Title page from "Life in the Sick-Room." Click the image to go directly to the book!
For several years in the mid-nineteenth century starting in 1839, English social activist Harriet Martineau was a housebound invalid, suffering from the pain of a tumor. Before this period, she was an extremely active writer and traveller, moving around the United Kingdom and the United States to examine living conditions and current affairs in both countries. Continue reading
Title page of "The Problem of Race-Regeneration."
In the April 1912 edition of Eugenics Review, an E. Schuster wrote about a new series of pamphlets, “New Tracts for the Times”: “We welcome the publication of this series, aiming as it does at awakening ‘an enlightened social conscience’…” (94) Continue reading
Image of a hypocasium from a Roman bath at Chester.
The history of ‘alternative medicine’ does not begin in the twentieth century. The arguments between allopaths and homeopaths formed part of mainstream medical dialogue in the nineteenth century and alternatives to ‘heroic’ medicine or mainstream medical treatment have always enjoyed a greater or lesser degree of popularity. Today, therapies like acupuncture and medical massage are receiving critical attention; in the nineteenth century in Britain, the Turkish bath enjoyed a similar vogue. Continue reading
Title page from "A Brief History..."
In 1840 in Preston, in the north of England in Lancashire, Joseph Dearden published A Brief History of Ancient and Modern Tee-totalism, an apologia for the temperance movement. Continue reading
Table of contents from "Narratives."
Narratives of Remarkable Crimes, selected from the German works of Anselm Ritter von Feuerbach and published in 1846 in London, consists of 14 of the trials in Feuerbach’s original 1300 page work chosen and translated by Lady Duff Gordon. She provides a brief overview of the German justice system in her preface, commenting on the role of witnesses, judge, and the system of appeals. She spends only a brief paragraph explaining her reasons for choosing the trials here published, mentioning only the influence of an article from the influential and popular Edinburgh Review and her desire to “[choose] those trials which appear to me to have the greatest general interest…” (10) Continue reading
A patient suffering from 'mania' during an episode.
In 1843, Sir Alexander Morison published The Physiognomy of Mental Diseases, a compilation of observations and sketches of mental patients. Continue reading
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
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
Title page of "Inferences from Haunted Houses and Haunted Men," by John Harris.
John Harris’ Inferences from Haunted Houses and Haunted Men is a great read as we look forward to the Halloween season. Harris’ work is best approached in a kind of smorgasbord state of mind: there is no single through-line argument, rather Harris has assembled a collection of anecdotes and evidence to discuss psychic phenomena of one kind or another including hypnotism, thought transference, and hauntings. Continue reading
Title page of Ann Brookhouse's narrative.
Tabloid-style stories have been popular for far longer than what we think of as tabloid journalism. A Narrative of the Seizure & Confinement of Ann Brookhouse from the end of the eighteenth century is just such a piece. Purporting to be the true life narrative of a young female victim of abduction “as related by herself” and “written by a friend.” Continue reading
