Out of the stacks

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

Staff From our researchers, Out of the stacks October 16, 2019January 13, 202118th century mental health, 19th century mental health, History of medicine, Pennsylvania Hospital, Quakers

– 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?

Bad Blood: Nineteenth-Century Anti-Vaccination Rhetoric

Staff From our researchers, Out of the stacks May 15, 2019October 7, 2020Anti-vaccination movements, Ephemera, History of medicine, Visual communications

– by Wood Institute Travel Grantee Elena Jarmoskaite*

It was in the scorching heat of summer 2018 that I arrived in Philadelphia, having travelled some three and a half thousand miles separating the Historical Medical Library and my home in London. I came here for the sole purpose of learning more about the phenomenon most of us would happily never hear about again: the anti-vaccinationists, or, colloquially, the anti-vaxxers.

Not that long ago I would have seen vaccination opponents as a merely baffling movement, perhaps not all that distinctly removed from other fringe groups like the infamous flat-earthers or tin foil-hat-wearers; at the point of my visit, however, they had become central to my Master thesis. A lot has been said about the anti-vaccinationists, and it is an increasingly hot topic at the moment, with unfortunate and unignorable outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases happening all over the globe. Vaccination opposition, however, is a difficult subject, both because of its multi-layered nature, and because of the immense amount of emotion surrounding it.

Between the Pages: Victorian Women’s Letters to H. Lenox Hodge

Staff From our researchers, Out of the stacks, Voices from our collection April 17, 2019December 16, 2019Doctor-patient, Gynecology, H. Lenox Hodge, Nineteenth century medicine, Women's healthcare

– by Wood Institute travel grantee Annelle Brunson*

Cracking open the accordion-notebook of Dr. Hugh Lenox Hodge (1836-1881), I read from the top, thumb and index finger poised delicately at the faded yellow corners. Each turn of the page wafts the familiar musty odor of the archives. Each page brings another woman in distress. Hodge was one of the leading doctors of female diseases in nineteenth-century Philadelphia. His entries can seem vaguely impersonal, a simple version of the forms we fill out today: name, age, address, family members, symptoms, and physical notations. Unlike today, his diagnoses carry a heavy weight of non-scientific judgment.

Nineteenth-century doctors, almost exclusively male, entertained peculiar ideas about the female body. Hysteria was at its diagnostic climax, reproduction was at the root of all women’s ills, and terminality was still a gift and a punishment from God. But what intrigued me most were the documents inter-leaving the accordion; the correspondence from female patients, who offer a very different view of the patient experience. Their letters appear carefully composed but the ink blots at the ends of sentences and words suggest an occasional hesitation, a desire to get this right—and they tell a deeper story of the women’s lives read in-between the lines.

A Day at the Beach? Mothers at the Children’s Seashore House

Staff From our researchers, Out of the stacks February 25, 2019December 5, 2019Beaches, Children's health, Children's Seashore House, Fresh air treatment, Vacation

– by Meggie Crnic, Senior Lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania

As I carried the hefty, bound volumes to my research station, I wondered what stories they might reveal. Unwrapping the protective covers, I maneuvered a book to examine its spine. It was a Children’s Seashore House (CSH) patient log book from the 1920s.

From my previous research I knew that the CSH was a pediatric hospital in Atlantic City, NJ. It opened in 1872 to care for Philadelphia’s children who could not otherwise afford time at the seashore. The CSH was a beachfront institution where physicians used “marine medication,” to care for children with a range of pediatric disorders. At the hospital children experienced sea-air, sea-water, and sun bathing as their therapies. Elite medical research supported marine medication and prominent physicians on both sides of the Atlantic prescribed patients time at the shore. The belief in the curative and restorative powers of marine environments transcended national, cultural, religious, and class boundaries. It also gave rise to a vast network of pediatric seashore hospitals in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries.

William Osler, Medicine, and Fairy Tales

Staff From our researchers, Out of the stacks, Voices from our collection January 9, 2019January 9, 2019Fairy tales, History of medicine, Literature and medicine, William Osler

– by Wood Institute travel grantee Ryan Habermeyer*

Several years ago, in a daze of dissertation research, I stumbled upon a passing comment by William Osler, pioneer of modern medicine: “To talk of diseases is a sort of Arabian Nights entertainment.” What a curious coupling, fairy tales and medicine. As much as I tried to forget it and press forward with my dissertation I kept returning to that idea. How is pathology a bedfellow to fairy tales?

Here is my best conclusion: For centuries, disease was almost indistinguishable from magic – spontaneous, metamorphic, at times exotic, powerful, and mysterious. For centuries, disease provoked both wonder and fear; it elicited a kind of grotesque enchantment. Disease, I like to think Osler is suggesting, tells a story. It has traceable beginnings, chaotic middles and dramatic ends. To us, the victims, it is the villain which must be vanquished; but I imagine if diseases could talk they would cast themselves as the heroes and heroines struggling to survive against impossible odds.

How to Talk About Difficult Issues in Medicine

Staff Education and outreach, From our researchers, Out of the stacks October 19, 2018October 19, 2018Doctor-patient relationship, Hemorrhoids, History of medicine, Medical "shame"

– by Wood Institute travel grantee Dr. Edward Allen Driggers*

American medicine has many problems and virtues. One way to “probe” and vindicate the virtues and deal honestly with the problems is participating in writing the history of medicine. Many of the readers of this blog suffer from or will suffer from some sort of medical illness or pathology. One difficulty of illness is talking about it with friends, family, and relatives. American society, much like many other world societies, is oddly squeamish about bodily fluids, belches, smells, and discharges. These passé manners do not serve our open and heartfelt discussions of diseases. For instance, dear reader, I suffer from Irritable Bowel Disease (IBD), specifically Crohn’s Disease. I have had abscesses, discharges, leaky bowels, and, to confess, I do not have all my original parts that I started life with. One of the most difficult things about being chronically ill is explaining these problems to friends, family, or a new lover. How do we talk about difficult things?
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