By Arlene Shaner, Historical Collections Librarian, Library Fellowship Coordinator
The NYAM Library has just awarded its 2023 residential research fellowships. The Audrey and William H. Helfand Fellowship in the History of Medicine and Public Health goes to Sean Purcell, Indiana University, for his project “Imaging Consumption: Seeing ‘The White Plague’ in American Medicine”; and the Paul Klemperer Fellowship in the History of Medicine to Anastasiia Zaplatina, Bielefeld University, for her project “The American Soviet Medical Society (1943–1947): Academic Exchanges between Allies and Their Cold War Legacy.” Congratulations to both recipients!
2023 Helfand Fellow Sean Purcell
Sean Purcell plans to dig deeply into the Library collections to find visual materials related to early twentieth-century tuberculosis research for an upcoming video art installation. He is especially interested in questions of how and why visual materials such as microscope slides, photographs, illustrations, and specimens were used in medical research, and who the subjects were.
2023 Klemperer Fellow Anastasiia Zaplatina
Anastasiia Zaplatina will be looking at archival and published materials related to the American-Soviet Medical Society, and at the Joseph Wortis Soviet Medicine and Psychiatry Papers as part of investigating the impact of this short period of collaboration between individuals in both countries, and specifically whether collaboration ultimately laid the groundwork for increased competition.
We invite all interested researchers regardless of academic affiliation to apply for one of the Library’s research fellowships. Our 2024 fellowship application process will open early in the summer of 2023, with an application deadline at the end of August and a decision in October, for a month’s residence at the Library during the following calendar year. Each fellowship provides $5,000 in support. At the conclusion of their time at the Library, each Fellow gives a presentation and writes a blog post on their work. For background on how these Fellowships arose, see The Faces Behind Our Fellowships; and for more information about the focuses of the awards, including a list of previous awardees and their projects, take a look at the Library Fellowships pages.
Over the last 175 years, the Academy Library has built one of the premier medical collections in the United States, expanded its reach beyond the Academy to the world, and reinvented its mission.
Dr. Isaac Wood inscribed his donation of Dr. Martyn Paine’s Medical and Physiological Commentaries (1840), the Library’s first acquisition.
Set up at the Academy’s founding in 1847 to support the Fellows’ continuing education, the Library sought to build a collection of the latest medical books and journals. The first item in its collection was Dr. Martyn Paine’s Medical and Physiological Commentaries (1840), followed by many more, growing to over 200,000 volumes today. The centerpiece of the medical library, though, was the medical journal, the avenue to the most up-to-date medical thinking. The Library’s journal collections comprise some 22,000 different journals, published on every continent except Antarctica, in dozens of languages. Collecting was extensive: the journals take up six floors of stacks; both books and journals number over 550,000 volumes. In addition, the Library has collected hundreds of thousands of pamphlets—a favorite 19th– and early 20th-century format—as well as 275,000 medically related illustrations. By the 1950s, the Academy Library was one of the largest medical libraries in the country.[1]
In 1878, the Academy opened the Library to the public, and began to serve not just the Fellows, but also the larger medical community, inquisitive citizens, and historical researchers. By the turn of the 20th century, we were seen as complementing the New York Public Library; our scope reached beyond the city to the tri-state region. By the middle of the 20th century, our range expanded to the nation and beyond, as the Library became part of broader networks of libraries—medical and otherwise—that made our resources available to everyone. U.S. medical libraries coordinated their efforts under the leadership of the National Library of Medicine (which Academy Library director Janet Doe helped organize in its present form). The NYAM Library began to participate in the nationwide medical interlibrary system through NLM’s DOCLINE and, as one of NLM’s Regional Medical Libraries, organized training and outreach efforts for the medical libraries of the northeast. The digital revolution made this expansion possible—the same revolution that now brings medical information to people’s home computers.
In the 1990s, like many other leading medical libraries, we took on innovative projects to use the internet to collect new forms of medical information and to reach audiences in new ways. The Library was one of the founders of NOAH (New York Online Access to Health Information), started in 1994 as an early effort to present accurate medical information online. In 1999 it started the Grey Literature Report, an online database gathering and indexing the rarely-collected studies and articles published by foundations and other nonprofits. Through these and many other projects, the Library moved with the times. Even so, as medical books and especially journals moved into the digital realm, and as access to this literature increasingly came through medical schools and hospitals, the NYAM Library found its primary mission supplanted. People got their medical information elsewhere.
In 1909, Sir William Osler (1849–1919), the most famous physician of his day, donated the world’s most famous medical book, Andreas Vesalius’s De humani corporis fabrica (1543).
Alongside the Library’s mission to provide up-to-date medical information was its promotion of history. From the late 19th century, the Library began to collect the classics of medicine, supporting the public persona, in the words of John Harley Warner, “of the clinician who embodied not only the precision of [the] scientist but also the sensibility of the gentleman,” seeing history “as a wellspring of connectedness.”[2] The Library’s rare book collection grew from donations and exchanges, including among esteemed physician-collectors, such as Sir William Osler and Academy Librarian Dr. Archibald Malloch. A series of remarkable gifts and purchases in the mid-20th century greatly expanded the Academy’s unique and rare holdings: the Edward Clark Streeter Collection of rare medical books, with many from the 15th century; the Margaret Barclay Wilson collection of food and cookery, which brought the 9th-century manuscript cookbook the Apicius to the Library; the Robert Levy collection on 17th-century physician William Harvey, discoverer of the circulation of the blood; the Fenwick Beekman collection on 18th-century Scottish surgeon John Hunter; and perhaps the most valuable of the Library’s holdings, the Edwin Smith Papyrus, an ancient Egyptian work on wounds from about 1600 BCE, the oldest known surgical text in the world. Manuscript and archival collections, such as the Michael M. Davis papers on medical economics, supported historical research as well.
The Rare Book and History Room shortly after it opened in 1933. Since 2012, the room is known as the Drs. Barry and Bobbi Coller Rare Book Reading Room.
The Academy’s new 1926 building provided dedicated spaces for rare books, and medical history and bibliography; the Academy’s 1933 addition created the Rare Book and History Room for study and seminars, designed after an Elizabethan library. From 1930 on, the Library published its History of Medicine book series, which concluded in 1989 after 53 volumes. Public lectures, some radio-broadcast, explored historical topics. Starting in 1996, the Library hosted a residential fellowship in the history of medicine and public health, and three years later added a second. As that field developed, historians expanded their focus from classic texts to the full panoply of medicine and public health.
In 2022, the Library mounted a new event series, Then & Now, using the insights of history to shed light on current issues in public health.
As our in-person medical users began to drop away, the Library refocused its efforts to history, building on its premier collections and its century-long work in the history of medicine and public health. The Library’s general collections, the product of over 150 years of active collecting, were now valued for their historical potential. In the first decades of the 21st century, the Library stopped collecting current medical literature and made history its primary mission. Its Center for the History of Medicine and Public Health opened in 2012, mounting public programs that use history to engage the public around issues of health and medicine.
As the Library looks to the future, we embrace our mission of serving the Academy, the city, the nation, and beyond, preserving the heritage of medicine, and promoting historical understanding. We invite you to join us!
The Academy Library has reworked and expanded its timeline of milestones. Please check it out to learn more of our 175-year history.
References
[1] The Library of the Surgeon General’s Office of the U.S. Army was the largest, which in 1956 became the U.S. National Library of Medicine.
[2] John Harley Warner, “The Fielding Garrison Lecture: The Aesthetic Grounding of Modern Medicine,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 88 (2014): 1–47. The first quotation is from pp. 23–24, the second from p. 22, paraphrasing Sir William Osler.
By Dr. Eileen V. Wallis, Professor of History, California State Polytechnic University—Pomona, and the Library’s 2020 Paul Klemperer Fellow
Dr. Wallis completed her Fellowship residency in summer 2022 and will present her research by Zoom on August 2 at 4:00 pm (EDT). To attend her talk, “California and the Search for Medical Legitimacy, 1850–1880,” register through the Academy’s Events page.
As true of many researchers, the hunt for historical primary and secondary sources for my book project, “California and the Politics of Disability, 1850-1970,” has led me down many paths. This book project uses Los Angeles County as a case study to understand how the interplay between state and county governments shaped the lived experiences of Californians deemed “mentally disordered” from 1850 to 1970. “Mentally disordered” was not a socio-medical category, but rather a bureaucratic one. It is, however, still a useful construct for understanding the ways in which California’s politicians, doctors, and progressive reformers lumped together populations experiencing what today we would consider two distinct categories of disability—mental illnesses and developmental disorders—for their own convenience.[1] These were also the two populations arguably most vulnerable to institutionalization in this era, as well as the ones least likely to leave primary sources behind them. The time span of this study was chosen because it encompasses the rise of institutions for the disabled in California; the shift in them from care custodialism; the era of overcrowding, abuse, and crisis; and the ultimate dismantling of most state institutions for the disabled, a process that began in the late 1950s and culminated with the passage of the Lanterman Disability Service Act in 1969 and the beginning of the era of deinstitutionalization.
Disabled Americans are frequently absent from or hidden within the historical record. The study of sickness and disability, Gracen Brilmyer writes, is often marked by “layers of absences, subtleties, inaccuracies, and perspectives that are embodied in records, archives, and the lack thereof.”[2] However, because the New York Academy of Medicine Library began collecting so early, and because the Academy’s interests were so wide-ranging, it has amassed a strong collection of materials of use to anyone interested in the history of disability in the United States. Interestingly, many of the items it holds related to and in some cases created by Californians cannot be found in collections in the Golden State, but only in New York City at the Academy Library.
“Evolution of Treatment Methods of a Hospital for the Mentally Retarded” California Mental Health Research Monograph no. 3, 1965. New York Academy of Medicine Library
In 1965, two researchers working for California’s Department of Mental Hygiene, Esther Pond and Stuart Brody, produced a report called “Evolution of Treatment Methods of a Hospital for the Mentally Retarded.” Focused on what was then-called the Sonoma State Hospital in Sonoma County, California, the state’s oldest institution for the developmentally disabled, this report was officially California Mental Health Research Monograph no. 3.[3] It was prepared specifically for use by the Department, printed on cheap paper, given only a pink paper cover, and was likely expected to be, eventually, discarded. The Department certainly could not have anticipated that it would still exist, more than fifty years later, tucked away in a filing cabinet in the New York Academy of Medicine Library.
Sonoma Home for the Feeble Minded, California State Archives
Biennial Report of the State Department of Mental Hygiene, p. 3, New York Academy of Medicine Library
Indeed, a remarkable number of materials generated by California’s Department of Mental Hygiene, which operated all of California’s state asylums and institutions for the mentally ill and developmentally disabled through the late 1960s, found their way into the Library’s collections. Another example is the 1950–1952 Biennial Report of the California State Department of Mental Hygiene. Like “Evolution of Treatment Methods,” this report has only a paper cover and is held together with staples. It is, however, lushly illustrated with photos, charts, and graphs, including a page featuring both then-Governor of California Earl Warren (soon to be Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court) and Department head Frank Tallman commenting favorably about the work then being done. Because it covers the years 1950 to 1952, the Biennial Report captures California’s asylums and institutions as the state both embarks on a massive post-war building spree but is also beginning to look for quicker ways to “treat and release” individuals. The report excitedly discusses the use of invasive treatments and psychosurgeries such as electroshock (now known as electroconvulsive therapy or ECT), insulin shock, and lobotomies as heralding a promising new era of medical treatment. The modern reader, of course, knows this is not what would ultimately happen. To read such a report today is jarring, but it is, nonetheless, a valuable snapshot of a key transitional moment for both California and indeed for the care of mentally ill and disabled Americans nationwide.
Cover, “Lanterman Mental Retardation Services Act” brochure, c. 1971. New York Academy of Medicine Library
Many of these items are only discoverable by using the Library’s printed catalog, as they were acquired before the advent of online catalogs and have not yet been included in the Library’s projects to convert its printed catalogs to digital form. Some are what is known as ephemera, items that were created for a “specific, limited purpose” and for “one-time or short-term use.”[4] In the last two decades historians have found them to be an incredibly rich source of information, often capturing information about people (women, African Americans, the working classes, etc.) who are “rarely visible in archival collections or mainstream publications.”[5] These absences become more profound the farther back in time one travels. Thus, scholars often make use of institutional and medical reports like Pond and Brody’s and the Biennial Report to try to excavate from within them as much as possible about the lived experiences of Californians in state institutions during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
For the researcher interested in American disability history, the Library’s printed catalog volumes lead to a treasure trove of primary sources, and well-worth exploring alongside the online catalog. When combined with its other holdings, the New York Academy of Medicine Library’s collections show tremendous promise for furthering our understanding of the history of disability in the United States.[6]
References
[1] English authorities used the term in similar ways, although usually without including mental illness. For a discussion of that context, see Mark Jackson, The Borderland of Imbecility: Medicine, Society, and the Fabrication of the Feeble Mind in Late Victorian and Edwardian England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000).
[2] Gracen Brilmyer, “Towards Sickness: Developing a Critical Disability Archival Methodology,” in Journal of Feminist Scholarship Volume 17 Issue 17 (Fall 2020): 27.
[3] Sonoma State Hospital began in the 1870s as California’s first state Home for Feeble-Minded Children, a name which unfortunately tells us a great deal about how these individuals were perceived by society at the time. It later became the Sonoma State Home, the Sonoma State Hospital, and finally the Sonoma Developmental Center.
[4] The nature of such items unquestionably poses challenges for librarians and archivists, both in their physical care and in how to catalog them. Rebecca Alternatt and Adrien Hilton, “Hidden Collections within Hidden Collections: Providing Access to Printed Ephemera,” in The American Archivist Volume 75, No. 1 (Spring/Summer 2012): 173.
[5] There is debate in the field as to what is and what is not ephemera. Rebecca Altermatt and Adrien Hilton, for example, argue that any kind of government document is not ephemera. However, as this report was not a publication of the state of California itself but of one department within that government, and created for short-term internal use, the question is open for debate. Altermatt and Hilton, 173.
[6] As disability history and Disability Studies have evolved as research fields, scholars have pushed to move us beyond the medical model of disability, which sees disability as mainly a pathology, as something to be cured, to the social model, which urges an examination of disability as both a social construction and as a lived experience. As scholars Susan Burch and Ian Sutherland explain, “disability is often less about physical or mental impairments than it is about how society responds to impairments.” Susan Burch and Ian Sutherland, “Who’s Not Here Yet? American Disability History,” in Radical History Review Issue 94 (Winter 2006): 128–29.
Paul Klemperer (1887–1964) spent much of his career at Mount Sinai Hospital, where he held the position of pathologist from 1927 until his retirement in 1955. Born outside of Vienna, Klemperer first enrolled at the University of Vienna, intending to become a lawyer. At the suggestion of his father, he took a class on psychoanalysis taught by family friend Sigmund Freud and began to study medicine instead. After receiving his medical degree in 1912, he spent two years studying pathological anatomy, and then served as a physician during World War I. In 1921, he emigrated to the United States, spending a year in Chicago before moving to New York, teaching briefly at the New York Post-Graduate Medical School before joining the staff at Mount Sinai. He also taught pathology at the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Columbia University for many years, and after retirement continued to teach the Albert Einstein College of Medicine.
Paul Klemperer, M.D. (1887–1964). NYAM Library Collections.
His students and colleagues were devoted to him. In 1962, the Academy presented him with the Academy Medal for Distinguished Contributions to Biomedical Science. In his remarks George Baehr, his colleague at Mount Sinai, noted that Klemperer’s skill as a pathologist combined with his skill as a teacher made him a much-loved figure in all the institutions to which he had a connection. Neuropathologist Stanley Aronson, in a 1989 reminiscence in the Mount Sinai Journal of Medicine, recalled him as “one who was shy yet effective, retiring yet generous, undemonstrative yet passionate, learned yet learning, always learning. For he was truly our teacher.”[1]
After he retired, Klemperer devoted significant time to the study of the history of medicine. He wrote the preface and introduction to the Academy’s publication of a translation of Giambattista Morgagni’s noted book on pathology, The Seats and causes of diseases investigated by anatomy, as well as translating five letters of Morgagni. He also wrote the introductions to several other volumes in the Academy’s history of medicine series. To honor his memory and his devotion to the history of medicine, some years after his death an anonymous group of donors endowed the fellowship that bears his name, first awarded in 1996.
William H. Helfand (1926–2018), a Philadelphia native, pursued a career as a pharmaceutical executive for Merck. His work dovetailed with his collecting interests in prints, posters, and such pharmaceutical ephemera as trade cards and almanacs, and he wrote extensively on their social history.[2] He and his wife, Audrey, endowed positions and fellowships at several institutions, including the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Library Company of Philadelphia, and the Grolier Club. In 1998, the couple endowed the NYAM Library fellowship that bears their name, with the first fellowship awarded in the 1999–2000 academic year.
William H. Helfand (1926–2018). Image from the New York Times, October 5, 2018.
From the beginning, the Helfand fellowship supported research on the ways that visual materials enhance the study of the history of medicine, public health, and the medical humanities. Our own Library collections are far richer in these areas because Bill supplemented his endowment with gifts of materials from his own collections, Chief among these is the William H. Helfand Collection of Pharmaceutical Trade Cards, which is digitized and available here. In addition to trade cards, Bill gave the Library almanacs, broadsides, caricatures, prints, sheet music, and other medical ephemera. Our Helfand collection is one of many; others can be found at the Huntington Library, Yale University, Duke University, and the Library Company of Philadelphia.
If you are a scholar working on a history of medicine project, please consider our fellowships. Applications are being accepted until September 17, 2021, for a month’s residence at the Library. Successful applicants will be notified by October 22, and the next two fellows may work any time during the 2022 calendar year.
Lists of all the projects that have been supported through these endowments can be found on the fellowship pages for the Klemperer Fellowship and the Helfand Fellowship; application procedures are found there as well.
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[1] Baehr, George. “Citation and Presentation of the Academy Medal to Paul Klemperer, MD.” Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine 38, no. 4 (1962): 240; Aronson, S. M. “The legacy of Paul Klemperer.” The Mount Sinai Journal of Medicine, New York 56, no. 5 (1989): 347–350.
Our annual Color Our Collections week kicks off today! From February 1st through 5th libraries, archives, museums, and other cultural institutions showcase their collections through free, downloadable coloring books. A hundred books or so are gathered at ColorOurCollections.org. Follow #ColorOurCollections2021 on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and other social media platforms to participate.
The NYAM Library’s coloring book presents images from the Renaissance to the 20th century. Here are a few coloring sheets to help while away your hours; for more, check out our whole coloring book.
From Diversions for the Sick, published by the Life Conservation Service of the John Hancock Mutual Life Insurance Company (Boston, around 1938).“Melon,” from Elizabeth Blackwell’s collection of botanical plates, A curious herbal (London, 1739).“Gyre Falcon,” from Ulisse Aldrovandi, Ornithologiae . . .(Bologna, 1599).
Over the course of a decade, culinary historian Stephen Schmidt has advised the NYAM Library on our extensive manuscript cookbook collection. This blog post is a version of the essay he wrote about our digital collection Remedies and Recipes: Manuscript Cookbooks. As part of Bibliography Week 2021, he is speaking on “Manuscript Cookbooks and Their Audience” on January 30.
Introduction to Manuscript Cookbooks
The modern Anglo-American tradition of manuscript cookbooks might be said to begin with the world’s first printed cookbook, De honesta voluptate et valetudine, or “On right pleasure and good health.” Written by the celebrated humanist writer Bartolomeo Sacchi, known as Platina, and first published around 1474, the book was translated into Italian, French, and German within a few decades of publication, and it remained widely read throughout Europe into the early eighteenth century. The book featured both a new cuisine and, just as importantly, a new attitude toward food and cooking. Platina presented an interest in food and its preparation as a kind of connoisseurship akin to the connoisseurship of painting, music, or literature. Europe came to call Platina’s attitude toward food and cooking “epicurean,” and those who espoused it “epicures.” At the dawn of the sixteenth century, these new individuals were emblematic of the Renaissance European world.
When Italian epicureanism was first unleashed in Europe, England was in the throes of its own cultural and intellectual Renaissance. Among the English elite classes, the quest for new knowledge found expression in the collecting and creating of recipes, known then and well into the nineteenth century by the now-archaic word “receipts.” Originally the word receipt meant a prescription for a medicine or remedy. During the Renaissance, as the knowledge-hungry English began to write and collect prescription-like formulas for all sorts of things, the term receipt broadened accordingly: directions for farming and building; formulas for chemistry and alchemy; recipes for practical household products like cleaning solutions and paints, and, amid the growing epicurean spirt of the time, food recipes. The sixteenth-century English made a distinction between receipts pertaining to the home and commonly undertaken by women, and receipts for things involving work outside the home, assumed to be the concern of men. Thus, most who collected food and drink recipes also collected receipts for medicines, remedies, cosmetics, and household necessities such as candles, cleaners, pesticides, fabric dyes, and ink. Today, these books of mixed home recipes are often referred to as “cookbooks” when a substantial portion of their recipes concern food and drink.
Cookbooks in History—Manuscript and Print
There is a persistent belief that in the early modern world recipes originated in the home and then were subsequently picked up in print cookbooks. In fact, this was true in England only during the Renaissance, that is, up to about 1625. Only about a dozen cookbooks were published in England, from the first, in 1500, to that date. This may have been due to a lack of demand, but it was also surely due to the thorny practical problem that, cookbooks being a new idea, a community of writers possessing the specialized skills needed to produce them had yet to develop. Printers solved this problem in the only way they could: by cobbling together their printed cookbooks from manuscript cookbooks compiled by ladies of the peerage and then slapping titles and, in some instances, putative authors on them, all of whom, of course, were men. In most instances, the women who actually wrote these cookbooks were unacknowledged—some of their manuscripts may well have been pilfered from their estates—although two Renaissance cookbook authors, John Partridge and Gervase Markham, did explicitly credit noble ladies as the true originators of their printed books. While manuscript cookbooks preceded print cookbooks during the English Renaissance, this situation was soon to change.
During the seventeenth century, the number of published cookbooks grew rapidly in England, as did the number of manuscript cookbooks, to judge from those now extant. As the use of printed cookbooks spread, most recipes in manuscript cookbooks cycled through print at some point. In fact, quite a few manuscript cookbooks compiled after the mid-seventeenth century contain recipes copied verbatim from print. As English cookbook publishing matured, female cookbook authors appeared, starting with the remarkable Hannah Woolley, active in the 1650s through the early 1670s. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, female cookbook authors, who generally branded themselves “experienced housekeepers” rather than professional cooks, dominated English and American cookbook publishing. The relationship between manuscript and print, however, remained the same: recipes cycled from print into manuscript and back into print again, until cooking fashions changed and the old recipes were replaced by new ones.
The NYAM Collection
The eleven NYAM receipt books in Recipes and Remedies show the same organization patterns common to most manuscript books in the English-language tradition. For example, in most of the NYAM books, the culinary recipes are separated from the medical and household recipes in some fashion. In some of the NYAM books, recipes are clustered by subject matter, that is, a clutch of food recipes will be followed by a clutch of medical recipes, and so on. In other NYAM manuscript cookbooks, the culinary recipes are written from the front of the notebook while the medical and household recipes are written from the back of the notebook going toward the center. In one item in the NYAM collection, the medical and household recipes are also written upside down in relation to the culinary recipes, making the separation more explicit.
The Hoffman cook book in the NYAM collection is rare in that it unveils a style of cooking outside the mainstream norm. Written in halting English by a German immigrant to America, this highly interesting cookbook is composed primarily of German-inflected recipes like those we today associate with the so-called Pennsylvania Dutch. It also contains recipes for standard American dishes, such as roast turkey, pumpkin pie, and pound cake, but approached in idiosyncratic ways by a woman struggling to interpret a cuisine that was foreign to her. While the author of this cookbook was a cultural and linguistic outsider and her cooking outside the contemporaneous American mainstream, she was also a woman of privilege, a member of a prosperous German-American family that had owned paper mills in Maryland since the eighteenth century. For these reasons she was the sort of person, whether in Germany or America, who would be expected to use recipes and perhaps also to collect them.
Manuscript cookbook authors tended primarily to collect recipes for fruit preserves, fruit and flower wines, sweet dishes, cakes, and, after 1700, breads and cakes served at breakfast or with tea. About half of the manuscript cookbooks in the NYAM collection reflect the typical manuscript preference for sweets. Most of the culinary and drink recipes in Gemel book of recipes and A collection of choise receipts are geared to banqueting, an extravagant repast of sweets that was sometimes served after important meals and sometimes staged as a stand-alone party during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Recipe book, 1700s titles its culinary section “Wines, Sweetmeats, & Cookery”; recipes in the first two categories far outnumber those in the last. Receipt book, 1848–circa 1885, by an American woman named Jane Beck, can be aptly described as a cake cookbook. This inclination can be explained, in part, by the fact that many ladies personally participated in preserve-making, distilling, and baking, while relegating the preparation of the principal dishes of dinner entirely to their cooks. In addition, the success of sweet dishes and cakes hinges on precise recipes, while savory dishes can be successfully executed intuitively, without recipes, at least by good cooks, or so people seem to have believed. Finally, up through the nineteenth century, the biggest per capita consumers of sugar in the world were the British, with the Americans not far behind.
Manuscript cookbooks contain insights that historical printed cookbooks lack. Manuscript recipes are likely to have been cooked from, if not by the person who collected the recipe and wrote it down in her book, at least by the person from whom the recipe was collected. Thus manuscript cookbooks contain concrete details that historical printed cookbooks generally lack: the precise motion of the hand in stirring; the most suitable cuts of meat; the time that a cooking process takes; the signs that something is going wrong; the size and number of molds needed for individual cakes; the clues that a dish is done; and so on. Manuscript recipes not only illuminate the making of specific dishes but also basic kitchen conditions and broad practices in historical cooking.
A special feature of manuscript cookbooks is that they reflect the tastes of individual households. Thus, while most printed cookbooks published between 1675 and 1800 outline the same three basic recipes for lemon cream, contemporaneous manuscript cookbooks present dozens of different recipes for this favorite dessert, some tart and others sweet, some rich and others lean, suiting the varied tastes of the epicures of centuries past.
Our new digital collection showcases 11 of the 40 manuscript cookbooks the Library holds. The digitization is based on our earlier work with these materials. In 2012, the Pine Tree Foundation provided funding for conservation and cataloging of 31 of these manuscripts. In 2019, the foundation awarded the Library funding to digitize a selection of the English-language manuscript cookbooks and make them available to the public through the Library’s Digital Collections & Exhibits website. The digitized manuscripts will also be linked through corresponding listings in the Manuscript Cookbook Survey, providing a full-text option for each of our manuscripts on the site.
Four of the 11 manuscripts were previously digitized as part of an Adam Matthew Digital project, Food and Drink in History. After the earlier conservation work, only a quick conservation review was required before we sent the rest of the manuscripts out for scanning. The 2012 funding had also provided us with robust catalog records, so the work of our current project focused on providing a digital experience that was as similar as possible to paging through these manuscripts in our reading room. This work started with creating high-quality digital scans to display each item as a book object.
The manuscripts are viewable through the Internet Archive Book Reader, which allows a reader to browse a digital book page by page. Additional photo editing work was required to ensure that each page aligned with the next. This digital collection contains 2,021 pages and additional eyes were needed to review each page of every manuscript, to check the alignment, the consistency of page sizes, and the integrity of the images. Quality control is integral and took place multiple times on this project: to confirm the images were scanned correctly, to verify the content on the site was correct, and to check the functionality of the site.
Example of noting blank pages, from Recipe book : manuscript, 1804.
A couple of challenges emerged when attempting to preserve the integrity of each manuscript as a digital object. One of the concerns was blank pages: a few of these manuscripts have many blank pages. In the physical manuscript, a reader can turn several blank pages at a time. In the digital display, a reader may have a frustrating experience clicking blank page after blank page. Our approach to this concern was to include a scan of the first blank page in a section of blank pages and to note that not all the blank pages were scanned.
Example of displaying the front of an insert, from A collection of choise receipts : manuscript, circa 1680–1700.Example of displaying the back of an insert, from A collection of choise receipts : manuscript, circa 1680–1700.
Another challenge was the display of inserts. A couple of the books included plant clippings and flowers pressed between the pages. To emulate the experience of viewing the inserts in the physical manuscript, we opted to overlay the front of the insert on the recto, and then have the same pages repeated in the next view, but with the reverse of the insert overlaid on the verso.
Elizabeth Duncumb’s recipe for waffles, from Duncumb recipe book : autograph manuscript signed, 1791–1800s.
Of course, no interventions can exactly replicate the experience of viewing and handling a physical object in person. How can one duplicate the heft of taking the 500-page “A collection of choise receipts” out of its clamshell box, or handling the slender “Hoffman home remedies” volume? But one advantage these digital surrogates provide is being able to make waffles from a handwritten recipe from 1791 without splattering batter on a unique and priceless cookbook!
The NYAM Library is happy to announce the launch of “Recipes and Remedies: Manuscript Cookbooks” on our Digital Collections & Exhibits website. We’ve digitized 11 of our English-language manuscript cookbooks, offering a fascinating look at seventeenth- to nineteenth-century culinary (and non-culinary) history in England and America. The books include recipes for making a range of dishes such as roast turkey, lemon cream, and almond biscuits. Receipts (an older word for recipes) for non-food items are also found in these cookbooks: you can learn about remedies for coughs, bruises, and other ailments, or read about preparing cosmetics or perfumes at home. These manuscripts are part of a remarkable collection of food and drink materials that are a strength of the Library, starting with its ninth-century culinary manuscript, the Apicius.
We hope that you enjoy exploring these unique materials, finding recipes and making discoveries, and reading about their historical context in the accompanying essay written by culinary historian Stephen Schmidt.
The digitization of these manuscript cookbooks was accomplished with a grant from the Pine Tree Foundation. We are grateful for the foundation’s continued support in helping us to provide access to our rich collections.
A drink for the holiday, adapted by Pietro Collina and Matt Jozwiak from “A collection of choise receipts.”
In the past, we’ve highlighted recipes from these cookbooks in blog posts. We invite you to read these earlier posts, even as you delve deeper into the digitized Manuscript Cookbooks Collection.
Applications for our fellowships are being accepted now through late August for fellowships that may be used at any time during 2020.
Preference in the application process will be given to those whose research will take advantage of resources that are uniquely available at the Academy, individuals in the early stages of their careers, and, for the Helfand Fellowship, applications which include an emphasis on the use of visual materials held within the Academy’s collections and elsewhere. Applicants should provide information in their proposals about the collection items they plan to use, either by including a bibliography of resources they intend to consult or discussing those items in detail in the context of the application essay. Changes in the Library that are scheduled to take place beginning in the second half of 2019 will impact applicants whose projects rely heavily on 19th and 20th century serial literature or on monographs published during the second half of the 20th century.
Applications are due by the end of the day on Friday, August 23, 2019. Letters of recommendation are due by the end of the day on Monday, August 26, 2019. Applicants will be notified of whether or not they have received a fellowship by Monday, October 4, 2019.
Prospective applicants are encouraged to contact Arlene Shaner, Historical Collections Librarian, at 212-822-7313 or history@nyam.org with questions or for assistance identifying useful materials in the library collections.
Click on their names to read blog posts about their projects from our most recent fellowship recipients, Matthew Davidson (Klemperer) and Tina Peabody (Helfand).
We look forward to hearing all about your projects!
The New York Academy of Medicine is once again participating in the annual Museum Mile Festival! This year’s event will be held on Tuesday, June 11th from 6:00pm-9:00pm and will feature lots of fun activities and performances, as well as free admission to eight museums along Museum Mile (Fifth Avenue in Manhattan from 82nd to 110th Streets).
Can’t make it to Museum Mile? Our coloring books are online, too!
We’ll be offering coloring pages using images from our collections and crayons. We hope you’ll stop by our table at 103rd Street!
Books, Health and History 