Tag: digital highlight

Digital Highlights: “Burking”

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“Burking” was a term invented after the discovery of the crimes committed by William Burke and William Hare between 1827 and 1828 in Edinburgh, Scotland. The two, recent immigrants from northern Ireland, made short-lived but lucrative careers out of providing bodies for the dissection laboratories at the medical school; Burke and Hare killed over 15 men and women to keep up their trade. “Burking” came to be used as the shorthand term for their preferred method of murder: a quiet type of suffocation which left the body unmarked.

Title page

Title page of The Trial, Sentence, and Confessions of Bishop, Williams, and May.

The Trial, Sentence, and Confessions of Bishop, Williams, and May provides first-hand documentary evidence of another grave-robbing trial, this one from the city of London in 1831. John Bishop, Thomas Williams, and James May were arrested and tried for the “burking” of Carlo Ferrari, a young Italian boy who had been working as a street-peddlar.

The Trial includes a didactic introduction which decries the horrors of the crime as well as a reconstruction of the trial, the confessions of Bishop and Williams, and an account of the executions of Bishop and Williams. May was tried but respited after the confessions of Bishop and Williams demonstrated that he was innocent of the death of Ferrari. After the description of the hangings of Bishop and Williams, the compilers of The Trial added in “…a few historical facts relative to the previous lives and occupations of all three of the men…” (p. 47).

The Trial is titillating reading, similar to a modern true-crime novel or television show; all it lacks is the team of dedicated detectives and forensic specialists trailing the three criminals back to their lair. It features a wealth of medical and scientific detail, as well as an almost minute-by-minute reconstruction of the crime itself, both in the trial and in the confessions of Bishop and Williams. The detection of the “Burkers” or “resurrection men” depends upon the scientific skill of the detectives and of the medical men to whom Bishop and Williams attempted to sell cadavers. Evidence from the trial, for example, features the testimony given by several surgeons who examined the body and offered minute detail about the condition of Ferrari’s corpse and what they deduced from it.

For contemporary readers, particularly those living in metropolitan areas like London, Edinburgh, or other large cities like Manchester and Leeds, it must have been a pleasantly thrilling read but also a warning that the city was a dangerous place.

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: 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 Highlights: Interdisciplinary Possibilities

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Title page of "The Closing Years of Dean Swift's Life"

Title page of The Closing Years of Dean Swift's Life

One of the fascinating things about a collection like the Medical Heritage Library is how many interdisciplinary opportunities it offers.

The history of medicine is an incredibly diverse field in and of itself — a quick glance down the list of subjects in the Library illustrates that. What may not be so immediately obvious is how many cross-disciplinary opportunities for investigation the collection affords.

Take, for example, The Closing Years of Dean Swift’s Life, by William R. Wilde. The volume was first published in 1849 in Dublin, at a time when Ireland was experiencing country-wide hardship as a result of catastrophic harvest failures in 1845 and 1847.

Dean Jonathan Swift, of course, is probably best known as the author of A Modest Proposal, an economic satire which proposed the Irish sell their infant children as provisions for the English. During his youth, Swift was secretary to Sir William Temple, an English diplomat who became well-known for the correspondence between himself and his wife which reveals details of life during the end of the seventeenth century in England. Swift himself was a polarizing figure during his life-time and continues to attract the attention of scholars in many fields.

William Wilde was a well-known Irish physician specializing in the eye and ear. He was a prolific author, writing not only about medicine but also about anthropology and Irish folklore. Wilde’s wife, Jane, published as a poet under the name “Speranza” and was well-known for the fiery nationalism of her work. Wilde is now better known as the father of Oscar Wilde, author of The Importance of Being Earnest and The Portrait of Dorian Gray.

One volume, then, connects to three separate individuals in widely diverse fields alone — and that’s simply on an examination of the title page! Who knows what more volumes could reveal?

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

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.

Digital Highlights: God’s revenge against murder! Or, the tragical histories and horrid cruelties of Elizabeth Brownrigg, midwife, to Mary Mitchell, Mary Jones, & Mary Clifford, her three apprentices

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Frontispiece from God’s revenge against murder! Or, the tragical histories and horrid cruelties of Elizabeth Brownrigg, midwife, to Mary Mitchell, Mary Jones, & Mary Clifford, her three apprentices. London, 1767? From the Boston Medical Library in the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine.

Medical jurisprudence is among the subject areas from which the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine’s Center for the History of Medicine has selected titles to be digitized. This image also tangentially represents another topic on which the Center will focus its digitization efforts, namely obstetrics.

Elizabeth Brownrigg, a midwife in 18th-century London, was executed for her cruel mistreatment of orphaned children apprenticed to her in order to be trained as domestic servants. The Center’s holdings in medical jurisprudence include many pamphlets describing lurid trials such as this one, from its Boston Medical Library collection.

To view this and other titles digitized for the Medical Heritage Library, go to the Internet Archive, click on “Texts” on the top of the page, then enter the search tag “medicalheritagelibrary.”

Link to: God’s revenge against murder! Or, the tragical histories and horrid cruelties of Elizabeth Brownrigg, midwife, to Mary Mitchell, Mary Jones, & Mary Clifford, her three apprentices at http://www.archive.org/details/godsrevengeagain00brow.