This is how many of us feel about Monday…
From Manuel de la boxe française et anglaise : méhode Leboucher (1882).
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Tag: Royal College of Surgeons of England
Digital Highlights: Home Dangers
Mrs. Priestley’s 1885 lecture Unseen dangers in the home is a tour de force collection of late Victorian concerns about health and hygiene. She starts right off with the dangers of polluted air and moves on through bad water and the dangers of in-house piping among other things. It’s interesting to note that Priestley’s text assumes her audience is one of well-off matrons with disposable income; this is not a lecture designed to help the working poor, for example. She recounts anecdotes from friends with houses in Mayfair, Picadilly, and St. James, who have had to deal with complaints from their servants of bad air in basements, kitchens, bathrooms, and attics.
Flip through the pages of Mrs. Priestley’s lecture below or follow this link to read Unseen dangers in the home.
Digital Highlights: Getting Ready for All Hallows
Halloween is only a week away, so in preparation, here are some of the texts we can offer on the ghostly and ghastly.
- Alfred Roffe’s 1851 An essay upon the ghost-belief of Shakespeare.
- John Henry Pepper’s 1890 The true history of the ghost : and all about metempsychosis.
- Andrew Lang’s 1897 The book of dreams and ghosts.
- The 1864 Spectropia, or, Surprising spectral illusions : showing ghosts everywhere, and of any colour : with sixteen illustrations.
- H. Addington Bruce’s 1914 Adventurings in the psychical.
- Frederick George Lee’s 1875 volumes The other world; or, Glimpses of the supernatural. Being facts, records, and traditions relating to dreams, omens, miraculous occurrences, apparitions, wraiths, warnings, second-sight, witchcraft, necromancy, etc (Volume 2 is also available.)
- And John William Harris’ 1901 Inferences from haunted houses and haunted men.
Did we miss out on your favorite? tell us in the comments!
And as always, for more from the Medical Heritage Library, please visit our full collection!
Our Reading List (#6)
Here are a few things that have gotten our reading attention this week:
- How can you make resources accessible for those with disabilities? from the Jisc blog.
- The latest publication from the History of Modern Biomedicine Research group, one of our partners: Human Gene Mapping Workshops, c. 1973-c.1991.
- Newly uploaded from the Royal College of Surgeons, Hermes Trismegistus, The book of quinte essence or the fifth being, that is to say, man’s heaven : a tretice in englisch breuely drawe out of þe book of quintis essencijs in latyn, þat hermys þe prophete and kyng of Egipt, after þe flood of Noe, fadir of philosophris, hadde by reuelacioun of an aungil of god to him sende (1866)
- Tim Hitchcock’s opening post from the Voices of the People Symposium, Sources, Empathy, and Politics in History from Below.
- The Writing Lives project is asking for your input!
- We found this JSTor Workset Browser — according to creator Eric Lease Morgan, “The Browser takes this citations.xml file as input and then: 1) harvests the content, 2) indexes it, 3) does some analysis against the content, 4) creates a few graphs illustrating characteristics of the dataset, and finally 5) generates a browsable “catalog” in the form of an HTML table.”
- Newly uploaded from the Royal College of Physicians of London, James Frazer’s The Golden Bough (the other 11 volumes are available, too!)
- The Centre for Medical Humanities is looking for a reviewer for The Sick Rose: Disease and the Art of Medical Illustration.
- Medical Advice About Bathing in 1813 from Two Nerdy History Girls.
- If you’re a public historian, the AHA is looking to collect survey data from you.
As always, for more from the Medical Heritage Library, please visit our full collection!
New to the MHL!
Our apologies for going unexpectedly AWOL last week — our trip to London was so absorbing, not at lot else got done! We’ll be talking more about our great day-long meeting with the Wellcome Trust in the weeks to come. For now, though, we’d like to point out some of the latest additions to our collection. Just click on the links below to read….
- Emile Lossouarn’s La Prevention de la Cecite en Chine (1926).
- James Rymer’s A treatise upon indigestion, and the hypochondriac disease; and upon the inflammatory and atonic gout; with the methods of cure : together with observations on the use and abuse of the cardiac tincture in the above diseases, and full directions for taking it in other nervous affections, in broken constitutions, and habits impaired by hot climates, &c. (1790)
- New York Hospital School of Nursing Alumnae Association’s The Alumnae News (1929) (and many other volumes, too!)
- W. Mitchell Banks’ On the Wolffian bodies of the foetus, and their remains in the adult : including the development of the generative system (1864)
- Edwin Chadwick’s The jubilee of sanitary science (1887)
- Printing Shop for Chinese Blind: Machine for Producing Literature in Braille at Institute in Edinburgh Road (1926)
- Horace B. Dobell’s Intelligence in the van : the beginning of the beginning and the end of the end (1887)
As always, for more from the Medical Heritage Library, please visit our full collection!
From the UKMHL: Digitisation at the Royal College of Surgeons England
We are grateful for the opportunity to cross-post content from the Wellcome Library’s blog about the UK MHL project! This post originally featured there on 5/4/2015.
Over the next year the Library at the Royal College of Surgeons of England will be preparing almost 2,500 volumes to send to the Wellcome Library for digitisation as part of the UK Medical Heritage Library project. Carried out by a team-in-residence from Internet Archive at its Euston Road centre, this project will make our collections visible and accessible to a new, global audience.
Handling the items as I prepare them for digitisation is fascinating and I am frequently surprised at the variety of titles that I come across. While some may seem puzzling to today’s reader (for instance Joseph Sampson Gamgee’s 1852 inquiry “into the reasons why the horse rarely vomits”, with a further inquiry apparently necessary in 1857), others contend with issues still hotly debated even today, for example the effectiveness or necessity of vaccines, the form medical education should take, or who has responsibility for caring for the poor. Taking time to systematically examine the items is also proving useful for another on-going project at RCS England – a review which assesses the care, use, condition and significance of our entire collections (find updates and images of our [re]discoveries on twitter @HunterianLondon#CollectionsReview ).
Unusually, RCS England’s contribution will come entirely from its tracts and pamphlet collection, and consists of almost 22,000 individual titles bound in 2,500 volumes. This represents almost 80% of the pamphlet collection in total. Each item must be individually flagged with its unique identifier, a process that has caused the Library Collections Manager to scale new heights of expertise using Microsoft mail merge. The pamphlets are as diverse as they are numerous and their inclusion in the UK Medical Heritage Library indicates their rarity and interest.
Funding from the Wellcome Trust made it possible to catalogue RCS England’s tracts and pamphlet collection over four years, and the online visibility of these records has already resulted in higher usage of the collection. The UK Medical Heritage Library represents the next stage in enabling as many people as possible to use it. Items from our collection are already starting to appear on the Internet Archive site, and we are looking forward to even more people discovering some of its delights and using them in new ways.
Author: Dot Fouracre is Collections Review Assistant at the Royal College of Surgeons of England and also works part-time at the Wellcome Library.
Celebrating Nurses
National Nursing Week closed formally yesterday but we figured we could stand another day of celebrating nursing professionals. Check out some of the titles we have on nurses and nursing below!
- Laurence Humpry’s A manual of nursing, medical and surgical (1896)
- James Anderson and Ethel F. Lamport’s Notes on medical nursing: from the lectures given to the probationers at the London Hospital (1897)
- Georgiana J. Saunders’ Modern methods in nursing (1922)
- Eva Lückes’ Lectures on general nursing: delivered to the probationers of the London Hospital Training School for Nurses (1888)
- Sir Dyce Duckworth’s Sick-nursing essentially a woman’s mission: being the inaugural lecture on the qualifications for and the conduct of sick-nurses delivered at the opening of the new School of Nursing in Saint Bartholomew’s Hospital on May 1, 1877 (1877)
- J.H. Barnes’ Notes on surgical nursing: being a short course of lectures delivered at the Training School for Nurses in connection with the Liverpool Workhouse (1874)
- S.E. Orme’s The matron’s course: an introduction to hospital and private nursing (1897)
- And many volumes of The British Journal of Nursing!
As always, for more from the Medical Heritage Library, please visit our full collection!