Tag: England

Digital Highlights: The Several Ways of Preserving Dead Bodies

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In 1705, Thomas Greenhill, surgeon, published Nekpokedeia: or, the Art of Embalming in London. Greenhill’s subtitle is even more informative: Wherein is Shown the Right [sic] of Burial, and Funeral Ceremonies, Especially That of Preserving Bodies After the Egyptian Method. And it goes on from there — there are a full 44 pages of front matter, including a poem, dedication to Greenhill’s patron, the Earl of Pembroke, and a list of subscribers and contributors to the volume, before Greenhill starts his discussion.

Fold-out frontispiece from Nekpokedeia.

Greenhill’s discussion of funerary customs and rites wanders in a fascinating manner from Biblical history to ancient Greece, Rome, and Egypt, through modern times. He brings up issues that are probably of less concern to our present-day morticians and funeral home directors including the need to double or even triple-check that the body is dead before funeral rites are started.

In his opening chapters, Greenhill emphasizes that there are many reasons for burial or embalming: chief among them being respect for the corpse and the need to protect others from contamination due to the processes of putrefaction. Respect for the corpse, for Greenhill, does not necessitate the Western under-ground burial: he allows that traditions in other parts of the world, such as mummification or disposal through fire, have their roots in the community and may be acceptable methods of corpse disposal in their place.

His interest in “putrid air” marks Greenhill very much as a man of his time when it was thought that disease and ill-health could be spread through exposure to “bad air” which could be anything from the night air in the open country to the atmosphere around an open cesspit. It was not until the late 19th century that the idea of the infectious nature of “bad air” was conclusively challenged and, even then, the concept hung on well into the 20th century. The difficulty of making clear the difference between infectious matter being spread in the air and the air itself being somehow to blame for the infection was probably key in this confusion.

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

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: 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: 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.