Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine - Medical Heritage Library

Our Reading List (#3)

By September 17, 2014 April 8, 2016 Reading

With the exciting news last week of the finding of one of the ships from Sir John Franklin’s last expedition, we decided to pull together some of the MHL’s resources on Arctic exploration in case this news stimulates your interest and while it’s still warm enough out that reading about the Arctic can be fun!

You could start out with Georg Hartwig’s The polar and tropical worlds : a description of man and nature in the polar and equatorial regions of the globe (1874)
And then try Robert DeCourcy Ward’s Climate, considered especially in relation to man (1908) and Burroughs Wellcome’s The romance of exploration and emergency first-aid from Stanley to Byrd … (1934?), created for the Chicago International Exposition of 1934.
If you want to get personal, try The Private Journal of James Markham Ambler, M.D. (1914)
And then you can dive right into the search for Franklin and his missing ships! There’s Sir John Richardson’s Arctic searching expedition : a journal of a boat-voyage through Rupert’s Land and the Arctic Sea : in search of the discovery ships under command of Sir John Franklin (1852) and Robert Anstruther Goodsir’s An Arctic voyage to Baffin’s Bay and Lancaster Sound : in search of friends with Sir John Franklin (1850). There’s Elisha Kent Kane’s The United States Grinnell Expedition in search of Sir John Franklin : a personal narrative (1857) and William Elder’s biography of Kane, himself a fascinating historical figure: Biography of Elisha Kent Kane (1858).

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

Our Reading List

By September 3, 2014 April 8, 2016 Digital Highlights

We can’t hope to be as exhaustive as Whewell’s Ghost or The History Carnival, but all this talk of going back to school has us thinking in reading lists. Here’s some of what we’re looking at online this week.

From the US NLM’s Circulating Now, Sophie Lipman’s piece on Medicine, Morality, Faith, and Film.
From the New York Academy of Medicine blog, Klemperer Research Fellow Heidi Knoblauch’s post on Patient Photographs and Medical Collecting. We’re hoping to do a project with all the MHL partners on patient photographs at some point in the future; our Johns Hopkins liaison, Phoebe Evans Letocha, has already done some preliminary digging on this fascinating subject.
From the YaleNews blog, Amy Athey Macdonald’s piece, Yale collections are time capsules of the people, politics, and propaganda of WWI.
And last but not least, from Sally Frampton’s Constructing Scientific Communities blog, ‘Sir: I am not a medical man, but….’: Laypeople and Medical Journals in the Nineteenth Century.

If that last piece piques your interest, we have lots of 19th century medical journals already in the collection and more coming in all the time! Check out issues of the Philadelphia journal of the medical and physical sciences (1820), the New York journal of medicine (1856), the Maryland medical journal (1901), the American journal of the medical sciences (1827), or the New Yorker medizinische Monatsschrift (1891).

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

Images from the Library

By MHL September 1, 2014 August 19, 2021 Images

From W.F. Hutchinson’s Under the Southern Cross : a guide to the sanitariums and other charming places in the West Indies and Spanish Main (1891).

Images from the Library

By MHL August 25, 2014 August 19, 2021 Images

From Neuer Leitfaden für den Turn-Unterricht in den Preussischen Volkschulen (1868).

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

Digital Highlights: South for Health

By August 8, 2014 April 8, 2016 Digital Highlights

“Sick people have but a single wish–that they may get well…” William Francis Hutchinson of Rhode Island starts his Under the Southern Cross: a guide to the sanitariums and other charming places in the West Indies and Spanish Main with a clear indication of his intended direction and audience: having benefited himself from travel in southern hemisphere, he intends to provide guidance for others. The title page provides Hutchinson a boost by adding, after his name, a list of memberships: the American Climatological Association, the American Medical Association, and the American Public Health Association.

Hutchinson makes a point of mentioning how many conditions can be helped by tropical travel including simply exhaustion — but doctors are too prone, he feels, to prescribe such travel to anyone who can pay for it: “Careful and thorough consideration should precede decision where to send invalids for climate treatment.” (17)

Despite this demurrer, Hutchinson writes as one in love with his surroundings, describing beaches, hotels and quiet nights with the pleasure of the true convert. He illustrates his book, too, both with photographs and personal sketches of plants and places.

Flip through the pages of Hutchinson’s book below or follow this link to read Under the Southern Cross.