Tag: Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine

Digital Highlights: Care for Ailing Sailors

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Names of the wards and numbers of beds in each of the buildings of the Greenwich Hospital. (42)

Modern-day students of history learn the use of primary sources almost from the minute they enter an undergraduate program; some, from high schools with engaged history faculty or by taking part in programs like History Day in Massachusetts, before then. Analyzing, closely reading, considering, debating, and writing about primary sources is a key part of any history student’s education.

What makes today’s digital highlight particularly interesting, then, is that not only is it now a primary source in its turn but it uses primary sources in their entirety. Continue reading

Digital Highlights: Shut your mouth and save your life

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A gallery of mouth-breathers adorns the cover of this strange work by George Catlin

Among the collection of works on hygiene and general health that the Francis A. Countway Medical Library has submitted to the Medical Heritage Library, one finds an eclectic mixture of theory and practice advocating everything from the reformation of cemetery burial to the donning of proper footwear; from water cures to treatment of diseases attendant to sedentary office life in the early 19th century. Through a simple subject search one can peer directly into a world where publishers and authors were attempting (often misguidedly) to apply the burgeoning scientific approaches of the day to every aspect of human health, with widely differing results. This work, which is dedicated to “the nervous and bilious,” promises to educate readers about the “art of invigorating and prolonging life by food, clothes, air, exercise, wine [and] sleep,” but nevertheless ends, somewhat ominously, with an extended section devoted to “the pleasures of making a will.” Continue reading

Digital Highlights: “I Do Believe in Spooks!”

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Title page of "Inferences from Haunted Houses and Haunted Men," by John Harris.

John Harris’ Inferences from Haunted Houses and Haunted Men is a great read as we look forward to the Halloween season. Harris’ work is best approached in a kind of smorgasbord state of mind: there is no single through-line argument, rather Harris has assembled a collection of anecdotes and evidence to discuss psychic phenomena of one kind or another including hypnotism, thought transference, and hauntings. Continue reading

MHL at two million images: a behind-the-scenes look at the project

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(Above) A collage of images from Countway books recently digitized and added to the MHL

This month, the Center for the History of Medicine contributed its two-millionth page-image to the Medical Heritage Library. That number translates into almost 6,000 volumes that have been digitized in their entirety (and downloaded over 90,000 times), or nearly two-thirds of our forecast total contributions to the project.

Those who are interested in the process of library digitization might also be interested to learn more about what those statistics mean in terms of logistics and workflow. What does it take to produce millions of page-images from a collection of hundreds of thousands of rare and fragile books? How much time is required? What are the biggest challenges involved? In this two-part series of blog posts, we will examine a large-scale digitization project from the inside. Continue reading

Digital Highlights: Healthful Travelling

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Title page of "Change of Air."

A trip to “recover one’s health” seems to have been something of a hobby in the nineteenth century. In the United Kingdom, Europe, and America, the health retreat to a spa, a seaside resort, the mountains, or the beach was a reasonably regular occurrence — for those who could afford it, anyway.

In 1831, “physician extraordinary to the King” James Johnson wrote Change of Air, or the Pursuit of Health to reflect not only on the need for such trips but an excursion he had himself taken and “…remarks and speculations on the moral, physical, and medicinal influence of foreign, especially of an Italian climate and residence, in sickness and in health.” (i) Continue reading