Tag: Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine

Downloads on the Rise

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As of March 4, 2011, there were 3,326 items from the Francis A. Countway Library digitized and available for download from the Medical Heritage Library on the Internet Archive.

The obvious question is: are they being used?

A staff member decided to find out and discovered that in February alone, there were over 6,000 downloads of items from the Countway. And that was just one month. Overall, there have been more than 38,000 downloads of material from the Countway.

A download, in case you’re curious, is counted when a given user visits the page for a particular book (for example, Alfred Dale Covey’s 1911 The Secrets of Specialists) and actually clicks in to view the page or file. Just visiting the URL for the book doesn’t trip the Internet Archive’s download counter; neither does turning pages within a given book trip the counter.

This means that the material the MHL is busy putting out into the digital world is being sought out and used! We’re delighted that so many scholars are finding our material useful and we’re looking forward to making more items available in the coming months.

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!

1,000,000 = 35,000

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Title page of Secrets of the Invisible World Disclosed...

The secrets of the invisible world disclos'd ... by Andrew Moreton, a.k.a. Daniel Defoe is one of the many early works dealing with interactions between the spirit and material worlds in the collections digitized so far.

The Center for the History of Medicine is happy to report that we recently contributed our one-millionth page of content to the Medical Heritage Library. Beyond the simple fact of that number, which represents a fraction of our eventual contributions to the project, a million pages of digitized content means that local patrons and MHL users around the world now have free and open access to over 3,000 rare and historically-significant medical texts previously available only to members of the Harvard community and visiting researchers. Users can now download full-color, high-resolution page images of medical charts, photographic plates, engravings, maps, atlases and a wide variety of other types of content from the book collections at the Countway Library, including, of course, hundreds of thousands of pages of printed text published between the 16th and 20th centuries (all of which are fully keyword-searchable).

Subject areas covered in our contributions thus far include: Military medicine, General surgery and surgical history, Spiritualism,Sanitation, Hygiene, Tropical medicine, Medical jurisprudence,Psychology, Gynecology, Phrenology, Crimes, criminology,Electrotherapeutics, Climatology, and Homeopathy, among others.

As we pass the one-million mark, it is important to note that statistics regarding the progress of our contributions to the MHL are not the only cause for celebration. More importantly to all of us here at the Center, the 3,000+ books that we have digitized so far have already been downloaded over 35,000 times, a number that helps to illustrate both a significant demand for these materials and the perceived utility of their digitized copies to those users who seek them out.

In the coming year we intend to triple the number of items digitized thus far, and in so doing to assure that these materials are available to the public on-line and in perpetuity. The work to come remains considerable–each individual book needs to be reviewed, selected, cataloged, digitized, and finally checked for quality before returning to our stacks. But the numbers we have gathered from our users up until this point one thing clear: it’s worth the effort!

For more from the Medical Heritage Library, please visit our full collection!

(Cross-posted from the Center for the History of Medicine blog.)

Discoveries in the Rare Book Stacks

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René Joseph Bertin's work on syphilis, the Traité de la maladie vénérienne (Paris, 1810) showing the armorial binding of the Emperor NapoleonResearchers from the Harvard-Longwood community and beyond benefit from the Medical Heritage Library, a growing collection of freely available digital texts.

Jack Eckert, Public Services Librarian, reports that, for the Center for the History of Medicine, one of the unintended benefits of the selection process for digitization is the unexpected discoveries made in the collection.  During a close and thorough examination each item considered for scanning, staff encounters and documents imperfections, incomplete sets, unrecorded titles bound with others, and corrects inaccurate cataloging information.  While this sort of information enhances the accuracy of the catalog, we are finding unexpected treasure as well. A large percentage of the rare book collection was acquired for its current informational value at the time, and little attention was paid to marks of ownership, provenance, and annotation.  But these are some of the very aspects that now enhance the rarity and value of the works.

For example, pioneer psychiatrist James Jackson Putnam (1846-1918) owned and donated a number of titles concerning the treatment of neuroses with electricity.  Many of our homeopathic titles were formerly part of the library of the Massachusetts Homeopathic Medical Society and contain inscriptions and annotations by local leaders in the movement, and physician Edward Jackson (1803-1884) was also clearly interested in homeopathy and owned a number of works on this subject.  A number of titles derive from the collection of the Boston Medical Library of 1805, and still more were part of the original library at Harvard Medical School and donated by James Jackson (1777-1867) and other members of the early faculty.  While Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s interest in the water-cure was known to scholars and historians, we were until recently unaware that several of our hydropathic titles were part of his own library.

Probably the most exciting discovery we’ve made in our own collection to date is a copy of René Joseph Bertin’s work on syphilis, the Traité de la maladie vénérienne (Paris, 1810) which has an armorial binding of the Emperor Napoleon.  The book was probably part of the collection of noted dermatologist Edward Wigglesworth (1804-1876), whose library was donated to the Boston Medical Library in 1897.

To see these and other titles digitized for the Medical Heritage Library, see http://www.archive.org/details/medicalheritagelibrary.

For more from the Medical Heritage Library, please visit our full collection!

(Cross-posted from the Center for the History of Medicine blog.)

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: 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.