Joseph Leidy

Joseph Leidy, Walt Whitman, and the Anatomy of the Scrotum

Staff Out of the stacks , , ,

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

 

By the mid-nineteenth century, Joseph Mellick Leidy (1823-91) was the poster boy of Victorian natural history. A photographic portrait of him in middle age shows a handsome, serious, debonair man, sitting cross-legged, his right elbow casually resting on a table, inches away from a sophisticated brass microscope, its eyepiece tilted towards Leidy. Paleontological specimens line a fireplace mantle behind him. Several disciplines today tag Leidy as their patriarch. He is the Father of American Vertebrate Paleontology. He is the Founder of American Parasitology. His biographer Leonard Warren titled his work The Last Man Who Knew Everything.[1]

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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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