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Digital Highlights: Water and Politics

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One of the most popular alternative cures in the nineteenth century involved water — lots of water. Balneology, balneotherapy, or “the cold water cure” was popular on mainland Europe, in England, and in the United States. Spas flourished in England, for example, and scientist Charles Darwin credited the cold water cure with the recreation of his system after serious digestive problems left him almost prostrate and unable to work.

Frontispiece portrait of Priessnitz.

In Six Months at Graefenberg, H.C. Wright tells about his own cure at a German cold water spa run by a balneologist called Priessnitz (there’s an interesting article on Priessnitz and water therapy in the first volume of British Journal of Balneology and Climatology from 1897.)  Continue reading

Learning from Users

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The MHL’s National Endowment for the Humanities “Digital Humanities Start-Up” project is underway (see: http://www.medicalheritage.org/2011/08/mhl-project-updates/). We are meeting with faculty, graduate students, and administrators at partner organizations to learn from them how they use digital sources in teaching and research, their ideal solutions to overcoming teaching and research obstacles, and how they envision the MHL supporting their work. This data will inform the near-term development of the MHL and its goals for the future. Continue reading

Digital Highlights: York Retreat

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The original building of the York Retreat. (19)

The care of the mentally ill has been a current topic in medical discourse for centuries. In the late eighteenth century, a Quaker named William Tuke opened the York Retreat in York, England, as a new type of mental health hospital. In 1892, Tuke’s grandson, D. Hack Tuke, who had been a visiting physician at the Retreat, wrote Reform in the Treatment of the Insane as a history of his grandfather’s pioneering efforts towards reforming the care of the mentally ill. Continue reading

Digital Highlights: The Biography of a Disease

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"Map of the Mountain and Pacific States Showing Distribution of Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever" (13)

In the early years of the twentieth century, diseases were being re-studied in light of advances in the fields of bacteriology, virology, and pathology. S. Burt Wolbach, at the time pathologist at the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital and the Boston Lying-In Hospital and later professor at Harvard Medical School, brought out Studies on Rocky Mountain Fever in the Journal of Medical Research in three successive issues in 1919 and then all three sections were brought together in this single volume. Continue reading