Out of the stacks

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

Staff Intern work, Out of the stacks April 22, 2016April 18, 2018Access, Archives, Institutional records, MPLP, Processing

– 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.

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

Staff From our researchers, Out of the stacks, Voices from our collection April 12, 2016June 7, 2016Bibliotherapy, Neurasthenia, Reading, Rest cure, Silas Weir Mitchell, Women's healthcare

– 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.

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

Staff Out of the stacks, Staff projects March 30, 2016April 12, 2016Death, History of medicine, Mortality, Premature burial

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

Staff From our researchers, Out of the stacks, Voices from our collection March 11, 2016December 16, 2019Agecroft Hall, Deeds, Early Modern England place names, History of medicine, John Dauntesey, Recipe books

-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.

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

Staff From our researchers, Out of the stacks February 24, 2016December 16, 2019Babies Hospital of Philadelphia, History of medicine, Infant mortality, Maternal fetal medicine, Maternal morbidity, Maternal mortality

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

Staff Out of the stacks, Staff projects, Voices from our collection February 17, 2016April 12, 2016Bookplates, Civil War medicine, History of medicine, Provenance, Signatures, Silas Weir Mitchell, William Weightman

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 19^th 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.”

From ‘Bicephalic Monsters’ to ‘Brains of the Insane’: How Anatomists Built Evolutionary Hierarchies

Staff From our researchers, In the museum, Out of the stacks January 26, 2016April 12, 2016Anatomy, Archives, Disability studies, History of medicine, Medical museums, Mütter Museum, Teratology

-by Wood Institute travel grantee Trevor Engel*

Museum catalog — “Presented by Dr. Corse.” Page from the Catalogue of the Mütter Museum, Volume 1 (CPP 7/002-01). 1884.

As a freshman in college who enjoyed collecting dead things—skulls, bones, taxidermy, wet preserved animals, among other things—I always hoped that I would have the chance to visit the Mütter Museum at The College of Physicians of Philadelphia. I’ve long been fascinated by death, so the Mütter seemed to be a place I just had to visit. But never did I imagine myself in the College’s Historical Medical Library poring through the original handwritten catalog and countless other nineteenth-century documents, analyzing the language used to describe “monsters,” and investigating how anatomists procured the bodies and body parts of people we might now call “disabled.” What made it possible for me to finally visit the Mütter, however, had nothing to do with my passion for collecting dead animals, but rather the field in which I am specializing: disability history. This relatively new field investigates the experiences of disabled people and also explores “disability” and “the normal” as social, political, and cultural categories in historical context.