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Digital Highlights: Cure of a true cancer of the female breast with mesmerism

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John Elliotson (1791-1868) studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh and Jesus College, Cambridge. A strong interest in phrenology and mesmerism, which traditional practitioners were reluctant to accept as valid medical or scientific disciplines, led him to resign his post as physician to London’s University College Hospital in 1838.

Thomas Wakley, the founder of The Lancet, at the time a new addition to the medical community, initially supported Elliotson but changed his mind. In 1838, The Lancet’s coverage of a series of trials of Elliotson’s mesmeric experiments at Wakley’s London home helped to discredit Elliotson.

His Numerous cases of surgical operations in the mesmeric state without pain, published in 1843, describes the use of hypnosis to induce sleep and prevent the awareness of pain during surgical procedures including amputations and dental extractions. Cure of a true cancer of the female breast with mesmerism takes this concept a step further by suggesting that hypnosis has therapeutic capability.

Cure of a true cancer of the female breast was digitized for the Medical Heritage Library from the holdings of the Countway Library’s Center for the History of Medicine and is available at http://archive.org/stream/cureoftruecancer00elli#page/n5/mode/2up

Browse the Medical Heritage Library, at: http://www.archive.org/details/medicalheritagelibrary. You can also search “medicalheritagelibrary” from the main Internet Archive page at: http://www.archive.org.

For more information about the Medical Heritage Library, see: http://www.medicalheritage.org.

Directories and their varied uses

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The participants in the Medical Heritage Library have been particularly eager to include  runs of their local physicians’ directories.  Holdings of these tend to be very “site-specific,” — Columbia University is unlikely to have extensive runs of directories from New England while Harvard, on the other hand, would.

The Columbia University Health Sciences Library’s set of New York area directories, however, is almost complete dating back to 1887, including both The Medical Directory of the City of New York and its successor, The Medical Directory of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut.  Besides their obvious biographical, genealogical, and local history importance, the directories have an abundance of fascinating advertisements for medical equipment, patent medicines, and sanitaria.

I find these last particularly interesting since I suspect that in many cases the directories contain the only visual documentation of many of these rest homes, private psychiatric clinics, and health resorts that once dotted the metropolitan New York area.

For instance, this ad from the 1909 edition for “The Idylease Inn” in still-rural Newfoundland, N.J. proclaims itself “a Modern Health Resort” with “Out-Door Exercises, Beautiful Scenery and Delightful Walks and Drives…” However, be warned: “NO TUBERCULAR NOR OBJECTIONABLE CASES.”

Idylease InnAnd who would ever have thought that Astoria, Queens, was once the place to go for “Alcoholic and Narcotic Habitues” looking to dry out (from the 1907 edition):

River Crest Sanitarium

And, of course, the great advantage of having them digitized means that you, dear viewer, can use them in the comfort of your home or office.  This has been a great help to my colleague, Arlene Shaner, Assistant Curator and Reference Librarian in the New York Academy of Medicine’s Historical Collections, as she recently emailed me:

Since January of 2010, a large part of the Academy’s 19th and early 20th century collections has been in off-site storage because of a stack renovation project.  Access to digital surrogates through portals like the Medical Heritage Library has made a world of difference to me as a public services librarian.  Many of the questions I answer require the ability to check multiple years of medical directories and having these available online has enabled me to continue to answer those kinds of questions even though our hard copies are temporarily off-site.  The digital surrogates also allow me to send the link to the text to my patrons, providing them with direct access to the materials themselves.  Since many of my patrons are located very far away and may never be able to come and consult the NYAM collections in person, I am delighted to be able to offer them enhanced service thanks to the materials available through MHL.

Each of the participating institutions in the Medical Heritage Library has a wealth of such local texts that are rarely found outside of their region.   One of the goals of the MHL is to make these less common texts available to anyone with access to  a computer.

http://www.archive.org/stream/medicaldirectory11medi#page/848/mode/2up

http://www.archive.org/stream/medicaldirectory09medi#page/4/mode/2up

The Medical Heritage Library site on Internet Archive: http://www.archive.org/details/medicalheritagelibrary

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About

Full-length engraving of a human skeleton.The Medical Heritage Library, Inc. is a collaborative digitization and discovery organization committed to providing open access resources in the history of healthcare and the health sciences.

We aspire to be a visible, research-driven history of medicine and health  community that serves a broad, interdisciplinary constituency. Our goal is to make high-quality content available online free of charge and to simplify and centralize the discovery of these resources.

Organized in 2009, begun in 2010, and incorporated in 2019, the Medical Heritage Library derives its strength – as a content-centered digital community and as a curated resource – by actively seeking new opportunities to digitize primary resources in the history of medicine through grant-funded initiatives and efforts to identify like-minded institutions willing to share content through the MHL’s Internet Archive collection. Grant funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Arcadia Fund, and the Council on Library and Information Resources has made it possible for us to address digitization gaps, negotiate open access, such as for our State Medical Journals project, and build tools to better utilize MHL resources.

The MHL was initiated by the Open Knowledge Commons, which was awarded $1.5 million dollars in start-up funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to begin digitization at partner libraries.

Through active community building and coordinated content selection, theFull-length engraving of a human skeleton from behind. MHL facilitates much needed discourse around the contemporary practice of medicine (anatomy, audiology, gynecology and reproductive health, physiology, surgery), mental health (psychology, psychiatry), nursing, neuroscience, public health, dentistry, infectious disease, and the biological sciences, as well as associated subjects, such as tobacco use, veterinary medicine, gardening, physical culture, and alternative medicine. The MHL includes materials in a variety of languages, including English, French, Spanish, German, Latin, Portuguese, and Dutch. We select materials for scholarly, educational, and historical value.

The MHL is a digital curation collaborative among some of the world’s leading medical libraries, promotes free and open access to quality historical resources in medicine. Our goal is 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. The MHL’s growing collection of digitized medical rare books, pamphlets, journals, and films number in the tens of thousands, with representative works from each of the past six centuries, all of which are available here through the Internet Archive. The original founders of this project were:

Full-length engraving of a human skeleton viewed from the left.Prior to incorporation in 2018, the MHL defined participation by member institutions in terms of contributor levels. These levels were fully described in the 2016 Membership Structure document.

The MHL was composed of Principal Contributors, Content Contributors, and Advocates. Principal Contributors are those institutions who both deposit history of medicine content to the MHL and make an annual financial contribution (or perform work on behalf of the MHL that is equivalent to an annual financial contribution) to support MHL operations.

Content Contributors contribute existing digitized content generated by their own institutions that meets MHL criteria and deposit it the Internet Archive tagged as part of the MHL collection. Content Contributors promote their MHL collections, link to the MHL website, distribute MHL promotional and print materials, and seek opportunities for collaboration, such as co-sponsoring events. The MHL has over 30 partner libraries in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom; a complete list may be found on our website.

Advocates publicize and promote the work of the MHL and encourage peerTwo engravings of a human skull, one from the front, one from the side. libraries, archives, special collections, faculty, students, or other constituencies to use or develop MHL resources. While advocates do not contribute content to the MHL, they provide the MHL with critical opportunities to expand its audience.

Old Research Tools List

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This list of digital research tools has been superseded by the new Develop@MHL page! But since we know folks liked and used this page, we didn’t want it to vanish into thin air. So here it is!

Research Tools, Text Analysis, and Visualization

  • Diigo – Allows you to take notes, add virtual “sticky notes”, or highlight most Webpages.
  • Endnote (for purchase) – Citation tool.
  • github – A public code repository.
  • Google Scratchpad – Handy little free widget that lets you take notes and view them in a pop-out window, a browser window, or a Google Drive folder.
  • Omeka – Tool to create collections and present them online using free, open-source software.
  • Open Calais – Toolkit for semantic functionality within a blog, content management system, website, etc.
  • OpenLayers – Allows you to present geospatial information in a website.
  • Neatline – a set of Omeka plug-ins “for hand-crafted geo-temporal visualization and interpretation.”
  • Quick Note – Provides you with online scratchpaper; from Diigo.com. Also available for Firefox.
  • R (The R Project for Statistical Computing) – Statistical computing and graphics tools.
  • RapidMiner – Data mining and analysis tool.
  • Readability – Free app that lets you transform webpage text into a more readable format.
  • RefWorks (for purchase) – Online research management, writing, and citation tool.
  • TaPoR offers a variety of tools for text analysis and exploration.
    • Need help getting started on your text analysis? Check out the TaPoR recipes page.
  • TopBraid – Tools to help you model data and work with Semantic Web applications.
  • Visual Concept Explorer – Visually explore PubMed.
  • Visual Understanding Environment – Concept and content mapping.
  • Wandora – “General purpose information gathering, management, and publishing appplication.”
  • Zotero – Collection of tools to let you collect and organize your research.