Today is #GivingTuesday

Posted on November 29, 2016 by nyamhistofmed

After Black Friday and Cyber Monday, two whirlwind days for getting deals, #GivingTuesday is a day for giving back. Through this campaign, millions of people have come together to support and champion the organizations and causes they value. On this day, please consider donating to the New York Academy of Medicine Library.

Open to the public since 1878, the library is home to a collection that spans 12 centuries of learning. It is a place where world-renowned historians and students alike come to learn, to be inspired, and to form the foundation of knowledge that opens the door to a future discovery. With your generous contribution, we can foster this discovery for years to come.

As we look to the future, please enjoy this look back at the past year through the eyes of our library staff.

“From Dr. Dorothy Boulding Ferebee, the African American physician leading the Mississippi Health Project during the Great Depression; Mexican physicians marching on the street for reform in the 1960s; to the doctors and nurses at the Lincoln Hospital creating a model for medical activism in the 1970s; this year’s “Changemakers” series was an important reminder that creating social and political change requires energy, engagement, and commitment, at any time in history.” –Lisa O’Sullivan, Director

archivespanel “On October 26th, the Academy Library convened ‘Archives, Advocacy and Change: Tales from Four New York City Collections.’ I moderated a lively conversation with all-star panelists Jenna Freedman (Barnard College), Steven Fullwood (In the Life Archive), Timothy Johnson (Tamiment Library, New York University) and Rich Wandel (The Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center). The discussion hit on a lot of fascinating issues, including how archivists shape the historical record with the selection and acquisition choices they make, issues of privilege, and access for communities.” –Anne Garner, Curator

edwardjenner “I was excited to learn in 2016 that the Library holds autograph letters from Edward Jenner in which he discusses the smallpox vaccine that he helped pioneer. These fascinating letters are available to the public for consultation. They demonstrate how strongly Jenner believed that inoculation with cowpox would protect people from the scourge of smallpox.” –Rebecca Filner, Head of Cataloging

“As a new staff member, I really enjoyed the Rare Book Room tour that Arlene Shaner gave me during my first few weeks at the Academy. I got to see some absolutely incredible items and learned so much about the building’s history. As a little aside, these tours are free and open to the public! They happen from 12-1 on the first Monday of each month.” –Audrey Lorberfeld, Digital Technical Assistant

pendleton_bugsandnuts_1924_cover_watermark “Most of my works has a lot to do with satisfaction—satisfactions from cleaning dusted books, from placing crumbled health pamphlets into clean, acid-free envelopes, from making fitted enclosures for damaged books, from putting torn pieces together, and so much more. But all of these satisfactions is ultimately coming from that I’m contributing in preservation of the library materials to be more accessible and usable for the future! One of the most memorable item I worked through in Health Pamphlet Rehousing Project this year is this “Bugs and Nuts” pamphlet by Andrew Lenis Pendleton, with so many absurd and eerie illustrations.” –Yungjin Shin, Collections Care Assistant

color-our-collections “A recent highlight for me would be our first #ColorOurCollections week, held February 1-5, 2016. Over 200 libraries, archives, and cultural institutions around the world participated by creating collections-based coloring sheets and sharing them freely online. It was exciting to connect with other institutions and new followers, and it was especially rewarding to share our collection and see people engage with it in new and creative ways. I can’t wait for the next #ColorOurCollections, coming up on February 6-10, 2017!” –Rebecca Pou, Archivist

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“One thing I particularly enjoyed this year was developing an online store featuring images from our collections on a variety of products. It allowed me to delve into and share the collections in a new and often very quirky ways. A 1910 health pamphlet on a beer koozie, a 17th century microscopic slice of rock as your party clutch, a poster of vintage stethoscopes to adorn your walls, a refrigerator magnet with a an octopus, or beautifully calligraphic roman numerals from a 9th century Roman cookbook decorating a bookmark – these truly breathe new life into elements of the collection.” –Emily Miranker, Team Administrator/Project Coordinator

“In sitting down to go through the William J. Morton Papers in connection with my residency as The Helfand Fellow, I was just stunned to find a 7-in thick stack of newspaper cuttings curated by Morton himself and preserved in their original order. The subject of my research is the history of the X-ray, and the difficulty is dealing with the voluminous print matter that appeared almost instantly. Yet Morton essentially curated some of that for me, by clipping articles that reflected his view of what was relevant to the New York metropolitan area and the networks of physicians and scientists in which he traveled. The collection is a gift for the historian, not just for its content, but because of its window into what one prominent NYC physician deemed worth noting about X-ray fever.” –Daniel Goldberg, Audrey and William H. Helfand Fellow

columbia-dermatology “Dr. Paul Schneiderman brought his Columbia dermatology residents to visit the rare book room on August 26th so that we could explore the history of dermatology. Looking at highlights from the dermatology collection from the 16th through the 20th centuries gave the residents a chance to think about the many ways in which their specialty has changed over time, especially since dermatology relies so heavily on visual representation. We looked at hand colored engravings, chromolithographs, photographs and stereoscopic images and the residents and their mentor engaged in lively debates about whether the descriptions and images matched with current information about some of the diseases that were shown. Not only did the residents have the opportunity to see these wonderful materials, but I had the pleasure of learning more about how to interpret the images from them.” –Arlene Shaner, Historical Collections Librarian

Shoot That Needle Straight (Item of the Month)

Posted on November 18, 2016 by nyamhistofmed

By Allison Piazza, Reference Services and Outreach Librarian

November is National Diabetes Month. As one would assume, the New York Academy of Medicine Library has a large collection of books about the disease. As I perused the stacks, however, one title jumped out.

Shoot that Needle Straight by Robert Rantoul was published in 1947, and tells the story of Richard “Dick” Hubbard. The book opens with Dick ill, and home from boarding school. His symptoms are numerous and puzzling, including dry tongue, a constant craving for sweets, headaches, weakness, and a drastic increase in height. It’s not long before Dick is told he has Diabetes Mellitus, a diagnosis that elicits a “What the hell is that?” from Dick.

rantoul_shootthatneedlestraight_watermark What follows is an engaging, often-times laugh-out-loud narrative of Dick’s new life with diabetes. Accompanying each chapter are charming illustrations by W. Joseph Carr.

After he is diagnosed, Dick and his mother travel to Boston, where he will have a two-week stay at a “diabetic home” known as the Carver Home, and see a diabetes specialist by the name of Dr. Anderson. At the Carver Home, Dick learns about diabetes and how he must control it through a home routine of proper diet and exercise. He also learns how to give himself insulin injections from his nurse, Miss Carver:

“Disinfect before you begin.
Press the needle firmly in.
Squeeze the plunger way down far.
Withdraw the needle and there you are.”

Dick’s new life as a diabetic is not without its hiccups. In one chapter, he goes to see a physician who claims he can cure diabetes, which he explains is the result of “a nervous condition brought on by destructive and fearful thinking processes, as a result of strain, over-worry or disasters.” Of course, the hope for a cure is too good to be true. The doctor in question turns out to be the head of an international narcotic ring, wanted in Argentina, Mexico and California for peddling an “iron tonic” full of morphine to unsuspecting diabetes patients.

rantoul_shootthatneedlestraight5_watermark In another chapter, Dick agrees to be a diabetes research participant at a lab. In a passage that would make any 21^st century Institutional Review Board member cringe, the doctor explains to Dick what it means to be a “guinea-pig”:

“For this period you must be willing to do anything we ask, regardless of your feelings…. At certain times our requests will be difficult and will, no doubt, upset you emotionally, but you must realize the emotions cannot stand in the way of medical science, and content yourself with the thought that we look upon you as a medical specimen rather than a human being.”

rantoul_shootthatneedlestraight6_watermark Another highlight of the book is Dick’s (somewhat inexplicable) trip to Munich, Germany with his mother during Adolf Hitler’s reign. During the trip, Dick is hospitalized with painful sores. The situation is, understandably, quiet stressful for Dick, but he takes it in stride:

“Nazis. Heil Hitler! The Third Reich! You read ominous stories about them, you shuddered at what people said they intended to do to America and the world, but never in your wildest dreams did you imagine yourself sick and alone among more than one thousand of them in their homeland. What a story to take home!”

These are just some of the situations Dick encounters as a diabetic. While highly comical, the book is also meant to educate and inform the diabetic patient. The American Journal of Digestive Diseases reviewed the book favorably in 1948, saying:

“This is a book that might safely be presented by a physician to a diabetic patient or by anyone to a friend suffering from the disease. … The general dietary regimen and the insulin therapy are described in exemplary fashion.”[1]

Another review in Science Education also speaks highly of the book, which they mention “has been checked for accuracy by eminent doctors.”[2]

While Shoot that Needle Straight may no longer be medically (or politically) correct, it is one of the gems of our collection.

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References

[1] The American Journal of Digestive Diseases 1948 15(3):103.

[2] Science Education 1950, 34(4): 274-275.

Blood Transfusion: 350 Years

Posted on November 15, 2016 by nyamhistofmed

By Paul Theerman, Associate Director

Three hundred and fifty years ago, on December 17, 1666, the Philosophical Transactions published the first account of blood transfusion, in the form of a letter from physician Richard Lower to chemist Robert Boyle.¹ Lower’s experiments transfused blood from one dog to another. The article provided his methods, specifying where the arteries and veins were to be cut, how the quill was to be inserted that formed the blood’s conduit between animals, and many other details of the operation.

Richard Lower (1631-1691), anatomist. Oil painting by Jacob Huysmans. Source: Iconographic Collections, Wellcome Library, London, accessed through Wellcome Images.

In addition to reporting on dog-to-dog transfusions, Lower also mentioned experiments between sheep, and interspecies transfusion between dogs and sheep, alternating donor (“emitter”) and recipient. In this first communication on the subject, Lower also laid out a broad experimental program:

’Tis intended, that these tryals shall be prosecuted to the utmost variety the subject shall beare: As by exchanging the bloud of Old and Young, Sick and Healthy, Hot and Cold, Fierce and Fearful, Lame [i.e., Tame] and Wild Animals, &c. and that not only of the same, but also of differing kinds.

The 1660s were the first heady days of the new Royal Society, whose motto, Nullius in verba (“nothing through words”), was the hallmark of the new “experimental philosophy.” And so these experiments have a bit of the quality of “ringing the changes”: try all kinds of animals, in all kinds of conditions, and see what happens!

Underlying the work, though, was the stronger sense of “blood as medicine.” Seventeenth-century physicians were well aware that too little blood led to death. But more, there was a general notion that blood and health were linked, a notion that came straight out of the humoral tradition. Sanguineous dispositions were healthy ones, in distinction to the melancholic ones that too much black bile created. A balance of humors, of course, was the best, but ruddy blood had an implicit edge.

In the same letter, then, Lower made these observations:

It seems not irrational to guess afore-hand, that the exchange of bloud will not alter the nature or disposition of the Animals, upon which it shall be practiced . . . . The most probable use of this Experiment may be conjectured to be, that one Animal may live with the bloud of another; and consequently that those animals that want bloud, or have corrupt bloud, may be supplied from other with a sufficient quantity, and of such as is good . . . .

Blood transfusion could serve as a type of reverse blood-letting; for those patients with too little blood, more could be supplied, and especially “good” blood rather than “corrupt.” Animals would serve as the blood source without fear that people would take on animal natures.

Human experimentation followed quickly. Similar experiments had been going on in France, and in June 1667, physician Jean-Baptiste Denis undertook the first transfusions into a human. His account, translated and published in the Philosophical Transactions, was called “Touching a Late Cure of an Inveterate Phrensy, by the Transfusion of Blood.”² Calves’ blood served to restore to his right mind a man under the influence of a “phrensy.” In this case, the animal was chosen for “its mildness and freshness,” in order to temper the blood of the unfortunate—a different understanding from the English!

This image relates more to infusion than to transfusion, that is, placing medicines directly into the body through the bloodstream. The technique lent itself to infusions of blood itself. Source: Johann Daniel Major, Chirurgia infusoria, placidis cl. virorum dubiis impugnata, cum modesta, ad eadem, responsione (Kiloni [Kiel]: Sumptibus Joh. Lüderwald, imprimeb. Joach. Reumannus, 1667), p. 2

On November 23 of that same year, Lower and his colleague, physician Edmund King, transfused sheep’s blood into a Mr. Arthur Coga, also of unsound mind. The transfusion seemed to have a good effect:

The Man after this operation, as well as in it, found himself very well, and hath given in his own Narrative under his own hand, enlarging more upon the benefit, he thinks, he hath received by it, than we think fit to own as yet.³

An image attributed as Lower and King’s 1667 transfusion of Arthur Coga. Source: Matthias Goffried Purmann, Grosser und gantz neugewundener Lorbeer-Krantz, oder Wund Artzney (Frankfort; Leipzig: Widow & heirs of M. Rohrlach, Leignitz, 1705), opposite page 292 of part 3.

But transfusion as a therapy soon petered out. One case in France died. Though Coga survived, he did not fully recover, and he was soon drinking up the 20 shilling fee he received for undertaking the procedure. Blood transfusion was mocked and abandoned in England, and outlawed in France.⁴

Blood transfusion only revived in the middle of the 19^th century, chiefly as a way of restoring blood volume. With the investigation of blood types before World War I, and Rhesus factors before World War II, transfusion became mobilized for war with the establishment of blood banks. In the last half of the 20^th century, transfusion from banked blood became standard medical practice in surgeries of all kinds, and (using blood products) for hemophilia.

When Mexican Physicians Take to the Streets and to Villages

Posted on November 10, 2016 by nyamhistofmed

Today’s guest post is written by Dr. Gabriela Soto Laveaga, Professor of the History of Science at Harvard University. Her book Jungle Laboratories: Mexican Peasants, National Projects and the Making of the Pill (Duke University Press, 2009) won the 2010 Robert K. Merton Best Book prize in Science, Knowledge, and Technology Studies from the American Sociological Association. On Thursday, November 17th at 6pm, Soto Laveaga will give The Iago Galdston Lecture: “When Mexican Physicians Take to the Streets and to Villages.” There is no charge, but please register in advance here.

In late November of 1964 more than two hundred residents and interns from one of Mexico City’s leading public hospitals threatened to strike because they were denied a Christmas bonus. Their unexpected response revealed the financially precarious situation of junior doctors and the worrisome state of many of the nation’s public hospitals. The subsequent walk-out launched ten months of unprecedented actions in hospitals, clinics, and, surprisingly, Mexico City streets.

Physician demonstration demanding “a solution to the medical problem in the country.”

As the movement gained momentum, physicians’ demands for living wages and better working conditions shifted to incorporate a call for social justice for peasants and blue-collar workers. The shift away from hospital-based labor demands alarmed an increasingly repressive regime that set out to discredit physicians through media manipulation, intimidation, and incarceration. By March 1965 many young physicians, once heralded as the future of the nation, were portrayed in the government-controlled media as traitors of the state.

Coded message requesting state governors send information about tension in hospitals. Source: National Archives, Mexico City.

Declassified material offers an extraordinary opportunity to learn —via decoded messages, transcribed wire-tapped conversations, and memos to the president— how the government sought to deal with unruly doctors. It is especially interesting to learn how the government used media – television and newspapers – to distort claims and dismiss doctors’ demands as the actions of a “greedy” profession. Especially revealing is, for example, how secret service agents infiltrated hospitals to gain first-hand knowledge of a movement that quickly became national in scope.

Throughout the multiple walk-outs, hospital emergency rooms remained opened but newspapers created a sense of growing dread among the population. In news stories doctors were often labeled “lazy,” “traitorous,” “murderous,” and, most often, as elites disconnected from the rest of society.

Secret Service picture of physicians protesting in May 1965. Source: National Archives, Mexico City.

Days before the 1965 State of the Union address, President Gustavo Diaz Ordaz sent military personnel to oust doctors from key hospitals. In his address the president spent more than thirty minutes speaking about the irresponsible “homicidal actions” of striking physicians. In the aftermath of the movement, more than five hundred physicians lost their license to practice medicine (most were able to practice again in the next presidential administration) and for the following fifty years, until summer 2015, there were no national, doctor-led movements in Mexico.

Doctors taking over downtown streets in silent protest, May 1965. Source: Página 24.

Of note is that after the social movement was unceremoniously truncated a handful of striking doctors joined an urban guerrilla Movimiento Revolucionario del Pueblo (People’s Revolutionary Movement) intent on destroying the government through violence. These doctors were, in turn, captured and together with other members of the guerrilla spent nearly a decade in Lecumberri prison for acts of treason.

The “medical” movement, as it came to be known, was really about two (often at odds) issues: the role of physicians in a rapidly changing society and the country’s need to provide proper healthcare to all working Mexicans, a right established in the 1917 Constitution. In fact young doctors’ reactions may be rooted not in 1960s urban discontent but, curiously, in experiences of city doctors in rural Mexico.

Nurses forming a human barrier to protect striking physicians, 1965.

Starting in 1936, all Mexican medical students were required to spend time in remote, poor, and/or indigenous areas provided much-needed primary care. This mandatory social service was later written into the Mexican Constitution. For many city physicians their social service time was a transformative experience. For example, treating patients in extreme poverty while living with them as neighbors and facing similar hardships (such as lack of electricity or running water) sensitized many physicians to the complexity of providing care in Mexico. In addition, these doctors experienced, often for the first time, the deep socio-economic divisions in the country. It was young doctors most moved by their social service year who, oral histories reveal, were more likely to join a social movement.

Currently Mexico’s public healthcare system is going through dramatic shifts, and the 1965 movement is a reminder of the powerful and evolving role that physicians have played in transforming care in the country.

Books, Health and History

The New York Academy of Medicine

Monthly Archives: November 2016

Today is #GivingTuesday

Shoot That Needle Straight (Item of the Month)

Blood Transfusion: 350 Years

When Mexican Physicians Take to the Streets and to Villages