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Digital Highlights: Among the Rappers

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Dedication from “The Rappers.”

Table-rapping, table-turning, spirit writing, and other forms of communication with “another world” were common and popular forms of spiritualistic activity in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Some consider that the rapping done by the Fox sisters in the late 1840s as the beginning of the spiritualist movement in the United States. The girls later admitted that their “spirit communication” was fraudulent but by that time — the 1880s — the admission had little effect: the movement was an independent thing. Continue reading

Digital Highlights: Walter Murray Gibson’s Sanitary Instructions for Hawaiians

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Hawaiian language title page of Walter Murray Gibson’s He mau olelo ao e pili ana i ke ola kino ona kanaka Hawaii [i.e., Sanitary Instructions for Hawaiians]. (Honolulu: Paiia e R. Grieve, 1881).

English language title page of Walter Murray Gibson’s Sanitary Instructions for Hawaiians (Honolulu: P. C. Advertiser, 1881).

The English and Hawaiian language editions of Walter Murray Gibson’s Sanitary Instructions for Hawaiians represent interesting milestones in Hawaiian public health. Continue reading

Digital Highlights: Civil War photography from the Army Medical Museum

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Photograph and case history of Private Samuel Decker. He posed for this portrait at the Army Medical Museum along with the prostheses he developed after losing both hands to an artillery accident during the battle of Perryville. — vol. 5, image 5.

The Center for the History of Medicine recently digitized a remarkable collection of Civil War-era images titled Photographs of surgical cases and specimens. Nearly 150 years after it was first published, this six-volume set provides a sobering look at the state of the art in surgery during and after the war. Continue reading