Tag: Columbia University Health Sciences Library

Digital Highlights: Health and Safety, 1915

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In 1915, The Health Series of Physiology and Hygiene published the latest in its series, Making the Most of Life, written by M.V. O’Shea and J.H. Kellogg. O’Shea was a professor of education at the University of Wisconsin; Kellogg was the superintendant of the Battle Creek Sanitarium in Michigan.

Photograph from "Making the Most of Life"

Text and photograph from Making the Most of Life.

Making the Most of Life was designed as a student text on health, complete with follow-up questions for each chapter, project suggestions, and a glossary at the end of the book. Chapter titles included “Taking the Measure of a Man,” “The Value of a Life,” and “Handicaps in the Race of Life.” The text is heavily illustrated with graphs, anatomical drawings, and black-and-white photographs which reinforce specific points in the text. For example, look at the image on the right: the photograph is meant to illustrate the relationship between body weight and symmetry of form.

The tone of the volume is lecturing, even hectoring at times, as O’Shea and Kellogg strive to inculcate their future students with contemporary values of health and well-being, including total abstinence from substances including tobacco, alcohol, cocaine, and caffeine. High-protein diets are decried and the benefits of much fresh air, exercise, and yoghurt promoted. Efficiency in modern living is invoked in the introduction to the volume, bringing to mind the concern at the time about American involvement in World War I, to say nothing of changes in working habits and technology.

Making the Most of Life also includes a brief but accurate description of the germ theory of disease and emphasizes the need for hygienic measures to be taken to halt the spread of diseases like tuberculosis. The book ends with a chapter called “Safety First,” which lists 10 rules for healthy living, including frequent handwashing and avoiding anyone with a sore throat.

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

Digital Highlights: Defoe and Plague

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Title page of Journal of the Plague Year

Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year is a factitious account of 1664-1665 in England, a period when mainland Britain experienced some of its worst outbreaks of plague infection. Hot, dry weather and the behavior of English citizens, particularly those living in London and other large seaports, inadvertently helped the spread of disease. People fleeing from infected cities took infection with them, bringing it inland, away from the ports that were the classic loci of illness. Historians studying the outbreak generally suggest that the fire of London in 1666 helped to stem and break the tide of infection, although it may have been ebbing naturally before then.

The trick with the Journal is that Defoe was only 4 or 5 years old in 1665; while he may have been precocious, writing an entire novel about experiences he may have only barely understood at the time would have been a real feat! The Journal was written in the early 1700s, within living memory of the plague years of the 1660s but not in the heat of the moment. The edition featured here was republished in 1888 under the aegis of Henry Morley, an educator, writer, and lecturer who popularized a series of reprints called Morley’s Universal Library:

Titles in Morley's Universal Library

Morley wrote pedagogical introductions to his volumes — which span a wide range of topics and titles as the above list demonstrates — and planned a 14-volume history of England, but died before he could finish it.

This copy of the Journal provides insight into the history of publishing in Britain: what titles might have been popular, what was being marketed to what audience — Victorian Britain had a strong sense of the need for self-improvement and entire societies were dedicated to educating the working- and lower-classes in particular, traditionally seen as undereducated or even ineducable for anything higher than manual labor. And, of course, the Journal provides scholars  with a valuable digital copy of a text which provides a fascinating look at the plague experience in England, a fictionalized account to set next to Samuel Pepys’ recollections in his famous diary.

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

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!

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