papers with a similar focus will be assembled into a single session by the program committee. Usually 3-4 papers are included in a session.

To allow adequate time for questions and discussion,  panels should be limited to four participants in addition to a chair/facilitator.

Please include the following in your complete proposal

  • Session title if submitting a full panel proposal (of no more than 20 words)
  • Session abstract if submitting a full panel proposal (up to 500 words)
  • Short session abstract for the program if submitting a full panel proposal (up to 50 words)
  • Paper or poster or presentation titles (if any), and names of corresponding presenters
  •  Biographical paragraph for each presenter
  •  E-mail address for each participant
  •  Affiliation, city, state, and country for each participant
  •  Social media handles or web addresses for each participant (optional)
  •  Audiovisual needs
  • Special accommodation needs

The deadline for submissions is June 17. We will notify presenters if their proposal has been accepted by July 22. 

Memory Lives On Program Committee

Monica Green, Ph.D.,  Professor of History, Arizona State University

Victoria Harden, Ph.D., Director (retired) of the Office of NIH History

Richard  McKay, DPhil,  Wellcome Trust Research Fellow, University of Cambridge

Barbara A. Koenig, Professor of Medical Anthropology & Bioethics in the Department of Social & Behavioral Sciences, Institute for Health & Aging and Head of UCSF Bioethics Program

Jay Levy, MD, Professor UCSF School of Medicine

Eric Jost, Digital Marketing Manager, SF AIDS Foundation

Jon Cohen, Staff writer for Science Magazine

Mark Harrington, Executive Director, Treatment Action Group

William Schupbach, Wellcome Library 

Jason Baumann, Susan and Douglas Dillon Assistant Director for Collection Development and Coordinator of Humanities and LGBT Collections, NYPL

Polina Ilieva, Head of Archives & Special Collections, UCSF Library

Submit a proposal: http://tiny.ucsf.edu/A2nohy

For any inquiries contact David Krah david.krah@ucsf.edu 

More information about the UCSF AIDS History Project:https://www.library.ucsf.edu/archives/aids/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/2289554314666452/

Introducing Kelly Hacker Jones

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Jones at Bridal Veil Falls in the Columbia River Gorge, Oregon, on a recent trip. As with many things in life, getting down from that rock was much more difficult than getting up it.


Kelly is our Education and Outreach Fellow and we asked her to write a quick post to introduce herself:

I taught a course on the history of healthcare in America at Baruch College this past semester. As a bonus question on their final exam, I asked my students what they learned in the course. This class’s answers were overall fairly typical – marvel at the rapid expansion of medical innovation in the twentieth century, outrage at past injustices in medical experimentation – but one student’s answer in particular piqued my interest. She wrote that she was surprised to learn that there is a history of medicine and healthcare (she had registered for the course at the last minute to fill a requirement). What she took away from the course, was an awareness that how we think about and treat disease, is informed by social and cultural factors – race, class, and gender – not only by scientific discoveries and technological innovations. She also wrote that she felt this material should be introduced to students at an earlier stage, perhaps during high school. As a teacher, those are the moments I live for: when a student realizes the relevance of historical context to their own daily life and sees a need to share it with others.

In my career to date, I have pursued projects in public history alongside my academic training. I have held positions as a docent at the Indiana Medical History Museum, as a historical walking tour guide in New York, and as an educator at the Museum of the City of New York. Each position required that I present difficult, sometimes contentious material to audiences ranging from school children to older adults, in an engaging, comprehensible manner. Mirroring the distinction between academic and public history, I pursue questions pertaining to the differentiation between expert and lay knowledge in my own research. My PhD dissertation, completed in summer 2018 at Stony Brook University, examined the adaptation of traditional Chinese medicine to the American medical marketplace during the mid-twentieth century. I engaged in such issues as the patient’s right to choose from therapies offered in a free medical marketplace, the authority of physicians to judge non-biomedical therapies as safe and effective, and the role of government to play referee in issues pertaining to health.

In short, understanding the divide between expert and general knowledge and finding ways to bridge that gap has become a sort of personal mission of mine. One way to do this, is to engage non-academics more directly in the study and creation of history, which is the reason why the Education & Outreach Fellowship appeals to me. My goal in this position, is to make the vast amount of materials in the Medical Heritage Library’s online collections more accessible to the public and to K-12 teachers – as well as to researchers – helping to bring the history of medicine to a broader audience. I am working to create digital exhibits that provide context and illuminate relationships between key sources on a given subject (first vaccination, then other topics including disability history, gender in the field of medicine, and others). As I have often told my students, everything has a history. Making this history more accessible will, I feel, provide more nuance in discussions of contemporary health issues.

Photo Caption: Jones at Bridal Veil Falls in the Columbia River Gorge, Oregon, on a recent trip. As with many things in life, getting down from that rock was much more difficult than getting up it.

From Our Partners: Normalizing Sex Research and Education in America: Robert Latou Dickinson in Perspective

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~This post courtesy Emily Gustainis, Deputy Director, Center for the History of Medicine at the Francis A. Countway Library of Harvard Medical School and vice-president of the Medical Heritage Library, Inc.

Physician Robert Latou Dickinson (1861–1950) resists categorization. He was a long-time obstetrician and gynecologist; a research scientist invested in sexual health who influenced Alfred Kinsey and notions of sexuality; a birth control and reproductive sterilization advocate; an anatomist who authored an influential atlas of reproductive anatomy/ an artist who illustrated his own scientific texts; and a public health educator whose popular sculptures and models changed the way the public visualized the birth process. “Normalizing Sex Research and Education in America: Robert Latou Dickinson in Perspective” will explore different aspects of Dickinson’s long career, addressing his work in reproductive health and family planning, his time spent as a sex educator and artist at the New York Academy of Medicine, his Birth Series models created for the 1939 World’s Fair, and his depictions of human anatomy and concepts of normalization through his models Norma and Normman. Dickinson’s legacy is still with us today, and his personal papers and models remain some of the Center for the History of Medicine’s most-used collections. With the help of these four scholars, we hope to better understand the impact and legacy that Robert Latou Dickinson continues to exert on our current health science and clinical care community.

An exhibition also entitled Normalizing Sex Research and Education in America: Robert Latou Dickinson in Perspective will be on display for the event (L1 of the Countway Library of Medicine).

Speakers

Sarah B. Rodriguez, Ph.D., Senior Lecturer, Global Health Studies, Weinberg College of Arts & Sciences; Lecturer, Medical Education, Feinberg School of Medicine; Faculty, Medical Humanities & Bioethics Graduate Program, all at Northwestern University, Robert Latou Dickinson: Pioneering Researcher.

A founding father of sex research in the United States, a prominent physician who used his position to advocate for access to birth control, and a distinguished clinician: Robert Latou Dickinson, with his deep interest in women’s health, took on all of these roles. In this presentation, Rodriguez will discuss these three roles – sex researcher, birth control advocate, and clinician – of this historically understudied physician, focusing on his pioneering research regarding female sexuality.

Anne Garner, MLS, Curator, Rare Books and Manuscripts Library, The New York Academy of Medicine Library, From the stacks to the studio:  Robert Latou Dickinson’s Academy of Medicine.

Robert Latou Dickinson’s relationship with the New York Academy of Medicine was a critical part of both his professional and creative identity. In 1891, Dickinson became a Fellow of the organization and served on numerous committees, including as Chairman of the Academy’s art committee from 1935-1940.  At the Academy Dickinson was given a dedicated studio space, where he worked on the Birth Series and other three-dimensional anatomical models. While de facto artist-in-residence, Dickinson also engaged Alfred Kinsey to lobby the Academy to open a sex education library. This talk will explore Dickinson’s role as influencer and occasional disrupter within the Academy, as he advocated for sex education and for greater access to medical information for public audiences.

Rosemarie Holz, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Practice, Associate Director, Women’s and Gender Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, “So that which has been lost is now found!” Exploring the magic of the 1939 Dickinson-Belskie Birth Series Sculptures.”

In this presentation Holz will discuss the creation and dissemination of the hugely influential yet surprisingly overlooked 1939 Dickinson-Belskie Birth Series sculptures, which illustrate the process of human development from fertilization through delivery. First displayed at the 1939-1940 World’s Fair in New York City, they were reproduced in a variety of forms and sent out across the United States and overseas, giving rise to modern views of pregnancy decades before Lennart Nilsson’s much-heralded in utero photographs in Lifemagazine in the 1960s. Despite their enormous popularity, by the 1970s and ‘80s the Birth Series began to disappear from public knowledge, eclipsed by new technologies, such as ultrasound, that offered modern ways to view in utero development. Holz will conclude her presentation by describing the Birth Series’ surprising re-birth since their 2014 recovery from the dusty storage collection of the University of Nebraska State Museum, a re-birth that is prompting renewed fascination with these evocative forms and new conversations.

Anna Creadick, Ph.D., Professor of English and American Studies, Hobart and William Smith Colleges, Model bodies, normal curves: Norm and Norma in Postwar America. 

In the early 1940s, with their Birth Series models completed, sexologist Robert L. Dickinson and his sculptor-collaborator Abram Belskie created two anthropometric sculptures representing the “average” American male and female bodies. Dickinson named them “Normman and Norma.” Dickinson’s effort to model the “normal” body was indicative of a broader obsession taking hold in midcentury America, as doctors, psychiatrists, physical anthropologists, and scientists began to isolate the normal as a subject, to try and define normality with increasing precision.  In 1945, Dickinson donated the “Norm and Norma” statues along with his Birth Series and other medical models to the Cleveland Health Museum, where they might have just gathered dust. But instead, Norm and Norma began a decade-long tour of the postwar public sphere, appearing in newspaper articles, popular science magazines, television shows, and even a look-alike contest. This presentation tells the story of the wartime production and postwar reception of these models, whose “normal” curves helped to promote a powerful organizing category of postwar culture.