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1,000,000 = 35,000

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Title page of Secrets of the Invisible World Disclosed...

The secrets of the invisible world disclos'd ... by Andrew Moreton, a.k.a. Daniel Defoe is one of the many early works dealing with interactions between the spirit and material worlds in the collections digitized so far.

The Center for the History of Medicine is happy to report that we recently contributed our one-millionth page of content to the Medical Heritage Library. Beyond the simple fact of that number, which represents a fraction of our eventual contributions to the project, a million pages of digitized content means that local patrons and MHL users around the world now have free and open access to over 3,000 rare and historically-significant medical texts previously available only to members of the Harvard community and visiting researchers. Users can now download full-color, high-resolution page images of medical charts, photographic plates, engravings, maps, atlases and a wide variety of other types of content from the book collections at the Countway Library, including, of course, hundreds of thousands of pages of printed text published between the 16th and 20th centuries (all of which are fully keyword-searchable).

Subject areas covered in our contributions thus far include: Military medicine, General surgery and surgical history, Spiritualism,Sanitation, Hygiene, Tropical medicine, Medical jurisprudence,Psychology, Gynecology, Phrenology, Crimes, criminology,Electrotherapeutics, Climatology, and Homeopathy, among others.

As we pass the one-million mark, it is important to note that statistics regarding the progress of our contributions to the MHL are not the only cause for celebration. More importantly to all of us here at the Center, the 3,000+ books that we have digitized so far have already been downloaded over 35,000 times, a number that helps to illustrate both a significant demand for these materials and the perceived utility of their digitized copies to those users who seek them out.

In the coming year we intend to triple the number of items digitized thus far, and in so doing to assure that these materials are available to the public on-line and in perpetuity. The work to come remains considerable–each individual book needs to be reviewed, selected, cataloged, digitized, and finally checked for quality before returning to our stacks. But the numbers we have gathered from our users up until this point one thing clear: it’s worth the effort!

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

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

Discoveries in the Rare Book Stacks

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René Joseph Bertin's work on syphilis, the Traité de la maladie vénérienne (Paris, 1810) showing the armorial binding of the Emperor NapoleonResearchers from the Harvard-Longwood community and beyond benefit from the Medical Heritage Library, a growing collection of freely available digital texts.

Jack Eckert, Public Services Librarian, reports that, for the Center for the History of Medicine, one of the unintended benefits of the selection process for digitization is the unexpected discoveries made in the collection.  During a close and thorough examination each item considered for scanning, staff encounters and documents imperfections, incomplete sets, unrecorded titles bound with others, and corrects inaccurate cataloging information.  While this sort of information enhances the accuracy of the catalog, we are finding unexpected treasure as well. A large percentage of the rare book collection was acquired for its current informational value at the time, and little attention was paid to marks of ownership, provenance, and annotation.  But these are some of the very aspects that now enhance the rarity and value of the works.

For example, pioneer psychiatrist James Jackson Putnam (1846-1918) owned and donated a number of titles concerning the treatment of neuroses with electricity.  Many of our homeopathic titles were formerly part of the library of the Massachusetts Homeopathic Medical Society and contain inscriptions and annotations by local leaders in the movement, and physician Edward Jackson (1803-1884) was also clearly interested in homeopathy and owned a number of works on this subject.  A number of titles derive from the collection of the Boston Medical Library of 1805, and still more were part of the original library at Harvard Medical School and donated by James Jackson (1777-1867) and other members of the early faculty.  While Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s interest in the water-cure was known to scholars and historians, we were until recently unaware that several of our hydropathic titles were part of his own library.

Probably the most exciting discovery we’ve made in our own collection to date is a copy of René Joseph Bertin’s work on syphilis, the Traité de la maladie vénérienne (Paris, 1810) which has an armorial binding of the Emperor Napoleon.  The book was probably part of the collection of noted dermatologist Edward Wigglesworth (1804-1876), whose library was donated to the Boston Medical Library in 1897.

To see these and other titles digitized for the Medical Heritage Library, see http://www.archive.org/details/medicalheritagelibrary.

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: The Physician’s Answer

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Title page for The Physician's Answer

Title page from The Physician's Answer.

This slim volume, called The Physician’s Answer, was originally published in 1913 by the International Committee of the Young Men’s Christian Association. The subtitle adds a little more information: Medical Authority and Prevailing Misconceptions about Sex.

It looks like — and might have been sold as — a Q and A-style manual of sex education, something like a far fore-runner of Our Bodies, Ourselves or a similar modern publication. In fact, it’s more like a moral treatise on the necessity of physical continence and self-restraint. While both genders are mentioned, Dr. M.J. Exner, author of the small volume, spends most of his 50-something pages talking about young men.

Dr. Exner spends most of his time exhorting young men, in terms that have a distinct tinge of muscular Christianity, to keep themselves clean and pure with married life in mind:

There is but one normal sex life for the young man–normal in relation to his own highest interests and to his social responsibilities–and that is the life in which his sex problem is left wholly to the care of nature, in which his sex impulses are controlled and transmuted into finer stuff by resolute will and high ideals of life as a whole. (5)

While the bulk of the text is devoted to young men — an exact age range is not specified, but it seems fairly clear from context that Dr. Exner has in mind adolescents and young men; anyone married is, obviously, beyond his purview in this case! — there is some commentary on women:

Womanhood outside of marriage does not demand any concessions from society regarding the sex life. Woman expects to control her sex impulses and does control them and every self-respecting man expects and demands that she do so. (18)

The text reflects a real concern with, in essence, what young men might be doing with their time when not at school or work. Anyone looking for day-to-day helpful advice, though, should probably look elsewhere; Dr. Exner has a high philosophical tone and manages to avoid any kind of detail that might have been described as salacious or even specific.

The assumptions about the sex lives of women, too, are fascinating material for historians of gender and women’s studies; the fact that women are so little mentioned in a volume which presumes heterosexuality is interesting in and of itself! The possibilities for study in this volume are widely varied: not only women’s studies historians but also historians interested in youth, medicine, and community organizations would find something here to interest them.

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

Digital Highlights: Detectives of Europe and America

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With the successful “reboot” of Sherlock Holmes in the BBC’s transatlantically successful Sherlock (2010), a particular volume from the MHL’s collection seems appropriate for the digital highlight this week: Detectives of Europe and America, or, Life in the Secret Service.

Detectives of Europe and America

Title page of Detectives of Europe and America.

Published in 1878, the preface says it all:

Many partial friends of mine have thought I might do some good…to the cause of human happiness…by the detail of certain wily “offenses against the law and good order of society,” while demonstrating therein how sure of final discovery and punishment are the criminally vicious,…in these days, when the art of police detection has become almost an exact science.

The “author” is one Officer George S. McWatters, described on the flyleaf as “late member of the American Secret Service.” The volume itself is a selection of Officer McWatters’s more interesting cases — as collated and edited by a “well-known public writer,” admits the Publisher’s Introduction, due to the modesty and forebearance of McWatters who apparently didn’t want to blow his own trumpet enough to suit the Publishers.  The table of contents includes stories titled, “Twenty-one Years of Illegal Imprisonment Suffered by a Beautiful Young Lady of the Polish Nobility,” “The Gambler’s Wax Finger,” and, simply, “The Skeleton.”

The stories have a certain Conan Doyle-ish flair to them, too, with passages such as:

“This, gentlemen,” thus I ended my story, “is all I have to tell; further particulars you may hear from the victim herself, who is now in the lunatic asylum, and from the witnesses who are all here.”

The tales center around midnight abductions, mysterious financial transactions, Eastern potentates, and innocent young heiresses and their traducers. Officer McWatters never fails to work his way through the intricacies of the case, working to establish the powers of justice, law, and order to their rightful place with the skillful use of 19th century forensic science.

You could define this as a 19th century version of Bones with Officer McWatters using his technical skill and scientific ability to dazzle lesser law officers and, potentially, his reading audience. Perhaps, too, Officer McWatters had a similar effect on actual forensic scientists as his television and movie counterparts do today. Nevertheless, the volume demonstrates that the scientific side of detective fiction is not a modern-day development in the genre.

Despite the possibility of making the reading public expect miracles from its police force by way of deduction, the adventures of Officer McWatters make for highly entertaining reading as well as a fascinating look at the continuing appeal of detective fiction in all its various guises.

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

Digital Connections: The Otis Historical Archives

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You may be familiar with the photo hosting site Flickr for hosting or browsing travel, work, or personal photographs, but many archives and special collections repositories are using the service to draw attention to their collections.

In the field of medical history, for example, the Otis Historical Archives, part of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology’s National Museum of Health and Medicine, has put up hundreds of photographs, postcards, and cartoons.

The material includes photographs from the Civil War, World War I, World War II, and bodies such as United States Navy’s Bureau of Medicine and Surgery. Also found here are topical collections such as Mirrors which collects 61 images of wounded patients posing to display their scars or injuries; in each case, a mirror is being used to point to some aspect of the wound that might not otherwise be noticed or readily seen by the viewer of the photograph. (For some interesting observations on the Mirrors set, check out this post from The Sterile Eye, a blog dedicated to medical photography.)

Highlights include of the Otis Archives material on Flickr:

General Pershing's dentures

World War II mess kit cleanliness poster

General Henry Barnum, gunshot wound

Colonel Frank Townsend examines the bullet that killed Lincoln and the probe used to examine the President

Thanks to Assistant Archivist Laura E. Cutter for sharing the great work of her repository with us!

Internet Archive Introduces New BookReader

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Books digitized by the Medical Heritage Library can be viewed in the new BookReader.  A number of features have been added, including:

  • Navigation bar that helps show your location in the book and navigate through it. Search results and chapter markers (if available) show up on the navigation bar.
  • New Read Aloud feature reads the book as audio in most browsers.  No special software is needed.
  • Vastly improved full-text search.  Search results are shown on the navigation bar and include a snippet of text near the matched search term.

For more information, see: http://blog.archive.org/2010/12/10/2685/.

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

Digital Highlights: Who is Francesco Durante or, What Can We Learn from Download Statistics?

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Francesco Durante (1844-1934); frontispiece from vol. 1 of "Per il XXV Anno Dell'Insegnamento Chirurgico di Francesco Durante"

Internet Archive, where the Medical Heritage Library’s content now resides, has a neat feature that allows you to see what has been downloaded most often.  With almost 8,500 volumes digitized by February 1, 2011, I thought it would be interesting to see what content in MHL was being most heavily used.

The results are surprising.  Among the top ten most downloaded volumes are three Columbia University catalogues (numbers 2, 5, and 10); three anatomical works: John McGrath’s Surgical Anatomy and Operative Surgery (1902) in the number 3 spot; the 1913 US edition of Henry Gray’s classic Anatomy, Descriptive and Applied (number 6); and Florence Fenwick Miller’s colorful An Atlas of Anatomy or Pictures of the Human Body (1879) in the number 8 position.

But the number one most downloaded volume in the Medical Heritage Library — a whopping 420 times —  is a comparative rarity: volume 2 of Per il XXV Anno Dell’Insegnamento Chirurgico di Francesco Durante nell’Università di Roma. 28 Febbraio 1898, edited by Roberto Alessandri. The second most downloaded item — the aforementioned Columbia University catalogue — can only boast 274 downloads.

No doubt you’re thinking Who? History of medicine mavens — at least those in the US — don’t need to be abashed if they have never heard of Durante.  While he is little known outside neurosurgery circles in this country, Durante (1844-1934) was a pioneering surgeon, esteemed teacher, and leading political figure in his native Italy.

The child of parents of modest means (his father helped build the first road to their isolated Sicilian village), Durante received his medical degree from Naples, studied with Virchow in Berlin, Billroth in Vienna, and Lister in London before being called to teach at the University of Rome in 1872. Twelve years later, in June 1884, he was the first surgeon to successfully remove a cranial base meningioma, an operation that caused an international sensation.

His 25th anniversary as a teacher at the University of Rome in 1897 was commemorated by the publication of the hefty 3 volume festschrift recently digitized by the MHL.  It contains contributions from several dozen surgeons on a wide variety of surgical topics.  While most of the authors were Italian, Durante’s fame was enough to elicit contributions from Philadelphia surgeon W.W. Keen and the French neurosurgeon Auguste Broca.

Why volume 2 of this title should have been downloaded so frequently will remain a mystery, but surely its rarity outside Italy — OCLC locates only four copies of the set in North America and another in Paris — played a factor.  It shows that there is a need for electronic access to even the most seemingly esoteric publications.

For more of the Durante festschrift click here:  http://www.archive.org/details/perilxxvannodell02ales

For all the holdings in the Medical Heritage Library click here: http://www.archive.org/details/medicalheritagelibrary

Forests, trees, and digitization

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American medical botany being a collection of the native medicinal plants of the United States, containing their botanical history and chemical analysis, and properties and uses in medicine, diet and the arts, with coloured engravings ... (1817) From the collections of the Columbia University Libraries digitized for the Medical Heritage Library.

As the medical profession continues to wrestle with the ethics, logistics, and implications of randomized controlled trials, I’ve become happily involved with an informal international collaborative group, led by Iain Chalmers (editor of the James Lind Library), in examining the history of controlled trials before the famous 1948 British Medical Research Council study of streptomycin for tuberculosis.

At the most basic level of full-text searching, digitization enables scholarship that simply could not be performed otherwise. With the British Medical Journal, Lancet, JAMA, and the NEJM fully digitized, our group can now perform full-text searches for such terms as “alternate patient(s)” or “alternate case(s)” to trace the deeper history of both the development and resistance to such methodologies. Such forest-revealing tools of course still require tree-level contextualization (or pick another metaphor; or, if interested in the history of particular medical metaphors, feel free to trace them as well over time!), but 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.

Imagine the scholarship that could be conducted if all the other venerable collections of medical history across the country and world were digitized.  But how? And where to start?

The Center for the History of Medicine has been a proud founding contributor to the Medical Heritage Library, a digital curation collaborative among some of the world’s leading medical libraries, with the intention to digitize and make freely available over 30,000 volumes over the next 18 months. We intend for this to serve as a nucleus for more comprehensive and collaborative long-term digitization of medical sources of all kinds, and to develop a platform through which digital scholarship in the history of medicine can itself evolve.

Indeed, as we develop our open-access Medical Heritage Library, it’s our hope that scholars will go beyond full-text searching to devise novel queries and approaches to what will be an expanding universe of available materials. Please join us in creating this new world. Visit the MHL page on the Internet Archive website, formulate your own searches, see what turns up, and let us know what we can do further to facilitate your research.

Scott H. Podolsky
Director, Center for the History of Medicine
Countway Library

Internet Archive to Change Derivatives

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The Internet Archive has been studying the usage stats of the DjVU and Black/White PDFs. The demand and activity with these file formats is very low, so the Internet Archive will halt the derivation of these two file formats.  In addition to the ‘Read online’ option, the Internet Archive will continue to offer:

PDF (color)
EPUB
Kindle
Daisy
Full Text

If users are concerned about this change, please  contact us at medicalheritage@gmail.com.

Topics selected for digitization in 2010-2011

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The Medical Heritage Library partners worked together during June and July 2009 to identify collection strengths and complementary subject areas for digitization.  Works selected for scanning include such topics such as anesthesia, popular medicine and homeopathy, medical jurisprudence and general public health, with a core focus on the intersection of medicine and society.  In the past year some 7,498 items have been uploaded to the Internet Archive, and in the upcoming year readers may expect to enjoy newly digitized public-domain titles in the following subject areas:

  • Anatomy
  • Anesthesia
  • Biography (Physician travels)
  • Cholera
  • Climatology, Geography of Disease
  • Cookbooks
  • Dentistry
  • Directories
  • Early Americana (1607 – 1820)
  • Epilepsies
  • General Public Health
  • Health Resorts
  • Homeopathy
  • Hydrotherapy
  • Immunology
  • Later Americana (1821 – 1860)
  • Medical Jurisprudence
  • Military Medicine
  • New England (esp. Connecticut)
  • Nursing
  • Obstetrics
  • Pamphlets (mixed topics)
  • Parasitology
  • Pathology
  • Pharmacology, Pharmacy, Materia Medica
  • Physiology
  • Plastic Surgery
  • Popular Medicine
  • Psychiatry
  • Radiology
  • Schools & Colleges
  • Serial Government Documents (U.S.)
  • Serial Reports of Hospitals
  • Smallpox (Vaccination, Inoculation)
  • Special Systems (General)
  • Surgery
  • Therapeutics (General)
  • Tobacco
  • Tuberculosis

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