The Diversity of Hormone Therapies in the United States, 1920-1964

Staff From our researchers, Out of the stacks , , ,

– by Kate Grauvogel*

 

With the isolation of estrogens, androgens, progestins, and insulin in the 1920s and 30s, boundless therapeutic uses for hormones became possible.[i] Fertility control, mental illness, and tuberculosis were just a few of the seemingly disparate problems that researchers attempted to treat or control by regulating hormones. My research adds to this picture by showing just how varied these uses were and how the community of researchers compared and coordinated their efforts. At the Historical Medical Library of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, I discovered additional diverse uses for hormone therapies in the published works of Dr. Edward Strecker and the papers and published works of Dr. Max B. Lurie.

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Battle Creek Sanitarium

Staff #TravelTuesday , , , ,

Looking for your beach bod? Some new found Battle Creek Sanitarium ephemera may be able to help you out! To read more about the company check out our digital exhibit here.

Battle Creek specialized in health foods, their most famous being cornflakes. The Sanitarium promoted a grain-heavy diet without stimulants and added sugars. Battle Creek sent out colorful ephemera to doctors and wealthy patients in hopes they would visit or buy their food through the catalogs.

 

Example of health foods listings

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If You Build it, They Will Come (And Maybe They Will Read It Too)

Tristan Dahn Digital humanities, Staff projects , ,

Since starting as Digital Projects Librarian here at the Historical Medical Library of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, one of my jobs has been to create new interpretive online exhibitions featuring unique aspects of our collections. Digital exhibitions are a great way to bring life to collections and to promote your institution. However, many exhibitions based on just text and images fail to be engaging in our age of constant clicking and easy distraction.

A plethora of articles exist showing that people do not engage with text online the same way they might if they were reading a book or a print article. Simply type “how people read online” into your favorite search engine and you’ll see headlines like, “How People Read Online: Why You Won’t Finish This Article” from Salon, or “Myth #1: People Read Online,” from the user design blog UXMyths. Indeed, a study by Jakob Nielsen, a prominent web usability expert, which tracked readers eyes as they read online, showed that only about 20% of the words of an average online text were actually being read. Studies like this show that online readers scan and click.

If you or your institution are going to be putting the time and effort into creating digital content around your collections, it is worth thinking about how to create digital exhibitions catered to people’s online behavior. Luckily, people in the digital humanities world have been thinking about this problem and have created tools for content creators to more easily build interactive and engaging exhibitions. I will be highlighting two such tools that I used in the creation of our last two major digital exhibitions.

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Before Leprosy became Hansen’s Disease

Staff From our researchers, Out of the stacks, Voices from our collection , , , ,

– by Elizabeth Schexnyder*

 

I’m always on the lookout for materials that have a connection to leprosy. In particular to the leprosarium established in Carville, Louisiana. Hansen’s disease is another name for leprosy.

Last year, a visitor from Philadelphia toured the National Hansen’s Disease Museum in Carville, where I am the curator.  He suggested that I look into the collections at the Mütter Museum and Historical Medical Library. He thought we had much in common.  And so we did.

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Why Wood-n’t You Want to Be An Archivist?

Staff Intern work , , , ,

– by Carly Schanock, Archives intern

 

As a graduate student in the Library and Information Sciences program at Drexel, you learn a lot about theory and read many articles about archives and archival work from those who have experience in the field. I couldn’t help but be jealous of those with practical experience in the archival field as there is only so much you can learn from reading. I’d previously done work with digital archives so I wanted an opportunity to work with physical materials. I had visited the Mütter Museum one weekend but hadn’t realized at the time that they also had a library and archives. It was during one of my graduate courses at Drexel that I had to interview an archivist. I discovered the Historical Medical Library and ended up touring there for the class. Luckily, just a short time later I received an email about an archives internship available at the Historical Medical Library and I jumped on the chance. I began my internship at the Historical Medical Library in January 2018.

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Seeing is Believing: Ophthalmology Over the Ages

Tristan Dahn #SeeingisBelieving, Out of the stacks, Staff projects , , ,

We have all heard the phrase “an eye for an eye.” The full passage, from The Code of Hammurabi, 2250 B.C.E., reads, “If a man destroy the eye of another man, they shall destroy his eye.” Less well known are the other ocular codes, including, “If a physician open an abscess (in the eye) of a man with a bronze lancet and destroy the man’s eye, they shall cut off his fingers.”

Ophthalmology, in a way, thus existed in ancient Babylon, meaning that the field is over 4,000 years old. Indeed, the ancient Egyptians detailed the treatment of cataracts and trachoma in papyri dating to 1650 B.C.E.

Hippocrates, the father of all medicine who lived in Greece in 5th century B.C.E., knew of the optic nerve, though he did not understand its function. He described many treatments for maladies of the eye, including restricted diets, hot footbaths and even cutting incisions into the scalp to excise the “morbid humors” of the eye. Galen, whose influence on Western medicine through the 18th century cannot be overstated, wrote two volumes related to ophthalmology, both of which are lost to history. However, his Anatomy and Physiology of the Eye exists to this day and prevailed for nearly 1,500 years after his death in 210 C.E.

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