Like most cultural institutions in the greater Philadelphia area, the Historical Medical Library (HML) along with the rest of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, closed to the public in mid-March due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
We closed in a hurry, with about 3 hours warning. Our focus was on securing the collection before we gave thought to what files we might need to take home with us to support work for an unknown period of time.
And being a librarian is challenging when you are away from your collection, particularly since the HML staff had been working intently on collections maintenance prior to closure. But as those of you in the profession know, there is always “virtual” work that can be done from the comfort of home.
One of those “virtual” projects involves transcription, the distilling of handwritten texts into a typed document. We are focusing on eight texts that have been digitized through a Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) Hidden Collections grant obtained through our partnership in the Philadelphia Area Consortium for Special Collections Libraries (PACSCL). This project, “For the Health of the New Nation…” will result in the digitization of every extant primary source documenting medical education in Philadelphia created between1746 and 1868.
All eight texts tell of infectious disease etiology and treatment as taught by Philadelphia physicians in the 19th century. Six are from HML collections and two are from the collections at Thomas Jefferson University.
The transcription of one student notebook, the first volume of Jacob Jeanes’ notes of lectures given by Dr. Nathaniel Chapman (c. 1821 -1822) has been completed, but only because of the hard work of a group of people who work as far away from the library as one can at the College: our Visitor Services (VS) staff.
I have to admit a bias: I find that some people have a hard time reading modern cursive, much less the cursive used in the 19th century. I have had Ph.D. candidates in the reading room who need assistance translating handwritten documents. This frustrates me, perhaps because I am old and cantankerous.
I admit that when I approached our team of undaunted VS staff – Diego Figueroa, Dana Suleymanova, Patrick Magee, Josh Bicker, Jessica Vacek and Charlie Dawson – to seek their assistance with this project, I was worried that they would find 19th century text too challenging. Those long “s’s” can be difficult! Nineteenth century medical terms are archaic! Medical students then had poor spelling! Pharmaceutical abbreviations! INK BLOTS!
Boy, was I schooled.
Transcription should be a time consuming process, first on the part of the transcriber, who has to get used to a person’s handwriting, use of punctuation, marginalia, etc. Plus you hope that the transcriber enjoys what they are reading, because you can see their enjoyment in their final product.
Secondly, the transcribed product has to be proofed against the original. That’s the job of library staff, mostly me on this first volume, and proofing is nothing if not time consuming.
That time, though, is well spent. To be immersed in a period of history in which there was no understanding of viruses or germs, when there were no antibiotics, when theories of infection were informed by concepts of bodily humors and fear of miasmas, is to be immersed in seeing how people in a period of time understood their bodies, the use of plants as medicinals, as well as the intersection of physicians and patients.
To have the privilege of this immersion in a time of modern pandemic is to see how little has changed:
- We wear masks to limit exhalations of shed virus, a modern miasma.
- Hydroxychloroquine, a synthetic form of quinine, might be an effective treatment for COVID-19. Quinine was originally derived from Peruvian Bark, a medicinal referenced throughout the first volume of Jeanes’ notes.
- We can only sustain critically ill people with the hope that their bodies will recover, much like physicians in the early 19th
It is evident that the VS staff thoroughly enjoyed their immersion. They had no problem with the 19th century cursive, they obviously took time to search out medical terms to be sure they were spelled correctly, they asked excellent questions when needed – I was schooled, my biases challenged, my grumpy self put in my grumpy place. I am grateful for their willingness to leap into the past.
The results of their hard work are now discoverable through our online public access catalog. A PDF of their transcription is now linked directly to the bibliographic record for the book, as is the digitized version of Jeanes’ notebook, which is available through the Internet Archive. This effort results in literally a single point of access for researchers: metadata, a surrogate of the original, and a usable transcription.
You can access the final product here. Check the links under “External Resources.”
This model is one that the HML hopes to be able to continue with the content digitized under this grant. For this opportunity, we thank the Council on Library and Information Resources for their generosity in supporting this effort and we thank our partners in PACSCL for their contributions.