I travelled to the Historical Medical Library of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia this past summer with the help of a grant from the Francis Clark Wood Institute. I was in Philadelphia to research my dissertation project, “What About the Woman?: Managing Maternal Mortality in Philadelphia, 1850-1973,” which asks how turn of the twentieth-century campaigns to lower the United States’ high infant mortality rates affected women’s health and altered the boundaries of the maternal-fetal relationship. The stately oak study table I called home for my two-week stay was piled high with archival materials from the Babies Hospital of Philadelphia, the Pediatric Society of Philadelphia, and the Committee on Maternal Welfare.
Why was I interested in these records? Earlier in the year I happened upon a 2013 American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology article by Mary D’Alton called “Putting the ‘M’ Back in Maternal-Fetal Medicine.”[1] In it, D’Alton urges maternal-fetal specialists to reprioritize maternal health in the wake of recent and startling statistics: maternal mortality rates in the United States have not decreased in over three decades and maternal morbidity rates are on the rise. D’Alton asserts that infant and maternal health are intimately intertwined; in other words, we focus our attention on one body at the expense of the other’s health. Read more
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 19th 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.”
Throughout history, the Fellows of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia have been at the forefront of many advancements in the history of medicine, not least of whom was Dr. Robert Abbe, a pioneer not only in the field of plastic surgery, but also in the use of radium in medical therapy.
Jeffrey Womack, a Library volunteer and doctoral student at the University of Houston, and Tristan Dahn, Digital Projects Librarian at the Historical Medical Library, explore the discovery of radium by Pierre and Marie Curie, and tell the story of early experimentations with radium, including Dr. Abbe’s self-experimentation, and the use of radium in such “health” products as the “Radium Emanator.”
Pamphlet advertising The Saubermann Radium Emanation Activator, circa 1900.
Abbe’s long correspondence with Marie Curie culminated with her visit to the College in May 1921, during which Curie donated the piezo-electrometer currently on display in the Hutchinson alcove of the Mütter Museum.
Quartz piezo electrometer, donated to the Mütter Museum by Marie Curie in 1921.
Jeffrey Womack is a doctoral student at the University of Houston, completing his dissertation on the development of radium and x-ray therapies between 1895 and 1935, under the direction of Martin Melosi. His recent publications include “Nuclear Weapons, Dystopian Deserts, and Science Fiction Cinema,” in Vulcan: The International Journal of the Social History of Military Technology 1, No. 1 (2013; Bart Hacker, editor), and “Miracle in the Sky: Solar Power Satellites,” in American Energy Policy in the 1970s, (Robert Lifset, editor; Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2014). He is also a contributor to the Encyclopedia of American Environmental History. Jeffrey is currently based in the Philadelphia area, where he teaches at Drexel University.
Tristan Dahn is a recent graduate of the Library and Information Studies program at McGill University. He joined the Library staff in September 2015, and is currently overseeing the digitization of 20th century state medical journals through the Library’s partnership in the Medical Heritage Library. Tristan also is leading the Library’s experiments in the digital humanities.
“Presented by Dr. Corse.” Page from the Catalogue of the Mütter Museum, Volume 1 (CPP 7/002-01). 1884.
As a freshman in college who enjoyed collecting dead things—skulls, bones, taxidermy, wet preserved animals, among other things—I always hoped that I would have the chance to visit the Mütter Museum at The College of Physicians of Philadelphia. I’ve long been fascinated by death, so the Mütter seemed to be a place I just had to visit. But never did I imagine myself in the College’s Historical Medical Library poring through the original handwritten catalog and countless other nineteenth-century documents, analyzing the language used to describe “monsters,” and investigating how anatomists procured the bodies and body parts of people we might now call “disabled.” What made it possible for me to finally visit the Mütter, however, had nothing to do with my passion for collecting dead animals, but rather the field in which I am specializing: disability history. This relatively new field investigates the experiences of disabled people and also explores “disability” and “the normal” as social, political, and cultural categories in historical context.
As is the case in so many libraries and archives, the manuscript collections at the Historical Medical Library used to be difficult to find, let alone search. Some were available through the College website as (essentially) text files. Unless a researcher knew the name of the collection he or she wanted to consult, it was virtually impossible to find the correct information.
The old interface researchers saw when searching our finding aids.
Anti-vaccination cartoon, 1890s. From the Scrapbook of Anti-Vaccinations Clippings. Call number: 8c242.
The anti-vaccination movement has been around nearly as long as the usage of vaccinations. Vaccines were first used as early as 10th century in China in the form of inoculations which is a slightly different process than vaccination. Inoculation uses the live and non-weakened form of the virus, while vaccinations use dead or weaken forms of viruses. The Western world didn’t begin the use of inoculations until the early 1700s.
Cotton Mather, a Puritan minister from Massachusetts, introduced large scale smallpox inoculations amongst his congregation in 1721 during an outbreak of the disease, but pushback came in the form of local clergymen and physicians opposed to the inoculations. Edward Jenner, who worked as a zoologist, scientist, and physician in England during the 1770s and 80s, was the first to inoculate patients from cowpox in England. Being such a new concept to the Western world, vaccines were in use in only a small population and very few knew what was the actual process was. Even Jenner was still working out the fine details of the inoculation to make it safer to implement. Despite the process being effective and Jenner being a Christian himself, there were groups who disagreed with his inoculations because of their own religious beliefs.
Although objectors to the vaccinations were adamant in their beliefs, most states, as well as the country of England, eventually passed their own laws on the need for a vaccinated population. Objections to these laws were due to the compulsory nature of the Acts. The 1898 Act added a clause that allowed “conscientious objectors” to refuse the vaccination. Through this clause parents could apply for an exemption from inoculations for themselves and their children. The Historical Medical Library (HML) holds a book called Sanitation v. Vaccination (1912), which argues that improvements in sanitation is what lowered the cases of diseases that were having devastating effects on the populations around the world.
There are many more examples like this in the form of pamphlets, books, news clippings, and images. One of the more recent historical anti-vaccination writings in the Library is from the United Lodge of Theophists (India, 1955) “Against Vaccination and Vivisection”. At the time of the publishing of this pamphlet, the anti-vaccination movement continued to argue against compulsory inoculations and were under the impression that Jenner had used his fortune that he made from his findings to push Parliament in his direction and fund the National Vaccine Establishment.
The Library holds many more items with examples of how the anti-vaccination movement has evolved over the years. From objections to vaccinations because of religious beliefs, then anti-compulsory issues, to mistrust in the governments and medical doctors that pushed for vaccinations: all of these reasons contribute to the anti-vaccination movements today.
The links below will direct you to the catalog record or finding aid of the resource listed. Remember to check our library catalog and finding aids – these are only some of the great sources we have about the anti-vaccination movement!
I have been involved with National History Day (NHD) since 2001 as both a judge and as a librarian. Judging this competition is exciting – middle and high school students put their heart and soul into projects, some of which are of exceptional caliber. Working with NHD as a librarian can be frustrating – students seem to stick with the same 10 broad topics, all of which can be researched with little more than a few clicks on Google.
I am going to tell students a deep, dark secret held closely by NHD judges: if we, the judges, read another paper, or see another exhibition, about the atomic bomb, or about the Salem witch trials, or about Alice Paul, we might start screaming. The impact of the atomic bomb on international relations, or the impact of the trials on the development of government in New England, or Paul’s impact on women’s suffrage cannot be denied. However, I’ve read a paper each year since 2001 about the atomic bomb, regardless of the annual theme of NHD, papers with bibliographies that are created using nothing but sources that are found online.
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