Tag: digital highlight

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

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

Digital Highlights: Physical and Emotional

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"Diagram of the more important distributions of the autonomic nervous system." From Cannon's "Bodily Changes..." (24)

The experience of having a great meal disturbed by an argument is a common one and a headache can make a work-day seem like it lasts 10 times as long. In 1915, Walter B. Cannon wrote Bodily Changes in Pain, Hunger, Fear, and Rage to describe the physical changes that accompany certain emotions. Continue reading

Digital Highlights: Abduction!

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Title page of Ann Brookhouse's narrative.

Tabloid-style stories have been popular for far longer than what we think of as tabloid journalism. A Narrative of the Seizure & Confinement of Ann Brookhouse from the end of the eighteenth century is just such a piece. Purporting to be the true life narrative of a young female victim of abduction “as related by herself” and “written by a friend.” Continue reading

Digital Highlights: Nightmare Studies

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First page of Chapter 8 of "An essay..."

Almost everyone has nightmares. A lucky few, perhaps, have very rare or mild bad dreams; others may have them in such vivid form as to invade the waking world and become a serious problem rather than an occasional disturbance. Still, having one serious nightmare is enough to make you want to avoid having another!

John Bond, the author of An essay on the Incubus, or Night-mare, suffered from nightmares so extensively according to his own statement that he began to study the phenomenon and put together his researches in this book, publishing it in England in 1753. Bond traces the history of the nightmare back to pre-Grecian times, beginning with an examination of the word itself and the progress of a nightmare: Continue reading

Digital Highlights: Home Health Care for All

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Illustration of the spine from "The Cottage Physician."

In 1900, the United States had a fair number of physicians — licensed and otherwise — operating within the various states. Still, people living in rural areas or the urban poor could not expect to be able to take their ailment or injury to a practising physician, whether due to location, cost, or some other barrier.
To try and fill this gap in some fashion, Doctors Thomas Faulkner, president of the Royal Medical Council in London, England, and J.H. Carmichael of the American Institute of Homeopathy put together The Cottage Physician: Best Known Methods of Treatment in all Diseases, Accidents and Emergencies of the Home, with a modest subtitle: prepared by the Ablest Physicians in the Leading Schools of Medicine: Allopathy & Homeopathy, etc., etc. Continue reading

Digital Highlights: Letters from Harvey

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By 1912, William Harvey had been dead for over 200 years but the life and work of an English physician maintained a persistent interest for historians and physicians since his death in 1657. Harvey had been a practicing physician during the period in England immediately succeeding the death of Queen Elizabeth I; the reigns of James I and his son Charles I were increasingly troubled, culminating in a coup d’etat led by Oliver Cromwell and the creation of an English Commonwealth in 1649 with no king at the head of the government.

Despite Harvey’s position as physician to King James, his most enduring medical legacy was the description of the circulatory system. With this work, Harvey established his place in medical history and became a figure of enduring interest. It was probably with this in mind that S. Weir Mitchell published his Some Recently Discovered Letters of William Harvey with Other Miscellanea in 1912 as part of the Transactions of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia. Continue reading

Digital Highlights: “Improved Under-Clothing”

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Title page from Mrs. Flynt's manual.

In 1882, styles of clothing for women were restrictive to say the least: tight bodices and long sweeping skirts restricted breathing, made it hard to move freely, and, in some cases where lacing was taken to the extreme, might even crack ribs or damage internal organs. Whether or not all women adhered to the dominant style all the time is, of course, impossible to say; probably most women made adjustments as necessary for individual figures, injuries, or the daily work they had to complete. Serious dress reform for women was some years off, though, and many people thought that strict lacing and tight corsets were necessary for women’s health, particularly to brace up weak backs or prevent hysterics, to say nothing of the fact of keeping in line with the fashion which called for tiny waists. Continue reading