Tag: digital highlight

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: “Sex in Education”

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Chapter 1 of "Sex in Education."

Education for women was a hot-button topic in the nineteenth century in much the same way that mandatory testing is today. In 1875, Edward H. Clarke capitalised on the public’s interest in this topic with a lecture that he turned into a book, Sex in Education: or, a fair chance for girls. The book makes for entertaining but rather disturbing reading. Continue reading

Digital Highlights: Water and Politics

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One of the most popular alternative cures in the nineteenth century involved water — lots of water. Balneology, balneotherapy, or “the cold water cure” was popular on mainland Europe, in England, and in the United States. Spas flourished in England, for example, and scientist Charles Darwin credited the cold water cure with the recreation of his system after serious digestive problems left him almost prostrate and unable to work.

Frontispiece portrait of Priessnitz.

In Six Months at Graefenberg, H.C. Wright tells about his own cure at a German cold water spa run by a balneologist called Priessnitz (there’s an interesting article on Priessnitz and water therapy in the first volume of British Journal of Balneology and Climatology from 1897.)  Continue reading

Digital Highlights: York Retreat

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The original building of the York Retreat. (19)

The care of the mentally ill has been a current topic in medical discourse for centuries. In the late eighteenth century, a Quaker named William Tuke opened the York Retreat in York, England, as a new type of mental health hospital. In 1892, Tuke’s grandson, D. Hack Tuke, who had been a visiting physician at the Retreat, wrote Reform in the Treatment of the Insane as a history of his grandfather’s pioneering efforts towards reforming the care of the mentally ill. 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

Digital Highlights: Care for Ailing Sailors

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Names of the wards and numbers of beds in each of the buildings of the Greenwich Hospital. (42)

Modern-day students of history learn the use of primary sources almost from the minute they enter an undergraduate program; some, from high schools with engaged history faculty or by taking part in programs like History Day in Massachusetts, before then. Analyzing, closely reading, considering, debating, and writing about primary sources is a key part of any history student’s education.

What makes today’s digital highlight particularly interesting, then, is that not only is it now a primary source in its turn but it uses primary sources in their entirety. Continue reading

Digital Highlights: Gambling, Duelling, and Suicide

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Title page of Hey's first dissertation.

Perhaps duelling is no longer the concern it once was, but gambling and suicide are still concerns for many people. With the rise of the Internet and widespread public access to a nearly global network of communication, both issues have been complicated once again with, among other things, the lure of online gambling. Continue reading