The Archives and Special Collections of the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library of Columbia University have digitized the 1661 German translation of Johann Remelin’s Catoptrum Microcosmicum.
Check out the great video made about the process:
Mrs. Priestley’s 1885 lecture Unseen dangers in the home is a tour de force collection of late Victorian concerns about health and hygiene. She starts right off with the dangers of polluted air and moves on through bad water and the dangers of in-house piping among other things. It’s interesting to note that Priestley’s text assumes her audience is one of well-off matrons with disposable income; this is not a lecture designed to help the working poor, for example. She recounts anecdotes from friends with houses in Mayfair, Picadilly, and St. James, who have had to deal with complaints from their servants of bad air in basements, kitchens, bathrooms, and attics.
Flip through the pages of Mrs. Priestley’s lecture below or follow this link to read Unseen dangers in the home.
I always enjoy looking through the cookbooks and home manuals in our collection and it always seems as though a holiday is a good time to point out a few.
What about the 1903 texts The White House cookbook : a comprehensive cyclopedia of information for the home; containing cooking, toilet, and household recipes, menus, dinner-giving, table etiquette, care of the sick, health suggestions, facts worth knowing, etc., featuring a recipe for both an English and a Christmas plum pudding.
Or this 1959 Food at Your Fingertips: In One Volume, put together by the Cookbook Committee of the Homemaking Section of the American Association of Instructors of the Blind.
There’s also the 1902 Cook book, published by the Ladies’ Aid Society of the Pullman Memorial Church, Albion, New York, which starts off with Pea soup. Dr. Fluhrer’s Favorite, and Mrs. Willingham Rawnsley’s 1908 An old-world recipe book, offering The Pudding. The simply titled Myra’s cookery book (1880) provides a wealth of recipes from soup to pickles.
Did I miss out your favorite? let me know in the comments! And, as always, please do visit our full collection for more.
Carte-de-visite of Emily Blackwell (1826-1910), English-born physician. Photograph by W. Kurtz.
The New York Academy of Medicine Library has digitized our collection of cartes de visite, small inexpensive photographs mounted on cards that became popular during the second part of the 19th century, through the Metropolitan New York Library Council’s (METRO) Culture in Transit: Digitizing and Democratizing New York’s Cultural Heritage grant. The grant allows METRO to send a mobile scanning unit to libraries and cultural institutions around the city to digitize small collections and make them available through METRO’s digital portal and the Digital Public Library of America .
Our collection consists of 223 late 19th– and early 20th-century photographs of national and international figures in medicine and public health. This collection contains portraits both of lesser-known individuals and of famous New York physicians, such as Abraham Jacobi, Lewis Albert Sayre, Willard Parker, Stephen Smith, Emily Blackwell, and Valentine Mott. It also includes many with international reputations: Robert Koch, Louis Pasteur, Hermann von Helmholtz, Rudolf Virchow, and others.
Names of Subjects in Collection
Exploring the metadata of the collection provides a glimpse into the richness and surprises of the collection. We identified most of the subjects, but there are three subjects that we only have the last name and one subject that is completely unknown. You can learn more about these subjects on our blog.
The majority of the subjects are physicians, but there is one lawyer and politician, John Van Buren, an American. There is also a carte of Celine B. (Mrs. Alexander) Hosack, widow of Dr. Alexander Eddy Hosack. The auditorium at the Academy is named for Dr. Hosack to commemorate her generous bequest to the Academy’s finances in the 1880s. There are only four women in the collection:
The subjects of the collection represented countries in Europe and North America. Five of the most frequent are:
There are also Bavarian, Canadian, Czech, Hungarian, Irish, Prussian, Scottish and Swiss subjects in the collection.
A majority of the subjects were photographed in America and Germany. Thirty-six percent of the photographs were taken in New York, 10% in Berlin, 10% in Vienna, and 9% in London to round out the top studio locations. The most frequent photographers in the collection were:
Photographers or Studio Names in the Collection
We are still exploring the data of the collection, but wanted to provide a quick glimpse into what we’ve found thus far. We are thrilled to share our entire collection on the Digital Culture website. You can view the front and back of each carte, and find out brief information about the physicians and scientists pictured. View all of the Academy Library’s digitized collections.
This post was co-authored with Arlene Shaner, MA, MLS. She is Historical Collections Librarian in the Drs. Barry and Bobbi Coller Rare Book Reading Room of the New York Academy of Medicine Library, where she has been on the staff since January of 2001.
Many of us are looking at an uptick in home baking as the holidays approach and some of us are dusting off recipes that we don’t use all that often: shortbread, cinnamon rolls, croissants, Eccles cakes! Never fear, though, George Read is here with directions for a variety of confectionery items in a “plain and concise manner.”
Flip through the pages of The confectioner’s and pastry-cook’s guide below or follow this link to read it online.
Now might be about the time in the fall semester when a little remedial something-or-other starts to sound like a pretty good idea — particularly remedial sleep.
Or perhaps you could just use the techniques in The remedial uses of hypnotism to convince yourself you have had more sleep and were ready to go all over again! (If you try that and it works, please do let me know.)
Page through below or follow this link to read Frederic Henry Gerrish’s 1892 The remedial uses of hypnotism.
If you’re a fan of the personal narrative, as I am, then any new one you find is an immediate treasure be it a collection of letters, autobiography, diary, or whatever.
The 1887 Letters from a Mourning City, originally written in Swedish by the traveller Axel Munthe and translated into English by Maude V. White, is a fascinating travelogue of Munthe’s trip to Naples in 1884 during an outbreak of cholera in the city.
Flip through the pages below or follow this link to read Letters from a Mourning City (Naples. Autumn 1884).
Halloween is only a week away, so in preparation, here are some of the texts we can offer on the ghostly and ghastly.
Did we miss out on your favorite? tell us in the comments!
And as always, for more from the Medical Heritage Library, please visit our full collection!
The two volumes of the 1858 Dictionary of Daily Wants aim to do for the nineteenth century family what Google does today: answer any possible question on any possible topic.
Want to know what you should always have in the house in case of accidents? Turn to page four and the list starts with “A piece of adhesive plaster.” Need a quick batch of almond cakes? That’s page 19. How about how to catch a bird? Page 141 through 144 for that. Planning your garden for next year and want to know about kale? Volume Two, page 587 has everything you need to know.
Flip through the volumes of the Dictionary of Daily Wants below or follow this link to Volume One and this link to Volume Two.
The Medical Heritage Library collection has more than doubled in size in the past year, with the upload of its 100,000th item this month. In October 2014, 10 new institutions from the United Kingdom joined the project and have so far contributed 30,000 titles to the growing collection, including its 100,000th item.
This milestone was achieved by the digitisation of Recent Developments in Massage by Douglas Graham, published in 1893 and originating from the collections of the Royal College of Physicians in Edinburgh. This work is an update to and summary of Graham’s much longer (and denser) 1890 publication A Treatise on Massage. Graham describes a wide range of massage techniques to ease symptoms and treat diseases such as diabetes, diarrheoa, fever, and ulcers.
Interestingly, Graham even recommends massage to treat diseases of the eye, as well as sight problems including near and far-sighted eyes, and astigmatic eyes.
How do you massage an eye? Graham describes three methods, which start off mild and then become eye-wateringly severe:
Massage Simple,
which is done by moving the lids, under slight pressure, in a radial direction away from the centre of the cornea, and by circular friction, under slight pressure upon the upper lid, around the sclera-corneal margin and adjacent surfaces.
Massage Medicated,
is done in the same manner as Massage Simple of the eye, with the addition of lotions or ointments introduced inside the lids. [In the case of treating ulcers in this way, Graham recommends cocaine as an anaesthetic].
Massage Traumatique,
is as near like rubbing the inside of the lids with sand-paper as can be imagined. It is used for granulations of the conjunctiva and opacities of the cornea. The conjunctiva is at first rendered insensitive by means of cocaine. A finger or thumb is then rendered antiseptic in a solution of corrosive sublimate, and after this it is dipped into some finely pulverized boracic acid. The lid is then turned up or down, and the massage is as strong as can be tolerated for two or three minutes. A profuse flow of blood is occasioned thereby, but very soon, in place of the rugous surface which was felt at first, there is a smooth and soft surface, showing that the granulations have been rubbed off.
You can read through the whole book below or follow this link to read Recent Developments in Massage.
And as always, for more from the Medical Heritage Library, please visit our full collection!
