In 1899, Joseph Ernest De Becker published an expose of the geisha quarter of the Japanese capital of Tokyo — then named Yedo — called the yoshiwara. De Becker ended up with a tome of over 500 pages, detailing the history, …
Tag Archive: titles
Digital Highlight: Eugenic Tracts
In the April 1912 edition of Eugenics Review, an E. Schuster wrote about a new series of pamphlets, “New Tracts for the Times”: “We welcome the publication of this series, aiming as it does at awakening ‘an enlightened social conscience’…” (94)
Images from the Library
From Ales Hrdlicka’s Physiological and Medical Observations Among the Indians of Southwestern United States and Northern Mexico (1908). As always, for more from the Medical Heritage Library, please visit our full collection!
Digital Highlight: Medical Necrology
In 1899, David N. Patterson assembled a necrology of physicians “in Lowell and vicinity” for the North Massachusetts Medical Society. A “necrology” is technically nothing more than a list of the dead, usually those from a certain place or time. …
Digital Highlight: Bathing Medicine
The history of ‘alternative medicine’ does not begin in the twentieth century. The arguments between allopaths and homeopaths formed part of mainstream medical dialogue in the nineteenth century and alternatives to ‘heroic’ medicine or mainstream medical treatment have always enjoyed …
Digital Highlight: Doctor’s Orders
James Jackson’s 1855 Letters to a Young Physician Just Entering Upon Practice makes for great reading. The volume consists of 27 “letters” of advice from Jackson to the newly qualified medical graduate. Jackson covers a variety of subjects and starts with …
Digital Highlight: A History of Intoxication
In 1840 in Preston, in the north of England in Lancashire, Joseph Dearden published A Brief History of Ancient and Modern Tee-totalism, an apologia for the temperance movement.
Images from the Library
From Cornelis Stalpart van der Wiel’s Observationum rariorum medic. anatomic. chirurgicarum (1727). As always, for more from the Medical Heritage Library, please visit our full collection!
Digital Highlight: The Fascination of Crime
Narratives of Remarkable Crimes, selected from the German works of Anselm Ritter von Feuerbach and published in 1846 in London, consists of 14 of the trials in Feuerbach’s original 1300 page work chosen and translated by Lady Duff Gordon. She …
Digital Highlight: Pioneer Doctor
Dr. Bethenia Owens-Adair, born in Missouri in 1840, published her life-story in 1906, writing down her experiences of life with pioneering parents and her medical education as one of the first women to aim for a medical degree. She was …
Recent articles in history of medicine
- "Confinement of the Higher Orders": The Social Role of Private Lunatic Asylums in Ireland, c. 1820-60
- "Spitting Is Dangerous, Indecent, and against the Law!" Legislating Health Behavior during the American Tuberculosis Crusade
- "They Increase in Beauty and Elegance": Transforming Cadavers and the Epistemology of Dissection in Early Nineteenth-Century American Medical Education
- A Radical Proposition: The Brief but Exceptional History of the Seattle School Clinic, 1914-21
- A Short History of Medical Genetics
- Alienists, Attendants and the Containment of Suicide in Public Lunatic Asylums, 1845-1890
- Arthur W. Frank’s: Letting Stories Breathe: A Socio-Narratology
- Bacteriology in the Service of Sanitation: The Factory Environment and the Regulation of Industrial Anthrax in Late-Victorian Britain
- Biological Aging and Social Characteristics: Gerontology, the Baltimore City Hospitals, and the National Institutes of Health
- Birth Attendants and Midwifery Practice in Early Twentieth-century Derbyshire