Out of the stacks

Race, Genitals, and Walt Whitman in Dr. Leidy’s Lectures

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

– by Christopher Willoughby, Ph.D.*

 

Over the last five years, I have spent months conducting research at the Historical Medical Library at The College of Physicians of Philadelphia. In my dissertation, I examine the history of slavery and racial science in American medical schools before the Civil War, and my research at the College of Physicians played an essential role in completing this project. One of the central tasks that I undertook at the Historical Medical Library was an intensive study of Joseph Leidy, the Professor of Anatomy at the University of Pennsylvania’s Medical Department for much of the second half of the nineteenth century.

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However Human I am Allowed to Be

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

– by Wood Institute travel grantee Erin Solomons*

 

In November 2016, I visited the College of the Physicians of Philadelphia, under a travel grant from the F.C. Wood Institute. Over the past year and a half, I have been pursuing a practice-based MPhil/PhD in Photography in the United Kingdom. This means that I use the creation of artwork and traditional research methods to critically assess my area of interest. Prior to enrolling in the program, my art practice used raw materials and photography to investigate mental health, trauma, and American identity. My work has reflected the boundaries between the human body and intrusive interactions upon it.

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Full diet or half diet?

Staff Out of the stacks, Staff projects , ,

– by Robert Hicks, Director of the Mütter Museum & the Historical Medical Library
William Maul Measey Chair for the History of Medicine

 

Special collections libraries occasionally spawn serendipitous discoveries while performing the most tedious tasks. Reference Librarian Caitlin Angelone was performing another bout of purging decades’ old pamphlet boxes of unneeded offprints of medical journal papers when she discovered a yellowed, folded wall poster. Carefully opening it, she discovered a ten-day diet schedule for posting in Union army hospital kitchens during the Civil War. In fact, the fine print at the bottom of the schedule commanded medical officers to conduct an “experimental trial” of the diet plan and report results to Surgeon General William A. Hammond, and scrupulously account for and report related expenses under the hospital fund, dated October 28, 1862.

 

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I Love the Flu

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

– by Emily T.H. Redman*

 

I love the flu.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t love the fever and chills, the runny nose, the sore throat, or the all-encompassing ache that seems to span from deep in the bones all the way to one’s hair follicles. I don’t love the complications—the respiratory infections, the myocarditis. In particular, I really don’t love the potential for death. What I love the flu for is divorced from these horrors, and lies in the pedagogical value afforded by teaching students about the history of influenza epidemics. Influenza epidemics are fascinating on a micro level, an evolving and mutating virus hitting the body with a slightly different impact every year. But flu season hits us on another level; as we collectively respond to epidemics it shapes our cultures, ideas, and traditions.

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Making the Medieval Digital

Staff Digital humanities, Education and outreach, Out of the stacks, Staff projects , , , , , ,

“If [medieval] culture is regarded as a response to the environment then the elements in that environment to which it responded most vigorously were manuscripts.”

– C. S. Lewis, The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature

Composite Medical Miscellany I. England, 15th century. Call number 10a 215.

The Historical Medical Library, as part of the Philadelphia Area Consortium of Special Collections Libraries (PACSCL), is participating in a CLIR grant to digitize Western medieval and early modern manuscripts held by libraries in the greater Philadelphia area.  The Library is lending thirteen medical manuscripts dating from c. 1220 to 1600 to this project, called Bibliotheca Philadelphiensis (BiblioPhilly).  Our manuscripts will be digitized at the University of Pennsylvania’s Schoenberg Center for Electronic Text and Images (SCETI) and the digital images hosted through the University of Pennyslvania’s OPenn manuscript portal and dark-archived at Lehigh University.

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On The Island of Dr. Morrow

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

– by Wood Institute travel grantee Madeline Hodgman*

 

I came to the Historical Medical Library at the College of Physicians of Philadelphia in July 2016 to research the American Social Hygiene Association for my senior honors thesis at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. My thesis explores the development of sex education in American society throughout the 20th century, comparing and contrasting both comprehensive and abstinence-only curricula. I learned through my work at the Library that “social hygiene” rhetoric not only referred to the public health epidemic of sexually transmitted diseases, but was also used as coded language to mask a eugenics agenda. This presented an interesting contradiction to my research — not only was the social hygiene movement one of the first comprehensive sex education campaigns for public health, but it was also actively encouraging abstinence in terms of eugenic “fitness” for procreation.

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The Battle Creek Sanitarium: Constructing History Through Ephemera

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

The Battle Creek Sanitarium of Battle Creek, Michigan was a health resort which employed holistic methods based on principles promoted by the Seventh-Day Adventist Church. Treatments included hydrotherapy, electrotherapy, phototherapy, physical training, exposure to fresh air, enemas, and dietetic plans crafted to lower patient’s libidos in order to live a chaste lifestyle free of sin. It became a destination for both prominent and middle-class American citizens, including celebrities such as J.C. Penney, Henry Ford, Amelia Earhart, Warren Harding, Mary Todd Lincoln, and Sojourner Truth. In order to draw so many prominent figures and a wealthy base of clients to its somewhat remote location in Michigan – and to promote the ideas of its founders, the Kellogg brothers – the Sanitarium needed to produce a wide swath of promotional materials, many of which survive today in The Historical Medical Library’s Medical Trade Ephemera collection.

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