Tag: digital highlight

Digital Highlights: Poetic Cookery

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After noticing the Poetical cook-book while putting together our new title round-up earlier in the week, I couldn’t resist having a flip through the pages. Perhaps I might find a guaranteed mnemonic for how to cook brown rice: a thing I never can recall when I need to.

Published in 1864 by Maria J. Moss, the volume opens with a brief disclaimer by the author. Written originally as a ‘pastime,’ she feels the pages have received a wider importance during the Civil War and now dedicates the publication to the Philadelphia 1864 Sanitary Fair.

For those of us hoping for rhyming cooking instructions, the book then continues very hopefully with a lengthy introduction in verse:

cooking

Moss describes the fate of the poor and the good cook and even manages to reference a pair of odd culinary happenings from the time of Charles I: the knighting of a loin of beef and the presentation of an eighteen-inch tall man in a pie.

Flip through the whole book below or follow this link to Maria Moss’ Poetical cook-book.

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

Digital Highlights: Elizabeth Packard Ware, Asylum Activist

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Title page from Mrs. Packard’s first volume.

In 1860, Elizabeth Parsons Ware Packard (see references in the Alabama Law Review and Project Muse) was committed to an Illinois insane asylum by her husband, with the assistance of a personal friend who was a physician. Packard claimed that she had been incarcerated unjustly and, after three years of work, managed to have herself released, having convinced the authorities of her sanity (the judge’s final decision in the case is said to have taken less than ten minutes to make!) Upon returning home, however, her husband sought to finish the job by isolating her in their house, boarding her up not unlike a character in Jane Eyre.

Accounts vary, but Packard herself said that her husband had institutionalized her because her religious beliefs differed from his and, as a clergyman, he was worried for his reputation and income if she continued to speak out.

During her first bout of institutionalization, Packard was eventually allowed writing materials by the asylum superintendent, Dr. Andrew McFarland. She composed at least one weighty volume while still in the asylum: The Great Drama: or, the Millenial Harbinger, which is a largely personal treatise on her own experiences and religious convictions. She divides American religous belief into two main camps: Christians and “Calvinists.” She identifies herself as the former and her husband, unambiguously referred to as her persecutor or jailor, as the latter.

Packard also wrote more specifically about the asylum system in Modern Persecution: or, insane asylums unveiled and The prisoners’ hidden life.

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

Digital Highlights: “The Kingdom of Evils”

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Two years after the death of E.E. Southard, one of his co-workers, Mary Jarrett, published one of the volumes on social work which Southard had proposed before his death. The Kingdom of Evils was meant to be a kind of instructional chart of what Southard — and presumably Jarrett – felt were the chief problems likely to confront the social worker. Continue reading

Digital Highlights: Family Doctors

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Flip through the pages above or follow this link to read Die Frau als Hausärztin : ein ärztliches Nachschlagebuch der Gesundheitspflege und Heilkunde in der Familie, mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der Frauen- und Kinderkrankheiten, Geburtshilfe und Kinderpflege (1911).

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

Digital Highlights: The Trial of Madame Restell

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Click through the pages above or follow this link to read Trial of Madame Restell, alias Ann Lohman, for abortion and causing the death of Mrs. Purdy : being a full account of all the proceedings on the trial, together with the suppressed evidence and editorial remarks (1841).

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

Digital Highlights: Our 50,000th Item “The Doctor’s Advice”

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Illustration of a child from “The Doctor’s Advice.”

The Medical Heritage Library recently passed a milestone: we uploaded our 50,000th item, the wonderfully titled The doctor’s advice : or how, when, and what to eat and drink, how to secure good health and long life, how to prevent and treat disease, what mothers and nurses ought to know : how to care for the baby, and give to our boys and girls the best moral, mental, and physical culture, when and whom to marry, how to choose a wife or husband, and how to be happy from 1898. Continue reading