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

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~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”

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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”

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– 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.

A New Way to Access MHL Images!

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  • The skeleton artists from the title page of Erasmus Wilson's A system of human anatomy, general and special (1847)
    The skeleton artists from the title page of Erasmus Wilson’s A system of human anatomy, general and special (1847)
  • Image from Supplement to Campi Phlegraei : being an account of the great eruption of Mount Vesuvius in the month of August 1779
    Image from Supplement to Campi Phlegraei : being an account of the great eruption of Mount Vesuvius in the month of August 1779
  • Page from 18th century "Artzney buch" is an unidentified German manuscript recently digitized by the National Library of Medicine.
    Page from 18th century “Artzney buch,” an unidentified German manuscript recently digitized by the National Library of Medicine.

Are you looking for a way to access the millions of images locked within our hundreds of thousands of books? Recently, the Medical Heritage Library Inc. began reaping millions of images from books and journals in our online collection and providing in-depth book level metadata to these images via Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mhlimages/.

Once you select an image, you have the ability to click a link taking you back to the page in the actual online book for context.  By scrolling down, you’ll discover links that allow you to:

“See all images from this book”

“See all MHL images published in the same year”

“See all images from [Contributing] Library”

Despite the massive swell of digitized texts over the past twenty years, systematically unlocking images in a large corpus of books with enough metadata to provide some basis for analysis has been a challenge.  The ability to find and analyze images is on the wish list of many of the researchers using the MHL.  While the metadata helps connect researchers to the actual book, the MHL at this point lacks the ability to provide a way for researchers to search for individual images within this massive corpus.  We invite you to tag the Flickr images, but we are working with colleagues on a new program that will help batch tag and sort millions of images based on machine reading and recognition.  We also recognize that our images filters do not always keep “visual junk” out, so please be patient as we work out the bugs.  Stay tuned!

From Our Partners: “From Hysteria to Anorexia Nervosa: An Evolution of Medical Terminology”

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– by Julia Jablonowski

Most people in our contemporary society are familiar with anorexia nervosa –more commonly known as just “anorexia.” Yet few know the development of medical thought and the advancement of medical etymologies in the Victorian era that led to the emergence of what we know today as anorexia nervosa.

Prior to the pathological conception of anorexia nervosa, its fundamental symptoms, which are grounded in self-inflicted food aversions, were not thought of as an independent disorder until the nineteenth century. A common diagnosis that was used in the days before anorexia nervosa was hysteria, a disease historically exclusive to the female gender.[1]

In the Victoria era, a woman was societally understood to be passive, feeble, emotional, and fragile.[2] These beliefs as espoused by Victorian culture created a space in which women were understood to be societally, and medically, more susceptible to illness. From mood swings to fevers, light-headedness to exhaustion, it seemed that almost any physical or mental affliction residing within the body and psyche of a woman could be met with the diagnosis of hysteria. Other symptoms included a vast array of nervous and erratic behavior projected by women in the form of fatigue, food refusal or self-starvation, depression, bodily pains, anxiety, and the general feeling of unwellness.[3]  Because of the broad symptoms of hysteria, it was applied to a large expanse of medical, mental, and emotional cases troubling the fragile Victorian female.

This identification of food refusal and self-starvation developed into an area of independent study in the nineteenth century, largely due to the high mortality rates of mental asylum patients in the United States and the United Kingdom.[4]  An English physician, Robley Dunglison, moved to America in 1825 to become a professor of anatomy and medicine. [5] [6] While in the United States, Dunglison was instrumental in the establishment of Pennsylvania’s first state asylum where proper provisions were made to treat the insane poor of Pennsylvania.[7]  Coincidentally or not, Dunglison’s position within the development of institutional asylums had a large impact on the evolution of the vocabulary we associate with self-inflicted food refusal.

In 1856, Dunglison published Medical Lexicon: A Dictionary of Medical Science. This medical dictionary defines a premature understanding of the word anorexia, then referred to as “anorex’ia,” which he defined as the “absence of appetite, without loathing.”[8] Dunglison’s dictionary elaborates on this new term, continuing the journey of the disorder’s etymological advancement, mentioning “anorexia exhausto’rum,” which is the “frigidity of the stomach.”

Anorexia began to be noted as an individual disorder rather than a symptom of a larger disease such as hysteria, due to the level of accountability asylums where held to in the public spheres of the U.S. and Britain. Anorexia began to be distinguishable as its own malady because of the level of transparency promoted by medical journals and newspapers that reported on mortality rates in such institutions.[9] In American asylums, the superintendents were held accountable through the spectacle of death by starvation, which was a frightening source of mortality to the public.[10] An asylum’s mortality statistics were published in professional medical journals, as well as abstracted in newspapers for society’s lay people.[11] A high mortality rate communicated immense failure on the part of the asylum. British asylum keepers were becoming increasingly aware of this transparency and the repercussions that followed when people began to catch on to the increasing numbers of premature patient deaths due to self-starvation in an institution meant to care for the ill, thus allowing for the disease to gain special attention. [12]

The attention drawn to this disease was largely addressed by two medical professionals: Parisian neuropsychiatrist, Ernest Charles Lasègue, and London physician, Sir William Withey Gull. Lasègue, a contemporary of Gull, was responsible for the term “l’anorexie hysterique” –hysterical anorexia.  Gull combated this name and proposed the name anorexia nervosa, which he publicly expressed in August 1868 in his address at Oxford University.[13] The significance of this terminological substitution of “nervosa” for “hysterique” was crucial to Gull because hysteria, as understood by Victorian medicine, was exclusively a woman’s plague. Although anorexia mostly affected the female population, Gull noted that it, too, plagued men, thus leading to the necessary use of the word nervosa, which focuses on anorexia’s association as a nervous, mental, and genderless disease.[14]

When defining the term anorexia nervosa in his address at Oxford, Gull explained:

“The want of appetite is, I believe, due to a morbid mental state. I have not observed in these cases any gastric disorder to which the want of appetite could be referred. (…) We might call the       state hysterical without committing ourselves to the etymological value of the word, or maintaining that the subjects of it have the common symptoms of hysteria. I prefer, however, the more general term ‘nervosa,’ since the disease occurs in males as well as females, and is probably rather central than peripheral.”[15]

This gender-inclusive research of Sir William Withey Gull, in addition to the growth of mortality rates –and public embarrassment—being suffered by asylums, shifted the understanding of self-starvation in medicine. This shift thus demanded intellectual and terminological changes to be made, resulting in the emergence of anorexia nervosa.

Notes:

[1] Cecilia Tasca, Mariangela Rapetti,, Mauro Giovanni Carta, and Bianca Fadda, “Women And Hysteria In The History Of Mental Health,” Clinical Practive & Epidemo=iology in Mental Health, 8, (2012): 110-111.

[2] “The Hysterical Female,” Restoring Perspective: Life and Treatment at the London Asylum,  https://www.lib.uwo.ca/archives/virtualexhibits/londonasylum/hysteria.html.

[3] “The Hysterical Female,” Restoring Perspective: Life and Treatment at the London Asylum,  https://www.lib.uwo.ca/archives/virtualexhibits/londonasylum/hysteria.html.

[4] Joan Jacobs Brumberg, Fasting Girls: The Emergence of Anorexia Nervosa as a Modern Disease.

[5] “Professor and Physician: Robley Dunglison, M. D.; The Dunglisons Reach the University of Virginia,” The University of Virginia, http://exhibits.hsl.virginia.edu/dunglison/at_uva/.

[6] “Professor and Physician: Robley Dunglison, M. D.; From Kewsick, England to Charlottesville, Virginia,” University of Virginia, http://exhibits.hsl.virginia.edu/dunglison/keswick/.

[7]  An Appeal to the People of Pennsylvania on the Subject of an Asylum for the Insane Poor of the Commonwealth, (Philadelphia, 1838).

[8] Robley Dunglison, M.D., LL.D., Medical Lexicon: A Dictionary of Medical Science, (Philadelphia, Blanchard and Lea., 1856), 80.

[9] Joan Jacobs Brumberg, Fasting Girls: The Emergence of Anorexia Nervosa as a Modern Disease, (Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press, 1988), 101.

[10] Joan Jacobs Brumberg, Fasting Girls: The Emergence of Anorexia Nervosa as a Modern Disease, (Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press, 1988), 101

[11] Joan Jacobs Brumberg, Fasting Girls: The Emergence of Anorexia Nervosa as a Modern Disease.

[12] Joan Jacobs Brumberg, Fasting Girls: The Emergence of Anorexia Nervosa as a Modern Disease, (Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press, 1988), 101.

[13] Gull, William Withey. “V.-Anorexia Nervosa (Apepsia Hysterica, Anorexia Hysterica).” Obesity Research 5, no. 5 (September 1997): 498–502

[14] Gull, William Withey. “V.-Anorexia Nervosa (Apepsia Hysterica, Anorexia Hysterica).” Obesity Research 5, no. 5 (September 1997): 498.

[15] Gull, William Withey. “V.-Anorexia Nervosa (Apepsia Hysterica, Anorexia Hysterica).” Obesity Research 5, no. 5 (September 1997): 501.

Sources:

An Appeal to the People of Pennsylvania on the Subject of an Asylum for the Insane Poor of the Commonwealth, (Philadelphia, 1838).

Dunglison, Robley M.D., LL.D., Medical Lexicon: A Dictionary of Medical Science, (Philadelphia, Blanchard and Lea., 1856), 80

Gull, William Withey. “V.-Anorexia Nervosa (Apepsia Hysterica, Anorexia Hysterica).” Obesity Research 5, no. 5 (September 1997).

Jacobs Brumberg, Joan, Fasting Girls: The Emergence of Anorexia Nervosa as a Modern Disease, (Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press, 1988).

“Professor and Physician: Robley Dunglison, M. D.; The Dunglisons Reach the University of Virginia.” The University of Virginia. http://exhibits.hsl.virginia.edu/dunglison/at_uva/.

“Professor and Physician: Robley Dunglison, M. D.; From Kewsick, England to Charlottesville, Virginia.” University of Virginia. http://exhibits.hsl.virginia.edu/dunglison/keswick/.

Tasca, Cecilia, Rapetti, Mariangela, Giovanni Carta Mauro, and Fadda, Bianca “Women and Hysteria In The History Of Mental Health,” Clinical Practive & Epidemo=iology in Mental         Health, 8, (2012).

“The Hysterical Female.” Restoring Perspective: Life and Treatment at the London Asylum.  https://www.lib.uwo.ca/archives/virtualexhibits/londonasylum/hysteria.html.

College of Physicians Receives CLIR Grant

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~Courtesy Beth Lander, College Librarian, Historical Medical Library, College of Physicians of Philadelphia.

The College of Physicians of Philadelphia has been awarded a $240,000 grant from the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) to digitize 150,000 pages of primary sources related to the history of medical education. 

This project, titled For the Health of the New Nation: Philadelphia as the Center of American Medical Education, 1746-1868, will digitize, describe, and provide access to lecture tickets, course schedules, theses, dissertations, student notes, faculty lectures notes, commencement addresses, opening addresses, and matriculation records, sharing not only the voices of the medical greats, but also the often unheard voices of students. Because of physicians’ flow between institutions across the city, this project would allow physically siloed material to be viewed and analyzed in one place for the first time. 

Project partners for this initiative are The College of Physicians of Philadelphia; The Legacy Center, Drexel University College of Medicine; University of Pennsylvania Libraries; Pennsylvania Hospital Historic Collections; The Library Company of Philadelphia; American Philosophical Society; Thomas Jefferson University Archives and Special Collections, and PACSCL.

The Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) announced the award on January 3, 2019 of over $3.8 million to fund 17 projects for 2018 Digitizing Hidden Special Collections and Archives awards.

New Digital Collection @ NYAM

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~Courtesy Carrie Levinson, Reference Services and Outreach Librarian

The New York Academy of Medicine is pleased to announce the newly digitized William S. Ladd Collection of Prints. This collection consists of 671 prints, primarily portraits, dating from the 17th century through the early 19th century, showcasing many of the formative authors and thinkers of these years. The digitization of this collection also provides an opportunity for researchers, conservators, artists, and the general public to explore early print technology from any web-enabled device. This project was completed with the help of funds from the Metropolitan New York Library Council (METRO) through the New York State Regional Bibliographic Databases Program.

To learn more, check out this blog post by our Head of Digital, Dr. Robin Naughton, explaining the process and providing examples of the material in the collection: https://nyamcenterforhistory.org/2018/12/19/digitizing-the-william-s-ladd-collection-of-prints/

Rubenstein Library Travel Grant Program

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~Courtesy Rachel Ingold, Curator, History of Medicine Collections Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library

The History of Medicine Collections in the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Duke University is accepting applications for our travel grant program. 

https://library.duke.edu/rubenstein/history-of-medicine/grants

Research grants of up to $1,500 will be offered to researchers whose work would benefit from access to the historical medical collections at the Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library. Our holdings include over 20,000 print items and 4,500 unique manuscripts along with photographs, prints, and over 800 medical instruments and artifacts including a large collection of ivory anatomical manikins. Collection strengths include but are not limited to anatomical atlases, human sexuality, materia medica, pediatrics, psychiatry, and obstetrics & gynecology.

Any faculty member, graduate or undergraduate student, or independent scholar with a research project requiring the use of materials held by the History of Medicine Collections is eligible to apply. Writers, creative and performing artists, film makers and journalists are welcome to apply.  All applicants must reside outside of a 100-mile radius of Durham, NC.

Grant money may be used for: transportation expenses (including air, train or bus ticket charges; car rental; mileage using a personal vehicle; parking fees); accommodations; and meals. Expenses will be reimbursed once the grant recipient has completed his or her research visit(s) and has submitted original receipts.

Research topics should be strongly supported by the History of Medicine Collections.  We encourage applicants to contact the Curator of the History of Medicine Collections to discuss research projects and Rubenstein Library collections that might support it before submitting an application. 

The deadline for application is January 31, 2019 by 5:00 PM EST. Recipients will be announced in March 2019. Grants must be used between April 1, 2019 and June 30, 2020.

Welcome Back!

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Welcome to 2019 and we hope you all had a lovely winter break (that is assuming you had one, of course) and are back and ready to stare down January.

We’re switching to a new posting schedule starting right now! We’ll be putting up fresh content here on the blog on Tuesdays and Thursdays. If you are interested in writing for us, please get in touch via comment or email (medicalheritage (at) gmail (dot) com). We’d love to hear your ideas.

We’ve added quite a lot of new material lately, including our first medieval manuscripts! Check out everything (sorted by date added to the collection) here.

From Our Partners: Base Hospital No. 30, One-Hundred Years Later, Part Four: The People

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~This post is courtesy Polina Ilieva, UCSF Archivist.

This is a guest post by Aaron J. Jackson, PhD student, UCSF Department of Anthropology, History and Social Medicine.

Figure 19 – San Francisco Chronicle, Monday, November 11, 1918

One hundred years ago, on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, the “war to end all wars” effectively came to an end as the Armistice went into effect. This momentous occasion would go on to be celebrated bas a national holiday in Britain, France, and the United States, where Armistice Day eventually expanded to honor the service of all veterans. With the centenary of the Armistice, it is worth reflecting on both the end of the First World War and on what it means to honor veterans’ service.

As a veteran myself, the phrase “thank you for your service” can at times feel like a platitude. It seems assumptive on many levels. Most often, those expressing that sentiment are strangers who have no knowledge of the details or motives of a given veteran’s service. And that can lead to difficult, guarded, or awkward conversation to follow. For the veteran’s part, it may be difficult to convey the multiple and complex layers of what our service means to us. A gulf can thus form between veterans and civilians, and that’s a shame.

As a historian, it is my sincere hope that the exploration of the past can provide useful insight in the present and future. By exploring veterans’ experiences in detail, we may be able to get past the platitudes and patriotic veneer and achieve a better understanding of what veterans’ service means. So it is my genuine privilege to present this brief account of the unit from the University of California School of Medicine during the First World War—the final part of a four-part series on the remarkable men and women who served with Base Hospital No. 30.

Figure 20 – “U.S. Army Base Hospital No. 30, World War I (University of California School of Medicine Unit),” from The Thirtieth, AR 207-16, UCSF Archives and Special Collections, Parnassus Library, UCSF, San Francisco, California

Base Hospital Thirty resulted from the Army’s effort to provide the best medical care the United States had to offer to its fighting men in the Great War. When it became apparent that America was likely to enter the war that had been raging since the summer of 1914, the American Red Cross (ARC) began coordinating with the nation’s leading medical schools to help the Army prepare for the war by organizing hospital units. Shortly after the declaration of war against Germany in April 1917, the ARC approached the University of California School of Medicine to organize one such unit and was received with enthusiasm.

Figure 21 – “Liberty Loan Parade,” AR 207-16, UCSF Archives and Special Collections, Parnassus Library, UCSF, San Francisco, California

Twenty-five medical officers, sixty-five nurses, and one-hundred-fifty enlisted men marched down Market Street as part of a highly successful Liberty Loan parade to raise money for the unit and to support the war effort. The Red Cross secured $100,000 to purchase supplies to outfit the hospital unit. Several of the nurses, enlisted personnel, and at least one officer were so eager to go to France that they quit their jobs and packed their belongings in anticipation of a quick deployment. But that initial enthusiasm soon bogged down in the realities of Army bureaucracy. It took more than seven months for the Army to formally organize the unit and another five months of drilling and training at Fort Mason in San Francisco before they received orders for France (for more information, see Part One).

Once in France, the men and women from California discovered that, before they could begin treating the Army’s wounded soldiers, they would have to figure out how to transform several dilapidated hotels in a French resort town into a modern hospital (for more information, see Part Two). They managed to pull it off and just in time as the Allied effort to blunt the German’s offensive and the subsequent Allied counteroffensive kept the hospital and its staff busy from June 1918 through January 1919 (for more information on “the work” of the hospital, see Part Three).

This post will address the human elements of Base Hospital Thirty—their entertainments, celebrations, and the communal bonds that shaped the military unit into something akin to family—and what those things contribute to the veteran experience. Entertainment and leisure activities were rare for units like Base Hospital Thirty, but when such opportunities presented themselves, the personnel and patients were quick to take advantage of the chances to let down their guard in an otherwise rigid and stressful environment and form communities that went well beyond their professional affiliation.

Figure 22 – “Orchestra” from The Record, AR 207-16, UCSF Archives and Special Collections, Parnassus Library, UCSF, San Francisco, California

One of the first entertainments the personnel of Base Hospital Thirty developed was the orchestra and bands. Likely in response to the delay in the Army bureaucracy, the orchestra organized at Fort Mason in San Francisco and continued playing together until the unit’s disbandment in 1919. Under the direction of Captain C. M. Richards, the orchestra featured enlisted personnel right alongside the officers—indeed, four of the five “first” violin spots were held by enlisted personnel, including two Privates First Class, then the second-lowest military rank. More remarkable, Lieutenant Colonel E. S. Kilgore, the commanding officer of the entire unit for the majority of its existence during the Great War, played in the “second” violin and was apparently one of the lowest ranking members of the orchestra by measure of musical talent, demonstrating an interesting reversal of the traditional military hierarchy that formed the basis of the unit in all other cases. The orchestra was a meritocracy of talent, and it did not play favors to even the most senior officers.

While the unit drilled and trained during the days at Fort Mason in preparation for their deployment to France, the orchestra’s twenty-five members gathered and practiced diligently at night, eventually providing frequent concerts for the entertainment of the rest of the unit. They continued holding impromptu concerts aboard the S.S. Northern Pacific on its record-breaking journey from San Francisco to New York via the Panama Canal, and it was especially appreciated at Royat, where patients, hospital personnel, and nearby military units and French civilians alike had many occasions to hear their music.

Not only did the orchestra provide entertainment to the audience—a crucial element in a stressful hospital environment—it provided opportunities for the unit to bond. It is remarkable, given how busy the personnel of Base Hospital Thirty were, that the orchestra as a whole was able to so often practice and play together, given that their musical pursuits would necessarily be secondary to their medical and official duties.

The hospital even boasted its own in-house jazz orchestra, whose members dedicated much of their downtime to entertaining the troops, French civilians, and neighboring units. Led by the musically-talented Private First Class Harold Turner—who played trombone and clarinet with the symphony orchestra, piano with the jazz orchestra, and served as the official bugler for the unit when he was not working in the clinic—the jazz quartet was always featured in the hospital’s entertainment programs.

Figure 23 – “The Base Thirty Vaudeville Aggregation at Les Sables d’Olonne” Program Announcement from The Record, AR 207-16, UCSF Archives and Special Collections, Parnassus Library, UCSF, San Francisco, California

But the orchestra was not the only entertainment. Grace Haviland, an American newspaper correspondent, happened to be in Royat during the Fourth of July celebrations. Lacking fireworks, hospital personnel and patients—most of whom were Marines fresh from the fighting at Belleau Woods—made up for it in a day and night full of “patriotism, entente cordials, fun and feasting.”

Most of the patients were convalescing and restricted to bed rest, recuperating from serious wounds including exposure to mustard gas in the ferocious fighting on the Western Front. But the local French civilians decided to do something for the Americans in the hospital as French schoolchildren brought bouquets of red, white, and blue flowers and a local chocolatier donated large amounts of their sweet desert to the troops free of charge. And to further raise spirits, the personnel of Base Hospital Thirty put together a three-hour long amateur vaudeville show featuring sketches of San Francisco, Egypt, and “Somewhere in France.”

A highlight of the program was the play “In My Harem,” put together by the pharmacist, Sergeant First Class Henry Creger—a man known to all in the unit to have a ready cure for anything from a “hold over” (hangover) to a corn. The play provided a rare opportunity in military entertainment in the form of the comic skit. Haviland described the scene:

The Hero was a cross between Otis Skinner’s Hadj, in his make-up, and the modern idea of a Pirate, and the sinuous dancing by the “not much dressed Egyptian mural decoration” effect of the Lady Turk was—words fail me—we must leave it with the costume to the imagination.

The well-known pharmacist sergeant played the hero, and the equally well-known private in charge of the commissary store, Tom Hill, dressed as a member of the hero’s harem—the Lady Turk—and danced for the crowd to great comedic effect. Their skit left an impression not only on Grace Haviland, but on the entire unit, as the Fourth of July show was well-covered in the unit’s memory book The Record. Dressing in drag for skits for the sake of laughs is, to modern observers, a long-standing tradition in military units, but it was something I was not expecting to find among the troops in the First World War. Unfortunately, no pictures of the event survived, so as Grace Haviland says, we must leave the scene to our imagination.

Figure 24 – “Base Hospital No. 30 rugby team” in Base Hospital #30 Collection, Calisphere.org

Members of the unit also engaged in sports, when time allowed, which was not often. They organized a football team to play rugby against a team of local French citizens and managed to play two exhibition games. The team was made up of former high school and university stars like Lieutenant Colonel Alanson Weeks—a former fullback for the undefeated 1898 Michigan Wolverines—in addition to “earnest beginners.” Down six points to none at the end of the first half, the men from California managed to rally in the second and pull off the victory by a score of eight to six, giving the hospital unit a measure of bragging rights for their time in France. But the most popular sport was baseball.

Members of the unit started playing baseball together beginning at Fort Mason, and in France they played many games against teams from neighboring units. They played, and usually won, many games against teams from the aviation and ordnance units stationed near Clermont, France, and even managed to secure a friendly game against Base Hospital No. 20, the unit from the University of Pennsylvania.

Base Thirty had the edge all the way through, and leading by a score of 3 to 2 in the ninth with two out, the umpire (a Base Twenty man and their coach) deeded the game to them by favoring his team with a couple of not-even-close decisions. Thus (as often the case in a prize fight), the best side won, but Twenty was given the decision.

Their crowning achievement was an exhibition game against the Vichy Hospital Center. With a one-score lead in the ninth, the men of Base Thirty ended the game on a double-play with the last out being made on an attempt to tie the score. The Vichy player slid into home plate, intentionally running into Bill King, Base Thirty’s catcher, in an attempt to get him to drop the ball. Bill held the ball firmly, ending the game, though he had to be admitted to the wards of Base Hospital No. 30 on account of having suffered a broken leg in the collision. Private King might have simply been remembered as a member of the Quartermaster Corps but for his heroics on the ballfield that day.

Figure 25 – “Verdun Battlefield” courtesy of Chemins de Mémoire, www.cheminsdememoire.gouv.fr/en/revue/verdun-1916-2016

The announcement of the Armistice on November 11th was well received by all, but the patient load at the hospital at the time prevented any organized celebrations. Lieutenant Colonel Eugene S. Kilgore, the hospital commander, had received orders to a new duty station and had been busy showing Major Alanson Weeks around to make the necessary introductions to ease Weeks’s transition into command. Kilgore caught a train to Paris on the night of the 11th and found the city celebrating the peace in full measure on the 12th.

Everywhere there were informal processions—boys or soldiers with a drum or a bugle and some flags would march hither and thither, and crowds would fall in behind them. Then they would meet a group of soldiers, and the little procession would break up and join hands and dance around the group. Those in the center would throw up their hands and cry “Kamarad” or else would rush at the dancers and kiss the women. As I stared down the Av. Mont-Martre a crowd of girls seized both my arms and my coat-tails and dragged me into the stream. The girl on my left had an American buck private on the other arm and we were all mixed up with Poilus, Australians, Italians, etc. An American soldier kissed an American colonel on both cheeks with the remark, “You’re a colonel and I’m a buck private, but I don’t give a damn!”

The Armistice changed the Army’s plans almost overnight. The Army rescinded Kilgore’s orders and left him in limbo for a time, which he used to take in some sightseeing, including the now-quiet front. He recorded an adventure to Verdun—the site of one of the bloodiest battles of the war—in early December 1918 in his diary:

I soon found a small truck going to Verdun…. We passed thru Verdun and across the Meuse, then… into “Death Valley” and past Dead Man’s Hill. These little villages were good example of large numbers over the battle fields of France that are completely destroyed—just piles of rubbish without anything to indicate where the houses stood…. [We left the truck and] here we began to explore trenches and dugouts not yet entered by the Clean Up Companies. Even the dead were not all buried. I saw one dead German, and others saw a number of corpses a little farther over in the wood. There were, oof course, all sorts of sourvenirs; and in a short time the chauffer and I, who were together, had picked up a couple of helmets, four German rifles, a lot of bayonettes, etc…. In gathering our trinkets we used due care to avoid touching wires or stumbling into any of the numerous traps [and] unexploded grenades and “potato-mashers” lying about.

Dr. Kilgore and his chauffer wandered much further into the battlefield than they had planned and soon found they could not find their way back to the car, so they continued until they found a poor road to follow through a series of shelled-out villages until they stumbled into a dugout still occupied by Allied troops. The Armistice ended the fighting, but the scars of the war were certainly still quite fresh, as Dr. Kilgore’s overnight venture through the Verdun battlefield demonstrated.

Likewise, work at the hospital in Royat continued just as it had before the armistice, though with an expectancy of going home again soon. Allowances were made to prepare for Thanksgiving and Christmas in a proper manner. This was made possible in large part thanks to a $5,000 donation (about $90,000 today) from banker William H. Crocker—a major financial backer of the UC School of Medicine—which was used to secure food, new musical instruments, and decorations for the holidays.

Figure 26 – Nurses’ Masquerade at Hotel Richlieu, Royat from The Record, AR 207-16, UCSF Archives and Special Collections, Parnassus Library, UCSF, San Francisco, California

By Christmas, the patient load was beginning to fall off as the Army focused on stabilizing patients for transfer to hospitals in the United States. The Red Cross, hospital personnel, and local officials and businesses worked together to create a full week’s program of festivities between December 24, 1918, and January 1, 1919, complete with a very attractive program published specifically for the occasion. They stuffed hundreds of stockings for the patients and personnel, exchanged gifts throughout the wards on Christmas Eve, held plays and concerts, presented movies at the Red Cross theater, and capped it all off with a New Year’s Eve Reception and Dance for the officers and nurses.

It was a happy time for most as they knew they were going home, but it was also a farewell for most. The hospital received orders to finish processing its remaining patients—it had about six-hundred in the wards on January 1, 1919, in a hospital with an operating capacity of twenty-four-hundred beds—and many of the personnel were being reassigned. By January 20, 1919, the hospital at Royat closed shop and the majority of the unit set out for the trip home.

Figure 27 – “Grunnagle, Parmelee, and Barshinger” (left) and “Creger Leaves Merritt” (right), from The Record, AR 207-16, UCSF Archives and Special Collections, Parnassus Library, UCSF, San Francisco, California

A review of the “Enlisted Personnel” section of The Record, written by First Sergeant Alexander Rattray, the “top” or ranking enlisted man in the unit, provides a few sentences of insight into the family that formed at the hospital. First Sergeant Rattray wrote a paragraph for 159 enlisted men, excluding himself, who served with the hospital at some point—demonstrating a senior non-commissioned officer’s unique respect for his men. Not all of the paragraphs were flattering, and some of these paragraphs are longer than others, but they provide insight into the family that developed in Base Hospital Thirty. A few examples from Rattray’s notes are worthy of mention.

Sergeant First Class Henry P. Hauser, “Red” for short by his friends (meaning everybody in Royat). “Red” could tickle a typewriter (meaning, of course, a machine) with the best of them. He could also show a few tricks on the football field and could take his place on the stage when the occasion arose. As an all around man “Red” was there. Was last heard of leading a band of athletes around France. Their headquarters were probably Paris.

Red Hauser was a beloved rabble rouser in Base Hospital Thirty, pushing paper by day, he took part in every opportunity for entertainment. He apparently had a reputation for seeking passes to Paris to take in the sights and serves as an example of the adventurous type of veteran who took full advantage of the opportunities provided by his deployment.

Sergeant First Class Elmer McKnew, “Choate,” had charge of the laundry at Royat and had his hands full. He played shortstop on the ball team, that was, one game. Mac was always sure to produce a smile when you mentioned home, as he was waiting for the first sight of a young son.

Many soldiers, like Elmer McKnew left pregnant wives behind in San Francisco when they deployed to France. Soldiers like McKnew were a constant and poignant reminder of home and what the members of the hospital were missing out on in order to serve their nation. It was also a reminder that those serving in France were not the only ones affected by the war.

Figure 28 – “’Veteran’ Army Nurses Return from Europe” clipping of The San Francisco Chronicle, Tuesday, March 25, 1919, in AR 207-16, UCSF Archives and Special Collections, Parnassus Library, UCSF, San Francisco, California

Back home, in San Francisco, the officers’ wives formed the Women’s Auxiliary for Base Hospital No. 30 to support the unit and each other during the deployment of their loved ones. They raised money for the purchase of instruments used by the orchestra, for athletic equipment used by the baseball and football teams, and to augment the purchase of food and gifts for the holiday celebrations.  Their story is relatively limited in The Record, covering only three paragraphs, but it details the account of their effort to welcome the nurses back to San Francisco in March 1919, and to hold a special dance and reception for the main part of the unit at the Palace Hotel on May 15, 1919.

Readers of the San Francisco Chronicle on March 25, 1919 may have seen the article “‘Veteran’ Army Nurses Return from Europe” covering the reception the nurses received at the Oakland Ferry Canteen, provided that they read through to page ten. Perhaps many of those readers would have viewed it as a colorful little article about the pluck of local nurses, or as an addendum to the patriotic trappings hung on the veterans of the war. But the whole story, as this blog series has hopefully shown, goes much deeper than that.

On Veterans Day we celebrate our nation’s veterans with pomp and circumstance very similar to that displayed in the pages of the San Francisco Chronicle. We wave flags, hold parades, and decorate in themes of red, white, and blue. But for many veterans, the day has deeper meaning. It is a reminder of the men and women with whom we had the pleasure (or displeasure) and the privilege to serve and of the communities for which we served—both the ones we left behind and the ones we formed in the military.

Within a year of returning from France, the men and women of Base Hospital Thirty put together and published a memory book they called The Record. In it, they told their story to each other and to anyone interested in flipping through its pages. They also listed the addresses of anyone interested in staying in touch—an indication that they wanted to continue to keep tabs on the members of their military family.

Attached to the copy of The Record stored in UCSF’s Archives and Special Collections is a letter from Dr. Eugene S. Kilgore to Dr. Howard Fleming, dated September 16, 1919. In it, Dr. Kilgore expresses how many of the unit had written him expressing interest in getting everyone together again for another evening of entertainment and reflection, “possibly on Armistice Day Nov. 11.”

So, on this centennial anniversary of the armistice, let us reflect upon and remember the remarkable men and women of Base Hospital Thirty and the surrogate family they formed. Their service and stories are, in many ways, precursors to our own stories, making us extended members of their family. Their story provides examples of service to others, of overcoming difficulties, and of working together towards the best possible outcome. It is a story that is rooted in the traditions of the hospital and healing professions as it is in the military. It is a story of selfless service. And that’s appropriate, for isn’t that what Veteran’s Day is really all about?

Acknowledgements

I want to offer my sincerest appreciation to the staff at the UCSF Archives and Special Collections—first for not only allowing but encouraging me to explore their collected materials on Base Hospital No. 30, but also for being so incredibly helpful and foundational to this project. Archivists Polina Ilieva, Kelsi Evans, and David Krah all deserve recognition for their contributions and I am extremely grateful for their guidance, assistance, and suggestions throughout the process. I would also be remiss if I did not express my appreciation to the Medical Heritage Library for agreeing to expose these posts to their audience as well.

If you are interested in learning more about Base Hospital No. 30, I highly encourage you to visit the UCSF Archives and Special Collections and ask to see the Base Hospital Thirty collection (AR 2017-16), the Homer Woolsey Papers (MSS 70-5), the Howard Naffziger papers (MSS 97-04), and anything else that the helpful archivists suggest based upon your interests.