Voices from our collection

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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I Can’t Say

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– by Marie Hathaway, Library Assistant

 

Prior to the closing of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia for COVID-19, my co-worker Kristen Pinkerton and I were working in the stacks at the Historical Medical Library processing journal volumes for deaccessioning and updating metadata for journals that will remain. Going through the collection volume by volume to update metadata allowed us to get to know the collection in ways we might not have based on researcher requests alone. We were continually surprised. Just in the week prior to closing I found a colorful pamphlet about WWII-era chemical warfare and Kristen found a year book featuring a medical student’s romantic poem about spermatozoa.

As we’ve transitioned from working in the stacks to working from home, Kristen and I have been helping to comb through another part of the library’s collection—its digital resources. Like the physical stacks, the online collection has proven to be full of surprising and fascinating information.
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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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Repost: “Caged birds sing”: The Sophia E. Perry Diaries

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Note: This post originally appeared on the In Her Own Right: A Century of Women’s Activism, 1820-1920 blog on 30 March 2020.

 

Many of the materials included as part of In Her Own Right represent women who fought for equal rights, jobs, and education in a man’s world. However, the Sophia Perry diaries give voice to another overlooked part of the population: (women) patients in mental institutions.

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

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– 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.

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William Osler, Medicine, and Fairy Tales

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– 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.

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