Tag: Yale Cushing/Whitney Medical Library

Yale Medicine Goes to War, 1917

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A new exhibition from Medical Heritage Library partner Yale University entitled “Yale Medicine Goes to War, 1917″ commemorates America’s entry into the war at the local level. From mobilizing a “first of its kind” Mobile Hospital Unit, No. 39, to research on the effects of chemical warfare, this exhibition explores the many ways that Yale Medical School faculty, researchers, and students contributed to the war effort at home and abroad. The war diaries of Harvey Cushing, a pioneering neurosurgeon and Sterling Professor of Neurology at the Yale School of Medicine (1932–1939), are also on view, documenting the trials and trauma of war, particularly brain damage arising from shell fragments, shrapnel, and gunshot wounds. Continue reading

Deaf Education- Celebrating the legacy of Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet

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~This post courtesy Katie Healey and Caroline Lieffers, doctoral students in Yale’s Program for the History of Science and Medicine, with additions by Melissa Grafe, John R. Bumstead Librarian for Medical History, Head of the Medical Historical Library.

Portrait of Thomas H. Gallaudet (1787-1851). Gallaudet is shown here wearing glasses; his name in American Sign Language is the same as the sign for GLASSES. From Henry Barnard, A discourse in commemoration of the life, character, and services of the Rev. Thomas H. Gallaudet, LL. D. : delivered before the citizens of Hartford, Jan. 7th, 1852 : with an appendix containing history of deaf-mute instruction and institutions and other documents (Hartford: Brockett & Hutchison, 1852):

Portrait of Thomas H. Gallaudet (1787-1851). Gallaudet is shown here wearing glasses; his name in American Sign Language is the same as the sign for GLASSES. From Henry Barnard, A discourse in commemoration of the life, character, and services of the Rev. Thomas H. Gallaudet, LL. D. : delivered before the citizens of Hartford, Jan. 7th, 1852 : with an appendix containing history of deaf-mute instruction and institutions and other documents (Hartford: Brockett & Hutchison, 1852).

Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet, instrumental in the establishment of the first permanent school for deaf children in the United States, was born on December 10th, 1787. The popular account of the school’s founding states that in 1814, the young Reverend Gallaudet wondered why the daughter of his Hartford neighbor did not laugh or play with his own younger siblings. Nine-year-old Alice Cogswell was deaf, and her family and friends struggled to communicate with her. Gallaudet traced the letters H-A-T into the dirt with a stick and pointed to his hat. Alice immediately understood, and Gallaudet realized his life’s calling. After observing different methods of instruction and communication on a European voyage supported by Alice’s father, Dr. Mason Fitch Cogswell (BA Yale 1780), Gallaudet concluded that the French method of sign language was most effective. He recruited Deaf Frenchman Laurent Clerc to help establish the Connecticut Asylum for the Education and Instruction of Deaf and Dumb Persons, which opened in Hartford on April 15, 1817. Alice Cogswell was its first registered student. Now called the American School for the Deaf, this historic institution will celebrate its bicentennial in 2017.

Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet earned his bachelor’s (1805) and master’s (1808) degrees at Yale before graduating from Andover Theological Seminary in 1814.  Following his serendipitous encounter with Alice Cogswell, Gallaudet embarked on a year-long tour of European deaf schools. After a frustrating visit to the secretive Braidwood Academy in England, which taught speech and speechreading, he attended a demonstration of the French manual method—that is, sign language—in London. The National Institute of the Deaf in Paris invited Gallaudet to study French Sign Language and deaf instruction. Impressed with their curriculum, Gallaudet persuaded the esteemed instructor Laurent Clerc, a former student of the Institute, to teach deaf children in America.  A commemoration of Gallaudet’s life was printed in 1852 and is available through the Medical Heritage Library partner National Library of Medicine.

Laurent Clerc was born in La Balme, France in 1785. As he later recounted in his autobiography, he fell into a fire as a toddler, which left him deafened and scarred his cheek. His name is signed by brushing the index and middle fingers twice down the cheek. Clerc was an exceptional student and later an internationally known instructor at the National Institute of the Deaf in Paris. He left his students only reluctantly in 1816, when Gallaudet persuaded him to come help American children. During the fifty-two-day voyage across the Atlantic, Clerc and Gallaudet exchanged lessons in French Sign Language and English, and Clerc kept a diary to practice his English.  The Laurent Clerc papers (MS140)  are available for research at Yale University’s Manuscripts and Archives, and the Mason Fitch Cogswell papers (GEN MSS 920)   are at Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University.  Read an address on deaf education delivered by Clerc in 1818 through this online copy, provided by the Medical Heritage Library.

Title page from Laurent Clerc, An address, written by Mr. Clerc, and read by his request at a public examination of the pupils in the Connecticut Asylum : before the governour and both houses of the legislature, 28th May, 1818 (Hartford: Hudson & Co. Printers, 1818).

Title page from Laurent Clerc, An address, written by Mr. Clerc, and read by his request at a public examination of the pupils in the Connecticut Asylum : before the governour and both houses of the legislature, 28th May, 1818 (Hartford: Hudson & Co. Printers, 1818).

Gallaudet University in Washington D.C. was named Gallaudet College in 1894 in honor of Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet.  Founded in 1864, Gallaudet University is the world’s only liberal arts college specifically for the Deaf and hard of hearing. It remains a center of both Deaf culture and Deaf rights activism.

For more on Gallaudet and Deaf education and culture, make sure to visit, the online exhibition Deaf: Cultures and Communication, 1600 to the Present.

Digital Highlights: Getting Ready for All Hallows

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Halloween is only a week away, so in preparation, here are some of the texts we can offer on the ghostly and ghastly.

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!

Digital Highlights: Disquisitions on Ancient Medicine

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What we might now call “history of medicine,” Richard Millar in 1811 thought of calling “medical archaeology.” His work in the field was inspired by “some singular traits” he felt he had discovered in ancient Greek medicine that he thought had parallels in other “rude, or semibarbarous, tribes…” and he wrote a book to prove it.

He starts at the beginning: “This will commence with the earliest trace of tradition or history,…” (29)

Flip through the pages below or follow this link to read Disquisitions in the history of medicine. Part first, Exhibiting a view of physic, as observed to flourish, during remote periods, in Europe, and the East.

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

Digital Highlights: Every day, in every way…

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If you’re still working on those New Year’s resolutions, perhaps today’s title can help! Emile Coué’s “formula” might be considered one of the originals in the ‘self-help’ genre. His theory worked along the lines of auto-suggestion: you could talk yourself — or someone else — into the desired result by sheer repetition. The classic example was “Every day, in every way, I am getting better and better.” If nothing else, this phrase has a gentle rhyme to it that makes it a genuine 1920s earworm!

Flip through the pages below to get some inspiration for your self-transformation or follow this link to read The practice of autosuggestion by the method of Emile Coué (1922).

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

Research travel grant for Yale’s Cushing/Whitney Medical Historical Library

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gyorgyey

Ferenc Gyorgyey, 1979, courtesy of Yale Medicine.

The Historical Library of the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University is pleased to announce its eighth annual Ferenc Gyorgyey Research Travel Award for use of the Historical Library.

The Medical Historical Library, located in New Haven, Connecticut, holds one of the country’s largest collections of rare medical books, journals, prints, photographs, and pamphlets. Special strengths are the works of Hippocrates, Galen, Vesalius, Boyle, Harvey, Culpeper, Priestley, and S. Weir Mitchell, and works on anesthesia, and smallpox inoculation and vaccination. The Library owns over fifty medieval and renaissance manuscripts, Arabic and Persian manuscripts, and over 300 medical incunabula.  The notable Clements C. Fry Collection of Prints and Drawings has over 2,500 fine prints, drawings, and posters from the 15th century to the present on medical subjects.  The library also holds a great collection of tobacco advertisements, patent medicine ephemera, and a large group of materials from Harvey Cushing, one of the founding fathers of neurosurgery.

The 2015-2016 travel grant is available to historians, medical practitioners, and other researchers who wish to use the collections of the Medical Historical Library:  http://historical.medicine.yale.edu/.  There is a single award of up to $1,500 for one week of research during the academic fiscal year July 1, 2015 – June 30, 2016.  Funds may be used for transportation, housing, food, and photographic reproductions. The award is limited to residents of the United States and Canada. Applicants should send a completed application form, curriculum vitae and a description of the project including the relevance of the collections of the Historical Library to the project, and two references attesting to the particular project. Preference will be given to applicants beyond commuting distance to the Historical Library.  This award is for use of Medical Historical special collections and is not intended for primary use of special collections in other libraries at Yale.  Applications are due by Monday, MAY 4th, 2015.  They will be considered by a committee and the candidates will be informed by JUNE 8th, 2015. An application form can be found on our website: http://historical.medicine.yale.edu/us/grant

Applications and requests for further information should be sent to:

Melissa Grafe, Ph.D
John R. Bumstead Librarian for Medical History
Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library
Yale University
P.O. Box 208014
New Haven, CT 06520-8014
Telephone: 203- 785-4354
Fax: 203-785-5636
E-mail: melissa.grafe@yale.edu

Additional information about the Library and its collections may be found at: http://historical.medicine.yale.edu/

Year One of “Expanding the Medical Heritage Library” Is Complete!

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We have just submitted our first year report on our second National Endowment for the Humanities-funded grant, “Expanding the Medical Heritage Library: Preserving and Providing Online Access to Historical Medical Periodicals.” Under this grant, we have been digitizing numerous 19th century American medical journals (approximately 1,863 volumes so far!) and we’ve excerpted some of the highlights below.

The College of Physicians of Philadelphia
The College staff were particularly excited about a number of our selections. Among the most significant contributions were 147 volumes comprising the four leading 19th‐century homeopathy journals (American homoeopathist/American homoeopath/American physician, Hahnemannian monthly, Homoeopathic physician, and Homeopathic recorder). Additionally, we included the entire run of the Transactions of The College of Physicians of Philadelphia, which includes a complete run of all volumes published throughout more than 200 years (volumes were published in 1793 and 1841‐2002). As the holder of the journals’ copyright, the College of Physicians agreed to release these volumes freely into the public domain for this project. The Transactions include proceedings from meetings, lists of Fellows, and detailed appendices that collectively describe how the College of Physicians shaped and engaged with emerging American medical trends.

Columbia University Libraries/Information Services
Columbia digitized 71 titles, the bulk of which came from the last quarter of the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th. These were years when U.S. medicine came of age – from its disorganized, underfunded, and generally unscientific state in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War to a powerful, scientifically cutting‐edge, and lavishly financed medical establishment by the end of the First World War. Many of the journals Columbia chose to digitize were created by emerging specialties such as dermatology and venereology; pediatrics; and neurology/psychiatry. They also concentrated on public health and climatology journals knowing that these cover an unusually broad range of topics that appeal to researchers in a wide range of disciplines. Additionally, they included many New York City journals since their holdings of these were usually complete. These included the Brooklyn Medical Journal and its successor, the Long Island Medical Journal (1888‐1922); the long‐running and influential New York Medical Journal (1865‐1922); and two New York German‐language journals: the New Yorker Medicinische Monatsschrift (1852‐53) and the New Yorker Medizinische Presse (1885‐1888).

Yale University’s Cushing/Whitney Medical Library
The titles Yale chose represent a variety of themes, from deafness to dentistry. Yale choose the journals, in collaboration with partners, based on perceived need, as many of the titles were not fully available digitally, allowing Yale to fill in gaps. A significant title selected by Yale was the American Annals of the Deaf and Dumb, a Connecticut journal that holds importance as one of the oldest journals in English that focuses on the education of the deaf.

Our Reading List

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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.

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!