Tag: titles

Digital Highlights: Civil War photography from the Army Medical Museum

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Photograph and case history of Private Samuel Decker. He posed for this portrait at the Army Medical Museum along with the prostheses he developed after losing both hands to an artillery accident during the battle of Perryville. — vol. 5, image 5.

The Center for the History of Medicine recently digitized a remarkable collection of Civil War-era images titled Photographs of surgical cases and specimens. Nearly 150 years after it was first published, this six-volume set provides a sobering look at the state of the art in surgery during and after the war. Continue reading

Digital Highlights: “The Wilderness Cure”

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Title page of “The Wilderness Cure.”

At the end of the nineteenth century, concerns were common over the enfeeblement of the human form — often the male human form — particularly of those who lived in cities or worked in factories or offices, those “new” and “unnatural” environments.

In 1881, Marc Cook, an office-worker in New York City, wrote The Wilderness Camp, his own personal tale of health revitalized through retreat from the city and return to the country. Continue reading

Digital Highlights: Seasonal Ailments

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List of other “American Health Primers” from the front of “The Summer and Its Diseases.”

Welcome to summer! It came in with a genuine heatwave here in the Northeast, but  heat exhaustion and sunburn aren’t the only ailments prevalent during the summer; Dr. James C. Wilson of Philadelphia wrote a whole book on the subject called (cheerfully enough!) The Summer and Its Diseases. Continue reading

Digital Highlights: The 19th Century “Foods for the Fat”

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Sample diet from "Foods for the Fat."

In current health and medical news, “obesity” is a much-used term — the current state of fright over the weight status of the “average” American would seem to be a relatively new issue being linked to everything from children’s inability to pay attention in school to the rise of Type II diabetes in adults.

But the MHL collections include plenty of older material that evinces an extremely modern concern with weight, weight-related health issues, and weight loss. Included in that number is Nathaniel Edward Davies’ 1896 Foods for the Fat: A Treatise on Corpulency and a Dietary for Its Cure. Continue reading

Digital Highlights: Kneebend, Contentment, and Glow-wine

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Distillery equipment.

Lewis Feuchtwanger’s 1858 Fermented Liquors is much more than the subtitle implies: a treatise on brewing, distilling, rectifying, and manufacturing of sugars, wines, spirits, and all known liquors, including cider and vinegar. Also, hundreds of valuable directions in medicine, metallurgy, pyrotechny, and the arts in general. Continue reading

Digital Highlights: Medical Education, circa 1900

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Reproduction of papyrus page from "History of Medicine."

The University of Edinburgh has a long and distinguished history as a school of medicine. In 1900, they published a History of Medicine: Syllabus and Specimen Extracts, combining what we would think of now as a schedule of lectures with the primary source documents (in modern terms) to be used and discussed in the class. Continue reading

Digital Highlight: Sickroom Lessons

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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