Tag: Columbia University Health Sciences Library

Digital Highlights: Pioneer Doctor

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Frontispiece portrait of Owens-Adair.

Dr. Bethenia Owens-Adair, born in Missouri in 1840, published her life-story in 1906, writing down her experiences of life with pioneering parents and her medical education as one of the first women to aim for a medical degree. She was married as a teenager and left her husband before she was twenty. She began attending school after leaving her husband and received funding from family friends and admirers, allowing her to set herself up as a school teacher and pursue her own further education. Continue reading

Digital Highlights: Healthy Plays

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Page from “The Pied Piper of Health.”

In 1920, a contest was held in New York City under the guidance of the Child Health Organization to present plays supporting the “Milk and Child Health Campaign.” The resultant plays were donated by their authors, public school teachers, for republication in an anthology called Health Plays for School Children (1921). The volume also includes a reprint of the short pamphlet “Milk: The Master Carpenter” which was meant to be the inspiration for the plays. 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

Lamar Soutter Library Contributes Rare Books to Online Medical Heritage Library

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We are pleased to announce the addition of 286 classic medical rare books from the Lamar Soutter Library, University of Massachusetts Medical School, to the Medical Heritage Library (MHL)’s holdings in the Internet Archive. The Lamar Soutter Library is the first contributor of existing digital materials to the MHL; by adding the tag “medicalheritage” to the cataloging information for each book in the Internet Archive, the Lamar Soutter Library has radically expanded the volumes’ potential audience. These digital texts join materials from Columbia, Harvard, and Yale, the National Library of Medicine, and the New York Public Library that will comprise the MHL. Continue reading

Digital Highlights: Physical and Emotional

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"Diagram of the more important distributions of the autonomic nervous system." From Cannon's "Bodily Changes..." (24)

The experience of having a great meal disturbed by an argument is a common one and a headache can make a work-day seem like it lasts 10 times as long. In 1915, Walter B. Cannon wrote Bodily Changes in Pain, Hunger, Fear, and Rage to describe the physical changes that accompany certain emotions. Continue reading

Digital Highlights: Food and Fitness

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Title page from Keeping Fit.

Published in 1914, Orison Swett Marden’s Keeping Fit is a part-handbook, part-sermon, and part-“to do” list.

Marden himself was a leading exponent of “New Thought” in the late 19th and early 20th century. “New Thought” believers argued that thought had a direct influence on life: if you thought you were happy, successful, and well-liked, the odds were in favor of all three of those things being true. “New Thought” also had some similarity with Christian Science insofar as the philosophy held that sickness was a matter of wrong thinking and bodily infirmity could be cured with proper mental effort. Continue reading

Digital Highlights: Diseases of Genius

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Title page from the Inaugural Essay on Genius and Its Diseases.

According to Thomas Middleton Stuart’s 1819 essay on Genius and Its Diseases there are four reasons for mental genius to become disordered: inactivity, imperfection, artificial excitement, and excessive exercise. Having cited such examples for genius as Newton, Franklin, and Homer, Stuart’s suppositions as to the sources of mental disturbance seem reasonable!

The essay was originally written to complete Stuart’s medical degree. The title page notes that it was “submitted to the examination of Samuel Bard…” and several other faculty members of the “College of Physicians and Surgeons of the University of the State of New York.” Stuart devotes most of his text to enumerating and discussing the causes and types of mental disease arising from genius and only in the last few pages turns to prevention and healing, finishing his argument by citing “…the writings of Rush…” as key to healing the mental upset that will undoubtedly follow from ignoring or abusing the call of genius.

What may seem somewhat odd to the modern reader is that Stuart spends comparatively little time in defining his subject matter. The actual definition of genius delays his argument for only a few pages; he finally settles on a definition borrowed from Dr. Johnson, “…‘a mind of superior general powers.‘” Stuart deepens the definitely by adding that invention seems to be a key component of genius; given that he includes no men (or women) best known for visual talent and very few literary figures in his list of figures he considers to be geniuses, invention is a key commonality between the other men he discusses.

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