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Guest Post: Women and the Tropics
As the summer winds down, I’m sure many of us are packing for a last vacation trip. The woman traveler can pick up some 19th century women’s travel and health tips from Tropical trials. A hand-book for women in the tropics.
With a cover featuring a gilded umbrella, palm trees, pyramids, and a list of the many tropical places one could travel in the late 19th century, including China, Burmah [sic], India, Melanesia, and Egypt, Tropical trials is a definitive travel guide for English women heading to exotic destinations.
While my travel essentials include sunscreen, a bathing suit, and a book, ladies in 1883 had exhaustive suggestions for traveling in comfort. Essentials include mosquito curtains, punkahs, an umbrella –silk with a cotton cover– and goggles to fight glare, dust and even “eye-flies.”
Tropical trials also includes remarks on diets (how to make a water filter), domestic economy (how to navigate a bazaar and hire a native chef), and how to treat simple maladies (including giddiness, nervousness, and sea-sickness). Trials particularly shows colonialist bias through its suggestions for the management and rearing of children in the tropics (including its warning against children acquiring Native Habits).
If you’re feeling up to traveling 1883-style, peruse the many suggestions, anecdotes, hints, and general remarks of Major Hunt below or follow this link to read Tropical trials. A hand-book for women in the tropics.
If you’re looking for the man’s guide to the tropics, Major S. Leigh Hunt and Alexander S. Kenny wrote On Duty under a Tropical Sun, also available via the Medial Heritage Library. The authors suggest that while each book are complete travel guides, On Duty especially addresses men’s issues while Tropical Trials is best suited for women.
Flip through the pages of Tropical trials below!
Images from the Library
From Bernhard Siegfried Albinus’ Bernardi Siegfried Albini Tabulae sceleti et musculorum corporis humani (1749).
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The MHL Welcomes a New Member: Health Sciences Library of the University of North Carolina
The Health Bulletin, Volume 36, Issue 8, page 16 (August 1921).
The Health Sciences Library (HSL) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has recently added the North Carolina History of Health Digital Collection to the Medical Heritage Library. The North Carolina History of Health Digital Collection contains more than 1000 books, journals, reports, bulletins, minutes, proceedings, and histories covering topics in medicine, public health, dentistry, pharmacy, and nursing, dating from 1849 to the present. These materials thoroughly document the development of health care and the health professions within North Carolina and is thus a significant part of the state’s cultural heritage and history, helping to reveal manifold health problems and how these problems were perceived, understood, and treated over time. The digital collection provides consolidated online access to resources that have been difficult to find and utilize in print.
HSL Special Collections Librarian Dawne Lucas particularly likes the public service announcements from The Health Bulletin, which was “sent free to any citizen of the State upon request.” “The public service announcements were an eye-catching way to draw attention to prominent health problems in early 20th century North Carolina,” says Lucas. “Some of them, such as the ones promoting the importance of vaccines, are still relevant today.”
This project was made possible by a multi-year NC ECHO (Exploring Cultural Heritage Online) digitization grant for the creation of the North Carolina History of Health Digital Collection. NC ECHO is funded by the State Library of North Carolina through the Library Services and Technology Act (LSTA).
Images from the Library
From Joseph Pancoast’s A treatise on operative surgery : comprising a description of the various processes of the art, including all the new operations : exhibiting the state of surgical science in its present advanced condition (1844).
As always, for more from the Medical Heritage Library, please visit our full collection!
Images from the Library
From John Marshall and J.S. Cuthbert’s Anatomy for artists (1883).
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Digital Highlights: Disquisitions on Ancient Medicine
What we might now call “history of medicine,” Richard Millar in 1811 thought of calling “medical archaeology.” His work in the field was inspired by “some singular traits” he felt he had discovered in ancient Greek medicine that he thought had parallels in other “rude, or semibarbarous, tribes…” and he wrote a book to prove it.
He starts at the beginning: “This will commence with the earliest trace of tradition or history,…” (29)
Flip through the pages below or follow this link to read Disquisitions in the history of medicine. Part first, Exhibiting a view of physic, as observed to flourish, during remote periods, in Europe, and the East.
As always, for more from the Medical Heritage Library, please visit our full collection!
New to the MHL: Anatomy, Myology, and Operative Surgery
The Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library has recently added several important volumes in the history of medicine to the Medical Heritage Library. Though the Health Sciences Library participated in MHL’s Sloan Foundation and NEH funded digitization projects, the size of these items precluded them being digitized at that time.
From the Albinus anatomy.
Bernhard Siegfried Albinus’ monumental anatomical atlas of 1749, Tabulae Sceleti et Musculorum Corporis Humani [Plates of the Skeleton and Muscles of the Human Body], is one of the best-known works in the history of anatomy. It features striking engravings of human skeletons standing before tombs, cherubs, and the first living rhinoceros to reach Europe.
Another volume includes two works by Jacques Gautier-D’Agoty: Anatomie de la Tête (1748) [Anatomy of the Head] and Myologie Complette en Couleur (1746) [Complete Myology in Color]. Gautier-D’Agoty was an artist and engraver, not an anatomist, and his works, while scientifically unimportant, are noted for their bold use of color and sometimes weird and fantastic images of the human body.
From the D’Agoty anatomy.
Joseph Pancoast’s Treatise on Operative Surgery (Philadelphia, 1844) is a landmark of 19th century American surgical writing. It’s particularly noted for its excellent chapters on plastic surgery, but also contains significant sections on neurological and ophthalmic operations. The 486 illustrations on 80 plates are known for their accuracy and detail and made this work an American medical best-seller with about 4,000 copies sold over nine years.
From the Pancoast treatise.
The digitization of these works is a collaborative effort among the Columbia University Libraries’ departments. It is part of an ongoing project to restore and repair larger quarto and folio rare books held by the Health Sciences Library’s Archives & Special Collections. The volumes are first treated by professional conservators at Columbia University Libraries’ Conservation Laboratory. They are then digitized by the Imaging Laboratory, part of the Libraries’ Preservation & Digital Conversion Division.
Besides being accessible through the Medical Heritage Library, the volumes can be found via CLIO, the Columbia University Libraries Online Public Access Catalog.
The Health Sciences Library’s conservation project is funded by the Jerome P. Webster Endowment, bequeathed to the Library by Dr. Webster, Columbia’s first professor of plastic surgery, prominent historian of medicine, and bibliophile.
As always, for more from the Medical Heritage Library, please visit our full collection!
Images from the Library
From Augustin Belloste and Thomas Sydenham’s Monsieur Belloste’s Hospital surgeon, as far as it treats of the gout, rheumatism, cholick, dropsy, stone, gravel, and venereal complaints … : to which are added Dr. Sydenham’s observations on the gout ; with proper notes on each ; this book is given gratis up one pair of stairs, at the sign of the famous anodyne necklace … and at Mr. Bradshaw’s Stoughton’s, & Daffy’s Elixir Ware-House .. (1737).
As always, for more from the Medical Heritage Library, please visit our full collection!
Digital Highlights: Tea with Mrs. Quantock
Any fan of E.F. Benson’s Lucia series will remember Daisy Quantock, Lucia’s next-door neighbor in the village of Riseholme. Benson describes Daisy as being a middle-aged woman in perfect health and therefore devoted to whatever diet or exercise fad comes her way. In the opening chapters of Queen Lucia, the first novel in the series, Daisy is a firm believer in cleansing, particularly in cleansing uric acid from her system. Her husband is quite impatient with the system since it means a longer reign of a bad cook hired when Daisy was under the sway of Christian Science and endless lectures from his wife on the dangers to his system of the foods he craves.
Perhaps Daisy and her cook would have pored over something like The Apsley cookery book (1905), a collection of 448 recipes for those on the uric-acid-free diet. The authors provide recipes for everything from soup to nuts, quite literally, along with introductory chapters extolling the virtues of the diet, suggesting proper cookware, and a table of “food values.”
Flip through the pages below or follow this link to read The Apsley cookery book.