Voices from our collection

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.

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.

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.”

Letting Fall Grains of Sand or Pins into a Glass: Finding the Poetry of René Laennec at the Historical Medical Library

Staff From our researchers, Voices from our collection December 9, 2015April 12, 2016History of medicine, Merie’dec Laennec, Mind-body connection, Poetry, René Laennec, Stethoscopes, Tuberculosis

-by Wood Institute travel grantee Ligia Bouton*

I arrived in Philadelphia on a beautiful clear afternoon in October. After Hurricane Joaquin grazed the city a few days before, the buildings looked freshly washed and the light remained watery. I was in Philadelphia with the help of a Wood Institute Travel Grant from the College of Physicians to facilitate research toward my current creative project, “The Cage Went in Search of a Bird.” This project explores how tuberculosis captured America’s collective cultural imagination during the 19^th century, creating an image of an illness that affected both the body and the spirit. I hoped to find texts in the Historical Medical Library focused on the treatment of the disease in the 19^th century and then explore any breathing devices or other medical apparatus developed to treat tuberculosis that was housed in the Mütter Museum’s collections.

The Skin She Lived In: Anthropodermic Books in the Historical Medical Library

Staff Education and outreach, Out of the stacks, Voices from our collection October 1, 2015May 13, 2019Anthropodermic books, Dr. John Stockton Hough, History of medicine, History of the book, Human skin bookbinding

-by Beth Lander

On Wednesday, July 15, 1868, a 28 year old woman named Mary Lynch was admitted to Old Blockley, Philadelphia’s almshouse, officially known as Philadelphia General Hospital (PGH). Old Blockley was located at what is now the intersection of 34^th Street and Civic Center Boulevard, on the southeast corner of the University of Pennsylvania. Blockley was where you went when you could not afford care in a private hospital.

Exterior view of the Ward Building, Philadelphia General Hospital, 1888. PGH 1.23, Records of the Philadelphia General Hospital (1884-1941).

The Women’s Receiving Register from PGH lists a small amount of information for each patient: name, birthplace (a country, if other than the United States. Mary was born in Ireland.), age, temperate or intemperate habits (Were you a drunk, or not?), date of admission, ward, color and diagnosis.

Mary suffered from phthitis, an archaic term for tuberculosis of the lungs. She was listed as being of temperate habits.