From our researchers

Diet and Nutrition in the Early Age of Aviation

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by Wood Institute travel grantee Bryce Evans

 

Many people dislike airline food, but that was what brought me to the College of Physicians as a Wood Institute scholar (‘Woodie’)! In the literal sense, the airline food on the American Airlines flight over from London wasn’t bad … I’ve certainly had worse. But the reason for my trip was to further research the scientific history of airline food – certainly a niche topic, but one which is pretty universal and always sure to elicit strong opinions.   

 

My time at the library was spent researching diet and nutrition in the early age of aviation. In ensuring the comfort and wellbeing of passengers and crew, much attention was paid to suitable foodstuffs to consume while airborne. I gained a fascinating glimpse of how theories developed around how the human body copes with altitude, air pressure, turbulence, lack of oxygen, and airsickness and specific thoughts on the gastro-intestinal processes attached to these.  

 

One has to remember that flying is a very recent human experience. Although most people these days have been in an airplane at least once, until recently flying was once the sole preserve of an elite (largely white male) few. Scientists longed for more detail on the short and long term effects on the body, how palatable food could be served in the air, and what the effect was of eating a meal at such altitude.   

 

Of course, much of the material in the library concerns an earlier period, and there were some interesting bits and pieces on those ‘mariners of the upper atmosphere’, the 18th and 19th century balloonists who pioneered understanding of what happened to the body when headed for the clouds. 

 

Picture of journal volumes on shelf.
Journal of Aviation Medicine on display in Norris Room for an event.

 

However, the most valuable resource was the complete set of The Journal of Aviation Medicine, spanning the 1920s to the 1960s. This was a treasure trove, with numerous articles relating to my topic. For example, authors explored themes such as the effect of altitude and oxygen upon primary taste perception, learning how the taste perception of sweet, salt, sour and bitter changes at 25,000 feet. These pioneering studies helped the major airlines to innovate around airline food, working with culinary professionals to develop suitable menus. Although many people deride airline food, the production of half-way appetizing food in the circumstances was, if not quite miraculous, underpinned by hard science. 

 

These were the early days of aviation and much of the material is ‘of its time’: writings on the topic were heavily gendered and racialized and often geared towards the strategic priorities of the US Air Force as the USA headed towards entry into the Second World War and post-war global dominance. Similarly, much of the early experiments into diet and digestion in the air would not meet ethical standards of research today. Nonetheless, it is interesting to chart the development of scientific insight around diet, nutrition and flying. These discoveries were of great use later on as the space race developed during the Cold War and astronauts’ diet assumed great importance. Space food owes a huge debt to airline food. 

 

What’s clear from the material is that, in many ways, aircraft in the early days were flying laboratories where the endurance of the human body was put to the test. Airlines were keen to maintain the physical and physiological efficiency of their crew. At the same time, early aviators were very much the ‘guinea pigs’ when it came to research into airborne diet.  

 

Gastrointestinal considerations were integral to the new science of aviation medicine, which examined phenomena such as pressure breathing, cardiovascular and respiratory dynamics, body temperature responses and – in terms of preventive medicine – longer term disease factors precipitated by the new phenomenon, and career choice, of global air transportation. 

 

To research in such august surroundings was a pleasure. I spent many contented hours in the Gross Library and the Norris Library and the behind-the-scenes glimpse at The Stacks was about as fun as it gets for a professional historian. I’d like to express my sincere thanks to Kristen, Shirley, Mary and Heidi: they were always helpful and always good company, and I’m proud to have worn the yellow lanyard and to have been a ‘Woodie’ for the week! 

 

Patients’ Experiences of Tertiary Syphilis Treatment at the Philadelphia Orthopaedic Hospital and Infirmary for Nervous Diseases

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– by Janet Lynne Golden, Professor Emerita at Rutgers University

 

I have always wanted to write about patients’ experiences of illness and ask how new diagnostic tools, treatments, and knowledge changed their daily lives. And I have always wanted to dig into the vast collection of patient records from the Philadelphia Orthopaedic Hospital and Infirmary for Nervous Diseases (hereafter POH). My interest in the records began thanks to the late Larry McHenry, Jr., M.D. who had hoped to write a history of the POH, the nation’s first neurological hospital. The materials from the POH are a goldmine, and include administrative records and, more importantly, casebooks that document the experiences of patients being treated for a variety of ailments.

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Examining Letters to Understand Medical History: The Samuel Preston Moore Papers

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– by Wood Institute travel grantee Molly Nebiolo*

 

Samuel Preston Moore was a physician in Philadelphia in the mid-eighteenth century whose surviving letters reveal some of the deep connections physicians had within the Pennsylvania colony. In these letters, we can visualize the networks urban physicians had with more rural areas of the colony. Moore, who later became the provincial treasurer from 1754 to 1768 and was the treasurer of the Pennsylvania Hospital in 1767-1768, is a good example of this because of the rich detail he includes in some of the letters housed at the Historical Medical Library at the College of Physicians of Philadelphia (HML).[1]

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Commitment

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– by Wood Institute travel grantee Maureen Cummins*

 

I spent a fascinating week this past summer at the Historical Medical Library of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia conducting research for a limited-edition artist’s book, Commitment. Like many of my titles, Commitment is a double-entendre, referring both to a marital or romantic bond and hospitalization for insanity. Suffice to say, the project explores the connection between intimate human relationships and mental illness.
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Medical Schools and Their Reputations, a Concern both Past and Present

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– by Wood Institute travel grantee Laura Smith*

 

On November 1, 1874, Dr. James H. Lenow procured the cadaver of an African American man from the state penitentiary in Arkansas and began dissecting it in a shed at the Little Rock Barracks, a military facility.  Lenow would become an early faculty member at what would eventually be known as the University of Arkansas Medical School (UAMS) which was also located in Little Rock. The story of the dissection gave him prestige among the city’s residents and inspired local confidence in a growing medical status in the South.  Lenow’s was the first legal dissection in Arkansas, and the state was so mesmerized by the deed that they built a monument to the dissection in May of 1927 on the spot it took place.  The monument still stands today.

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Conceptualizing Malaria in Medical Terms, 1827-1838

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– by Wood Institute travel grantee Urmi Engineer Willoughby*

 

It is difficult to pinpoint the presence of the disease presently called “malaria” in early America because of the inconsistent terminology used by doctors in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

This is partially because the symptoms of malaria, which include fever, headache, chills, muscle aches, nausea, jaundice, vomiting, and general malaise, resembled other common diseases such as yellow fever, typhoid fever, and influenza. For much of the nineteenth century, doctors in Europe and North America referred to the disease using descriptive terms that indicated observed symptoms and environmental factors. The most distinctive features of malaria are its periodicity and alternating of chills and fever, evident in the medical term “intermittent fever,” the more common “fever and ague,” and more specific terms that identified the intervals between attacks of fever (quotidian, tertian, and quartan fever).

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Quakers All the Way Down: Lunacy & the Society of Friends in Early Philadelphia

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– by Wood Institute travel grantee Sharlene Walbaum, Ph.D.*

 

Imagine this: it is 1750. You work a farm near Philadelphia. Your child, now a young adult, hears disturbing voices, is suspicious and fearful, and sometimes lashes out violently. It is terrible and sad. You feel the weight of responsibility to your child and to others. What are your choices? There are no emergency rooms, mental health care clinics, psychotherapists, or antipsychotic medications.

Families and communities were responsible for someone experiencing mental illness, although the ways in which that obligation was met seem cruel today. If the person was dangerous to self or others, he or she might live chained in a shed or a hole dug in the earthen floor of the kitchen that was covered with a grating. Or, he or she might face a potentially worse fate – jail or the almshouse. If danger was not a concern, he or she might be left to wander out of doors and depend on the kindness of neighbors. Confinement, incarceration, homelessness – how different are options today?

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