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MHL Annual Progress Report

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No, really, it's been a good year. Tractatus perutilis et completus de fractura cranei by Jacopo Berengario da Carpi, 1535. Digitized for the Medical Heritage LIbrary from the collections of the Countway Library of Medicine.

Over the past twelve months, the MHL has made progress on a number of fronts. As of this writing, 9,245 monographs have been uploaded to the Internet Archive (IA); nearly 5,000 more have been digitized and are awaiting processing and deposit.  Subject areas include general public health topics, psychiatry, popular medicine, medical directories, forensic medicine, and therapeutics, as well as surgery, anatomy, and physiology.  The ‘browse list’ of topics on the MHL’s IA homepage demonstrates the breadth of the history of medicine– it lists subjects from ‘Abattoirs’ to ‘Zulu War, 1879.’

MHL content has generated 187,000 downloads since the first deposit in early 2010. The single most downloaded book (currently at 702 downloads) is volume 2 of Per il XXV Anno Dell’Insegnamento Chirurgico di Francesco Durante nell’Università di Roma. 28 Febbraio 1898, edited by Roberto Alessandri (if the name Francesco Durante doesn’t ring a bell, see the MHL blog.

For more on our annual progress report, which will appear in the ALHHS Watermark, see: Announcements and Articles.

Your thoughts on any aspect of the MHL would be gratefully received; please email medicalheritage@gmail.com or leave a comment on our website or Facebook page.

MHL Awarded NEH Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant

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The Medical Heritage Library (MHL) has received a Level-One Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. This grant will support planning activities among 10 institutions and a scholarly advisory committee to continue developing the MHL (www.medicalheritage.org). The project furthers the MHL’s mission to “provide the means by which readers and scholars across a multitude of disciplines can examine the interrelated nature of medicine and society, both to inform contemporary medicine and strengthen understanding of the world in which we live.” This groundbreaking partnership in the digital humanities will highlight unique research resources in the history of medicine held by these institutions and enhance their utility for research.

“At the most basic level of full-text searching, digitization enables scholarship that simply could not be performed otherwise,” says Scott H. Podolsky, M.D., Director of the Center for the History of Medicine, Countway Library, and Assistant Professor of Global Health and Social  Medicine, Harvard Medical School. “Using runs of historical journals that are fully digitized, for example, it is possible to study the development of randomized controlled trials by performing full-text searches for such terms as ‘alternate patient(s)’ or ‘alternate case(s).’ The possibilities for answering novel questions are seemingly endless, and limited chiefly by the texts that have been digitized, the metadata applied to them, and the accessibility of the resources to scholars. NEH support will help erase these limitations.”

Created in 1965 as an independent federal agency, the National Endowment for the Humanities supports research and learning in history, literature, philosophy, and other areas of the humanities by funding selected, peer-reviewed proposals from around the nation. Additional information about the National Endowment for the Humanities and its grant programs is available at: www.neh.gov.

How Digital Resources Can Support Your Scholarship or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Digital World

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Photograph from "Making the Most of Life"

Photograph from "Making the Most of Life." Digitized for the Medical Heritage Library from the collections of the Columbia University Health Sciences Library.

Going to Philadelphia in April for AAHM?

If you’re attending the American Association for the History of Medicine annual meeting, join curators and reference librarians from leading academic medical libraries for lunch on Saturday. These subject specialists will discuss the digital resources, websites and databases, they consult when responding to research questions.  Among the sources under discussion will be the Medical Heritage Library.

This will also be an opportunity to learn about digital scholarship in the history of medicine itself and discuss the creative use of emerging resources. 

The lunch talk features:

Stephen Novak, Head, Archives and Special Collections, Columbia University Medical Center;

Michael North, Head of the Rare Books & Early Manuscripts Section in the History of Medicine Division of the National Library of Medicine;

Jack Eckert, Public Services Librarian, Center for the History of Medicine, Countway Medical Library;

Lori Jahnke, S. Gordon Castigliano CLIR Fellow, the College of Physicians of Philadelphia;

Jeremy Greene, Assistant Professor of the History of Science, Harvard University.

For more information about the AAHM meeting program, look here. We hope to see you on April 30 at session L3: How Digital Resources Can Support Your Scholarship.

Find Making the Most of Life at http://www.medicalheritage.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/makingmostoflife00oshe_0018.jpg). View all our collections at http://www.archive.org/details/medicalheritagelibrary.

Open Knowledge Commons Founder Maura Marx Honored by Simmons GSLIS

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The MHL partners are pleased to announce that Maura Marx, CEO of the Open Knowledge Commons (OKC), has been honored with the GSLIS Alumni Achievement Award, presented annually by the Simmons College Graduate School of Library and Information Science. Award winners have “demonstrated excellence in a way that exceeds the boundaries of their current positions by achieving influence as an outstanding role model for library and information science professionals.”

Ms. Marx initiated the Boston Public Library’s digital services program. Through the OKC, she catalyzed the MHL’s digitization project, now starting its second year. Ms. Marx is currently a fellow at the Berkman Center of Harvard University where her current project, developing a dialog around a digital public library, is drawing national attention.

We are proud to be associated with Ms. Marx and OKC and look forward to the exciting years ahead!

From the Stacks: A Survivor of the Harvard Fire of 1764

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Engraving of Richard Mead, 1754. Boston Medical Library in the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine.

Engraving of Richard Mead, 1754. Boston Medical Library in the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine.

The Center for the History of Medicine staff members report that as they review and examine the rare books in the Center’s holdings for inclusion in the Medical Heritage Library digitization project, surprising things continue to come to light:

Our copy of the 1708 second edition of A mechanical account of poisons in several essays, Richard Mead’s tract on vipers, tarantulas, and mad dogs, will soon be appearing in the MHL, but in looking through one of the copies of the fourth edition of 1745 we found the volume to be a presentation copy from its author.  The endpaper bears an inscription from William Shrimpton in 1748, stating “My Uncle Mead desir’d me to present this book to the College Library in New England,” with the addendum, “Forwarded by yr. humble serv’t, John Hunt, by desire of my uncle, Mr. William Shrimpton of London.”  Richard Mead (1673-1754) was physician to King George II of England, and the volume was probably commended to the care of Boston merchant, John Hunt (1715-1763), a graduate of Harvard College in 1734, whose mother was a Shrimpton.

Of possibly even greater interest, though, is the inscription on the volume’s Harvard bookplate, stating “This book belonged to the Library before the fire of Jan. 24, 1764.”  On that night, during a storm of snow and high wind, Harvard Hall, containing the College’s books and scientific apparatus, caught fire.  Over 5,000 volumes were destroyed, with only 404 surviving, the books being either on loan or recent donations not yet unpacked.  Many of those new acquisitions, which helped to rebuild the library, were gifts of Thomas Hollis (1720-1774), who also endowed Harvard’s oldest book acquisition fund.  His name and generosity are perpetuated through Harvard’s library catalog, HOLLIS (which also is an acronym for the Harvard OnLine Library Information System.)

To see an early edition of Richard Mead’s text along with other titles digitized for the Medical Heritage Library, see http://www.archive.org/details/medicalheritagelibrary.

The Incredible, Embeddable Book

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At the end of 2010, the team at the Internet Archive premiered a new BookReader. The new Reader has several nice new features, including a ReadAloud option, improved shareability, and a wider range of navigation options.

The new BookReader can also be used to embed books in websites like this one!

The embeddable BookReader allows for full use of scanned texts on other webpages: you can flip back and forth between pages and move between embedded and full screen views. Going to full screen takes you back to the Internet Archive page for the book, letting you use the ReadAloud and zoom options.

All you have to do to get your own embedded book is click on the “Share This Book” icon (the purple circle) in the top right-hand corner of the Internet Archive display for any text.

Click the purple circle and embed!

Then you can embed your new book anywhere you’d like other people to see it. The Archive’s only caveat is that they haven’t successfully tested the coding on WordPress.com blogs yet.

In creating this post, we found the best technique was to embed the code in the HTML view of our blogging platform and then save the post as a draft; the embedded book then became “live” code and we could continue editing our post as usual. If you want to change the height or width of the book on your website, you can do that easily by editing the pixel numbers in the code (width=’480px’ height=’430px’) generated by the Internet Archive when you click “Share This Book.”

Digital Highlights: a peculiar approach to healing, and an important early work on surgery

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The Center for the History of Medicine has digitized nearly 400 works on the subjects of surgery and the treatment of wounds and injuries as part of our ongoing contributions to the Medical Heritage Library. Two titles of note, both from the Boston Medical Library collection,  recently passed through the scanning lab: Addinell Hewson’s 1872 work, Earth as a topical application in surgery, and Thomas Gale’s Certaine workes of chirurgerie (1563).

The arm of a patient 15 days after Hewson amputated his hand.

Hewson, a once noted Philadelphia surgeon, describes in detail his practice of using powdered clay both to pack infected wounds and as a topical, post-surgical application. The idea that introducing “earth” to open wounds might have presented any medical benefit was at odds with what were at the time new and increasingly widely accepted ideas about antiseptics. Interestingly, the successes in accelerating the healing process that he describes in the book have been attributed by at least one modern researcher to the probable presence of naturally-occurring antibacterial agents in the clay that would have been unknown to Hewson at the time, and which preceded breakthroughs in modern antibiotics by nearly 75 years.

Another noteworthy feature of Earth as a topical application is that it contains a striking series of woodburytypes depicting the post-operative state of four patients who Hewson treated. Viewable on pages 45, 51, 112, and 164, these portraits render his patients in an unusually stark and artistic light.

The second title of note, Gale’s Certaine workes of chirurgerie, is the first printed book on

The wound man illustration from Gale's work on surgery.

surgery known to have been both written and published in English, a fact that sets it apart from the many English translations of foreign-language surgical texts from that era. It is a strange and whimsical work, composed in the form of a free-flowing conversation in which Gale discusses various maladies and their most suitable treatments with John Yates and John Feilde. In the course of the dialogues, Gale expounds upon various types of fractures (classifying them at times by their resemblances to the stalks of certain plants and vegetables), provides detailed instructions on the preparation of medicinal salves and unguents, and gives historical perspectives on then-current medical treatments.

A surgeon in the army of Henry VIII, Gale had first-hand knowledge of the traumatic injuries associated with 16th century warfare. Pictured at right, the title page of Certaine workes contains a commonly used thematic illustration that is generally referred to as “wound man.” Serving as a grim reminder of the perils that once faced soldiers of the late medieval and early modern eras, wound man was used in many early medical texts to depict the array of battlefield injuries common at that time. This version of wound man suffers simultaneous arrow-piercings, bones smashed by clubs, truncheons, hammers, and cannon balls; flesh rended by sword slashes and spear wounds, as well as various other grievous and unpleasant injuries.

Related topics:

surgery – wounds and injuries – asepsis and antisepsis in surgery – gunshot wounds

plastic surgery – facial reconstruction – dissection – anatomy – military surgery

As always, for more from the Medical Heritage Library, please visit our full collection!

(Cross-posted from the Center for the History of Medicine blog.)

Digital Highlights: Revelatory Writing

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G. Mackenzie Bacon, M.D., acted as Medical Superintendent of the County Asylum in Cambridgeshire, England. In 1870, he wrote a short treatise called On the Writing of the Insane. Bacon wrote a short introduction to his volume, but even with that, it isn’t entirely clear who he felt he was writing for. Nor is it entirely clear what point Bacon intends to make. He presents many documents that have come to his attention in his duties as Superintendent of the County Asylum, and feels very free to criticize the writers, but proposes no particular therapeutic approach or considerations other than institutionalization.

Page from "On the Writing of the Insane"

Letter from a patient. Reproduced in On the Writing of the Insane.

The book is made up of a single lengthy essay by Bacon, illustrated with examples of, literally, the writing of the insane. By “writing,” Bacon means both penmanship and composition, making something of a portmanteau word out of the single term. Bacon critiques both aspects of writing, but focuses more on the content of the letters and memoranda composed by his patients.

While Bacon does not use names or what we would now consider to be private patient information, he comments on the productions he cites in what seems like an unusual professional manner.

In one case, he quotes at length a letter he received from the relative of a patient and goes on to say,

This woman, married, and able to attend to her family…though from her letter it might be supposed she was incapable of any exertion. Now, such a state of mind is more nearly allied to insanity than anything else, and some light is found on its nature by the fact of her brother being insane. (8-9)

The productions Bacon cites are fascinating to examine and the tangled stories some of his patients have managed to achieve to explain their situations and problems are compelling to read. The patient whose letter is reproduced in the image above, for example, was producing writing of baffling complexity, full of images and phrases — to say nothing of the modern art style in which he wrote them! — which were presumably significant in some way to him, but which Bacon considers to be the productions of a deeply deranged mind.

It is interesting to note, too, in his afterword, that Bacon apparently considers poor spelling to be a sign of incipient insanity, quoting in full three letters from the relatives of patients, and describing them as being from “…what is called the sane portion of the public.” (23)

As always, for more from the Medical Heritage Library, please visit our full collection!

Downloads on the Rise

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As of March 4, 2011, there were 3,326 items from the Francis A. Countway Library digitized and available for download from the Medical Heritage Library on the Internet Archive.

The obvious question is: are they being used?

A staff member decided to find out and discovered that in February alone, there were over 6,000 downloads of items from the Countway. And that was just one month. Overall, there have been more than 38,000 downloads of material from the Countway.

A download, in case you’re curious, is counted when a given user visits the page for a particular book (for example, Alfred Dale Covey’s 1911 The Secrets of Specialists) and actually clicks in to view the page or file. Just visiting the URL for the book doesn’t trip the Internet Archive’s download counter; neither does turning pages within a given book trip the counter.

This means that the material the MHL is busy putting out into the digital world is being sought out and used! We’re delighted that so many scholars are finding our material useful and we’re looking forward to making more items available in the coming months.

As always, for more from the Medical Heritage Library, please visit our full collection!

Digital Highlights: “Burking”

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“Burking” was a term invented after the discovery of the crimes committed by William Burke and William Hare between 1827 and 1828 in Edinburgh, Scotland. The two, recent immigrants from northern Ireland, made short-lived but lucrative careers out of providing bodies for the dissection laboratories at the medical school; Burke and Hare killed over 15 men and women to keep up their trade. “Burking” came to be used as the shorthand term for their preferred method of murder: a quiet type of suffocation which left the body unmarked.

Title page

Title page of The Trial, Sentence, and Confessions of Bishop, Williams, and May.

The Trial, Sentence, and Confessions of Bishop, Williams, and May provides first-hand documentary evidence of another grave-robbing trial, this one from the city of London in 1831. John Bishop, Thomas Williams, and James May were arrested and tried for the “burking” of Carlo Ferrari, a young Italian boy who had been working as a street-peddlar.

The Trial includes a didactic introduction which decries the horrors of the crime as well as a reconstruction of the trial, the confessions of Bishop and Williams, and an account of the executions of Bishop and Williams. May was tried but respited after the confessions of Bishop and Williams demonstrated that he was innocent of the death of Ferrari. After the description of the hangings of Bishop and Williams, the compilers of The Trial added in “…a few historical facts relative to the previous lives and occupations of all three of the men…” (p. 47).

The Trial is titillating reading, similar to a modern true-crime novel or television show; all it lacks is the team of dedicated detectives and forensic specialists trailing the three criminals back to their lair. It features a wealth of medical and scientific detail, as well as an almost minute-by-minute reconstruction of the crime itself, both in the trial and in the confessions of Bishop and Williams. The detection of the “Burkers” or “resurrection men” depends upon the scientific skill of the detectives and of the medical men to whom Bishop and Williams attempted to sell cadavers. Evidence from the trial, for example, features the testimony given by several surgeons who examined the body and offered minute detail about the condition of Ferrari’s corpse and what they deduced from it.

For contemporary readers, particularly those living in metropolitan areas like London, Edinburgh, or other large cities like Manchester and Leeds, it must have been a pleasantly thrilling read but also a warning that the city was a dangerous place.

For more from the Medical Heritage Library, please visit our full collection!