Year: 2016

The Brains of the Operation: Processing the Records of the Office of the Executive Director

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– by Mary Hanes, Archives intern

The records generated by organizations provide important evidence about the organization’s history and function. In January of 2016, I started to process the College of Physicians of Philadelphia Office of the Executive Director records.  The Director oversees the everyday governance and administration of the College.  This includes overseeing the budget, strategic planning, special projects, and creating and maintaining relationships with other institutions. With so many responsibilities, the office generates a considerable amount of documentation, from correspondence to meeting minutes. The scope of my project includes processing boxes the Library received from the Office of the Executive Director and arranging them to better document the office’s administrative activities and governance duties.

Because the Executive Director’s Office produces so many files, the office keeps active records and sends the inactive files in boxes to the Library. Boxes arrive with varying levels of organization. Recently, the executive assistant to the current CEO requested minutes from a specific committee meeting. Although the material was located, it became clear that the collection needed processing to make it more accessible for current staff and future external researchers.

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Prescribing from the Bookshelf: S. Weir Mitchell and the Therapeutic Value of Restricting Reading

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– by Ph.D. candidate Mary Mahoney*

 

My dissertation focuses on the history of bibliotherapy, or the use of books as medicine. I recently travelled to the College of Physicians to examine the papers of Dr. S. Weir Mitchell, a physician perhaps best known for his invention of the “rest cure” to treat neurasthenia. While Mitchell certainly believed in the therapeutic value of reading in his own life – both reading and writing fiction throughout his career – his reputation has been shaped inexorably by his belief in the therapeutic value of restricting reading as a form of medicine. Neurasthenia was a disease that manifested itself in symptoms that affected the mind and body, including headaches, depression, numb limbs and exhaustion. While Mitchell genuinely believed that restricting reading was vital to resting the body and returning it to health, his female patients felt deprived because reading was a vital part of their lives.

Reading was an act that S. Weir Mitchell understood in bodily terms. Writing in Fat and Blood, his foundational work on the rest cure, he wrote about reading as an act that proved dangerous for bodies suffering from nervous exhaustion. Reading posed a threat for both the strain it placed on a reader’s eyes and the energy it drew from the body. A case study from Fat and Blood details these dangers.

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‘To be buried alive is, beyond question, the most terrible of these extremes which has ever fallen to the lot of mere mortality.’

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Cases of being accidentally buried alive date back to the 14th century when the corpse of philosopher John Duns Scotus was reportedly found outside his coffin with bloodied hands. Since then, there have been countless tales of people hearing cries and wails of the dead, longing to get out of their coffins. As recently as 2014, there was a noted case of a woman being buried alive in Peraia, Greece. The woman succumbed to cancer. Not long after her burial, her children heard screams coming from her grave. She was exhumed, and it was discovered that she actually died of cardiac arrest. To the horror of her family, it was discovered that her death occurred after she was in the grave.

The Historical Medical Library has an array of materials that touch on this subject – a subject that was, and is, still a fear to many.
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Location, Location, Location: Finding the Daunteseys of Agecroft Hall

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-by Wood Institute travel grantee Melissa Schultheis*

 

Recipe books are of particular importance to research of seventeenth-century medicine and literature. These texts provide a glimpse of early modern healthcare, both the roles of lay and professional medical providers and the principles that are foundational to the period’s understanding and treatment of the body. The College of Physicians of Philadelphia houses several seventeenth-century medical texts, including MS 10a 214, which is part of ongoing work by Rebecca Laroche and Hillary Nunn. Central to this post, however, is a recipe book signed and presumably owned by John Dauntesey (1529-1694). The Recipe book or MSS 2/070-01 contains an almanac, a transcription of “An hundred and fourteene Experiments and cures of Phillip Theophrastus Paracelsus,” several gynecological recipes, and numerous other recipes in nearly half a dozen hands in both Latin and English.[i] Signed in 1652, the manuscript, as I have discussed elsewhere, seems to represent the seventeenth-century medical community’s transition from traditional to contemporary practices. For example, MSS 2/070-01 frequently relies on Galenic medicine; however, several recipes are attributed to practitioners who work against Galenic tradition, including Paracelsus and Martinus Rulandus. This text’s amalgamation of medical trends seems indicative of the medical community’s shifting views, and with more study I hope this amalgamation can tell us more about those who used and were treated by recipes contained in MSS 2/070-01.

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Managing Maternal and Infant Mortality in Turn of the 20th-Century Philadelphia

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by Wood Institute travel grantee Emily Seitz*

 

I travelled to the Historical Medical Library of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia this past summer with the help of a grant from the Francis Clark Wood Institute. I was in Philadelphia to research my dissertation project, “What About the Woman?: Managing Maternal Mortality in Philadelphia, 1850-1973,” which asks how turn of the twentieth-century campaigns to lower the United States’ high infant mortality rates affected women’s health and altered the boundaries of the maternal-fetal relationship. The stately oak study table I called home for my two-week stay was piled high with archival materials from the Babies Hospital of Philadelphia, the Pediatric Society of Philadelphia, and the Committee on Maternal Welfare.

Why was I interested in these records? Earlier in the year I happened upon a 2013 American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology article by Mary D’Alton called “Putting the ‘M’ Back in Maternal-Fetal Medicine.”[1] In it, D’Alton urges maternal-fetal specialists to reprioritize maternal health in the wake of recent and startling statistics: maternal mortality rates in the United States have not decreased in over three decades and maternal morbidity rates are on the rise. D’Alton asserts that infant and maternal health are intimately intertwined; in other words, we focus our attention on one body at the expense of the other’s health.
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Books of War

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by Robert D. Hicks, Ph.D., Director, Mütter Museum,
Historical Medical Library, and Wood Institute for the History of Medicine*

 

Historians of the book anatomize books for their bindings, printers, paper, illustrators, and consider past readers and cultural contexts. Jorge Luis Borges wrote that a book is “an axis of innumerable relationships.”[i] A current research project has led to an inadvertent discovery and a hypothesis about relationships.

The inadvertent discovery began with my noticing ownership signatures in Civil War-related works and College bookplate data (signifying how books came into the collection). The digital catalogue of the Historical Medical Library does not include information on bookplates or inscriptions written by authors or past owners. I hypothesize that the ownership evidence in the books can re-create the social world of wartime physicians. Three-fourths of approximately 140 Fellows of The College of Physicians of Philadelphia engaged with war work at the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861.

My discovery was a book owned by Silas Weir Mitchell, MD (1829-1914), one of the most colorful, ambitious, famous, and polymathic American physicians of the 19th century and an influential Fellow of the College. Overlooked by scholars among the College’s vast Mitchell holdings is a war memoir by a former army surgeon, John Gardner Perry’s Letters from a Surgeon of the Civil War (compiled by his wife, Martha Derby Perry), published by Little, Brown of Boston in 1906.[ii] The inside front cover bears Mitchell’s bookplate (his name printed as “Weir Mitchell”) with an armorial device and the motto, “sapiens qui assiduous” (roughly, “the wise man is assiduous”) and a library date stamp of February 3, 1913. On the page opposite, the owner signed his name, “Weir Mitchell.”

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Healing Energy: Radium in America, a New Digital Exhibition at the Historical Medical Library of The College of Physicians of Philadelphia

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Dr. Robert Abbe (1851-1928)
Dr. Robert Abbe (1851-1928)

Throughout history, the Fellows of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia have been at the forefront of many advancements in the history of medicine, not least of whom was Dr. Robert Abbe, a pioneer not only in the field of plastic surgery, but also in the use of radium in medical therapy.

 

 

Jeffrey Womack, a Library volunteer and doctoral student at the University of Houston, and Tristan Dahn, Digital Projects Librarian at the Historical Medical Library, explore the discovery of radium by Pierre and Marie Curie, and tell the story of early experimentations with radium, including Dr. Abbe’s self-experimentation, and the use of radium in such “health” products as the “Radium Emanator.”

Pamphlet advertising The Saubermann Radium Emanation Activator, circa 1900.

Abbe’s long correspondence with Marie Curie culminated with her visit to the College in May 1921, during which Curie donated the piezo-electrometer currently on display in the Hutchinson alcove of the Mütter Museum.

Quartz piezo electrometer, donated to the Mütter Museum by Marie Curie in 1921.
Quartz piezo electrometer, donated to the Mütter Museum by Marie Curie in 1921.

The exhibit may be viewed at http://bit.ly/1Qpl4qA or by going to http://www.cppdigitallibrary.org/exhibits/.

Jeffrey Womack is a doctoral student at the University of Houston, completing his dissertation on the development of radium and x-ray therapies between 1895 and 1935, under the direction of Martin Melosi. His recent publications include “Nuclear Weapons, Dystopian Deserts, and Science Fiction Cinema,” in Vulcan: The International Journal of the Social History of Military Technology 1, No. 1 (2013; Bart Hacker, editor), and “Miracle in the Sky: Solar Power Satellites,” in American Energy Policy in the 1970s, (Robert Lifset, editor; Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2014). He is also a contributor to the Encyclopedia of American Environmental History. Jeffrey is currently based in the Philadelphia area, where he teaches at Drexel University.

Tristan Dahn is a recent graduate of the Library and Information Studies program at McGill University. He joined the Library staff in September 2015, and is currently overseeing the digitization of 20th century state medical journals through the Library’s partnership in the Medical Heritage Library. Tristan also is leading the Library’s experiments in the digital humanities.