Category Archives: Collections

All Work, No Rights: Severance and the Ethics of the Work-Life Balance 

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by Anthony Murisco, Public Engagement Librarian 
  
We all want work-life balance. It’s beneficial to both physical and mental health. But what would you do to achieve it? That’s the conceit at the heart of the hit Apple TV+ show, Severance. Now in its second season, the show continues to be an interesting take on American office culture. 

Image courtesy of Apple TV+ Press

Severance follows the office life of a group of workers at the Lumon Corporation. Our protagonists work in the “Macrodata Refinement” department, and they have all agreed to a procedure to separate the two parts of their life: home and work. The titular “severance” refers to a medical procedure whereby a chip is implanted in the worker’s brain that allows them to sever their two experiences. Those at work are called “innies” and those at home are called “outies.”   

In the world of the show, this procedure is highly contested with the general public. We see protests against the severance procedure, questionable ethics amongst politicians, and mysterious protocols that leave you with time lost. The lives of these workers have been signed away to work, and they don’t know the conditions their own “outies” have agreed to.  

“The Health of the Worker” by Metropolitan Life (1913)

As long ago as 1913, the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company wanted the worker to reflect on that very question!  In a pamphlet in the Library’s collections, “The Health of the Worker,” the company asks, “Do you know that a great many men and women die every year on account of the conditions under which they work? Do you know that if a man goes into certain trades, it means he will have five, ten, or fifteen years less of life than if he earned his living in some other way?”  While these concerns address the unethical practices that were nonetheless legal in “shops,” workers everywhere were called upon to look after one another. There may be physical challenges at any job! Questions to ask yourself include, “Is your workroom overcrowded? Is your workroom kept clean and in good order? Do you help to keep the workroom clean and in good order?” Solidarity! They weren’t even addressing the psychological toll that these conditions have on workers. Those fights would come even later….  

Dr. T.  M. Fraser’s findings and suggestions regarding work life from Human stress, work, and job satisfaction: a critical approach (1983) remain pertinent in 2025 and in Severance’s own fictional world. The literal physical “exploitation in an inhumane environment” of workhouses he writes about may not be something that those who work in an office or the cubicles in the basement of Lumon face. That’s why Fraser builds on previous pro-worker literature by also discussing the mental labor of menial, repetitive, or over-stimulating tasks. A human can experience a “system overload” when the “physical or psychosocial environment” becomes overwhelming. Fraser’s use of systems or even mechanical language is deliberate. Even machines need to be well taken care of for them to continue operations! Why shouldn’t human workers? 

Trade card advertising Wheat Bitters from our Helfand Collection of Pharmaceutical Trade Cards

In recent years, our real-world work life has been changing. For the Financial Times, Lucy Kellaway lamented what could be the death of the office in the early months of the COVID-19 lockdown in “We will miss the office if it dies.” She states that if more telecommuting is the way of the future, “office workers everywhere should stand in the street and weep at what they are losing.” Her words may read as overly dramatic, especially to the “innies” in the basement at Lumon, but she has a point! The office was created to be a small community. Without this space, “it’s hard to know how a company could ever create any sort of culture or any fellow feeling.” The office is the “great leveler”; everyone had to come to work! From the desk workers up to the boss, the collective goes beyond the boundaries of salary.   

Because the severance procedure doesn’t exist yet in our real world, the viewer is left to think about the ethical implications. By creating a split side of yourself, whose only existence is to work without all the benefits that come with getting a job, you devalue part of yourself. Workers fought for the checks and balances that come with a career. That should also apply to those “innies” who were dropped into the world. “Innies” are forced to endure day after day of all they are ever meant to know: punching a clock. No family life, no romantic life. They don’t even have the luxury of watching the latest streaming show! This strict 9-5 lifestyle of the pre-industrial days negates all who have come before us in the struggles of humanity. Extremist viewpoints on industrialism believe that self-fulfillment should come from the job you have. Once again, this doesn’t consider the humanity behind the worker. Especially as “outies” may live their life however they want. It may be possible to find work you love but the class system that industrialism has provided us with makes it hard for many.  

Image courtesy of Apple TV+ Press

The Macrodata Refinement Team works behind their computers all day. They didn’t choose to do this; their “outies“ chose it for them! The team is not even clear about what it is that they are doing. Their feelings instruct them to place a set of numbers into a box. When they reach a certain percentage, they are gifted with work branded tchotchke, a caricature, and sometimes the chance to pick out a song for an office-wide dance party.  

They aren’t the only “severed team” down there. We are slowly introduced to members of the Optics and Design Team. Sometime during the history of Lumon, it became known that different divisions would get into physical alterations, leading to separation between work teams. No current employees are aware of the veracity of these claims, yet they are still cautious of interacting with their fellow workers. They’re cautious, that is, until the workers find a way to talk and befriend each other, some even finding love. Workers united for this right! It’s among the lines of the unity of keeping your workplace clean and safe that the 1913 worker pamphlet talked about. Socialization is part of health! This is all to the dismay of a faceless, voiceless executive board.   

Image courtesy of Apple TV+ Press

There was a point when the “water-cooler century”—as Kellaway described it—may have been ending. Around the time of her article, written mid-2020, it looked like these places that had often become “second homes,” with work families, or at least work friends, seemed to be going away. Some companies had adapted to more telecommuting, others had gone all back to the office (including federal workers recently), and others adopted the hybrid model. Hybrid work has been proven to boost productivity and morale!  

The creators of Severance seem purposefully coy as to the setting, time, or year of their story. The technology used to perform their job looks antiquated and yet this mind-altering procedure seems futuristic. When cell phones are used, we aren’t seeing the latest smartphone. We don’t know if they suffered through a pandemic or if telecommuting was ever an option. All we know is their life at the office lacks any historical or cultural context.   

Human beings are layered. We have what Fraser calls a “diversity of stresses” in our lives that sometimes spill over into our work. This is what makes us human. This is what makes the workplace so special: different humans coming together to be united in a cause. The titular severance procedure that brings us the “innies” and “outies” is ostensibly meant to cure that, but why would we ever want that?   

References: 
Fraser, T. M. Human stress, work and job satisfaction : a critical approach. Geneva : International Labour Office, 1983.  
 
Kellaway, Lucy. “We will miss the office if it dies.” Financial Times, 15 May 2020.  

Winslow, C.-E. A. (Charles-Edward Amory). “The health of the worker.” [S.l.] : Metropolitan Life, 1913. 

Researching Neuropsychiatry and Veterans Hospitals During the 1930s at the New York Academy of Medicine 

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By Dr. Michael Robinson, National Army Museum Research Fellow, University of Birmingham (UK), and the Library’s 2024 Paul Klemperer Fellow in the History of Medicine 

I spent one month working in the New York Academy of Medicine’s magnificent library and reading room in the autumn of 2024. This residency enabled me to look at a host of materials dedicated to the treatment of mentally ill American Army veterans of the First World War during the Great Depression (1929–1939). I undertook this research hoping to utilise the USA as an important comparative case study on my current research project dedicated to mental illness and British Great War veterans during the 1930s. By examining mental breakdown and psychiatric medical care during this decade, this research seeks to reveal the delayed traumatic after-effects of war service on ex-service personnel and the potential for additional psychosocial determinants to influence mental ill-health.  

I first became interested in the American experience of post-First World War disability and mental healthcare owing to its regular appearance in the archival records of Britain’s Ministry of Pensions, the government agency responsible for distributing veterans’ pensions and medical care. During the inter-war period, British policymakers regularly cited the US experience of veteran after-care as a deterrent and a case study to avoid replicating. They actively held up the US system as being unfairly exclusive, costly, and liberal owing to its incremental but costly expansion of veteran rights and facilities. Britain significantly reduced its liability on behalf of veterans during the 1920s and 1930s, including the closure of most veterans’ hospitals. Veterans’ medical care in Britain was primarily outsourced to broader public health facilities, the civilian welfare state, and the charity sector.  

By contrast, the US witnessed increased state liability, including a vast financial outlay in funding exclusive Veterans Administration (VA) hospitals and medical facilities. In 1936, owing to the two nations’ inversed approaches to veteran care, one Ministry of Pensions official described the UK and US responses as being of ‘opposite extremes.’1 The primary purpose of my time at the NYAM was to better understand why the British and US systems were the complete inverse of one another. I also sought to appreciate how these contrasting policy trajectories and medical infrastructures affected the lives of mentally ill veterans.  

Portrait of Thomas Salmon, from History of the Interurban Clinical Club 1905-1937, edited by David Riesman (1937).

This comparative approach first led me to NYAM records relating to Dr. Thomas Salmon (1876–1927). For those unfamiliar, Salmon was the American Expeditionary Forces’ chief consultant in psychiatry during the First World War. Before this important role, following the country’s entry into the global conflict in 1917, Salmon visited England to study how it dealt with mental wounds during the war to help inform his country’s approach.2 As a leading figure in the US National Hygiene Movement before and after his war service, the records of Salmon’s war experience reflect a relatively progressive military medical official. He regularly stressed the environmental causes of soldiers’ breakdown. In short, Salmon was more inclined to blame combat neurosis and stress on the dehumanising and brutalising effects of war service than citing faulty hereditary genetics, as was more apparent amongst British military officials. This more empathetic outlook continued into Salmon’s advocacy on behalf of veterans following his return to America. Unlike the more reclusive and disillusioned Dr. Charles Myers, the British Army’s leading psychiatric official, Salmon advocated for healthcare and welfare on behalf of the mentally disabled First World War veterans during the initial post-war years. Described by his biographer as a successful ‘spokesman for veterans,’ the force of Salmon’s personality and his effective collaboration with the American Legion help explain why the American mentally ill veteran stopped being admitted into larger public mental hospitals.3 Instead, the US Federal Government established exclusive medical facilities for veterans from the early 1920s onwards.  

Salmon died unexpectedly whilst sailing near Long Island in 1927. Reflecting his prestige amongst his contemporaries, the National Committee for Mental Hygiene, an advocacy organization founded in 1909 by Clifford W. Beers, set up the Salmon Committee on Psychiatry and Mental Hygiene at the New York Academy of Medicine in 1931.4 Regardless, the exclusive medical infrastructure he had helped establish continued to cater to mentally ill First World War veterans into the 1930s. In stark contrast to Britain’s minuscule and dwindling psychiatric infrastructure, the VA provided seventeen neuropsychiatric facilities across its national network of forty-nine hospitals. It offered 10,633 beds for mental ailments, marking a 467% increase over 1921’s availability. The number of beds would be set to increase for the rest of the decade.5 With this exclusive federal medical care program for veterans, the VA published its Medical Bulletin journal throughout the 1930s. Pouring through these issues reveals a lively forum of VA medical officials discussing the continued difficulties of treating veterans during this period.  

Regarding neuropsychiatry—I was struck by how hospital superintendents, nurses, vocational trainers, and social workers regularly articulated a holistic approach to mental healthcare. They cited the psychosocial determinants of health outside of hospital walls. This includes, for example, the detrimental impact of unemployment and poverty on an individual’s mental and bodily health, the emasculating stigma attached to male mental illness, and the potential for harmful self-medication practices such as alcoholism.  

United States Veterans’ Bureau Medical Bulletin (1931), a collection of articles by VA staff and associates dedicated to all aspects of veteran after-care. These various scans come from volume 7.

The materials I reviewed at the NYAM provide a complex and nuanced picture of the post-war treatment of mentally ill World War One veterans. On the one hand, they give an image of an expansive, caring and financially generous veterans’ system. On the other hand, however, they provide comparatively little insight into the personal perspectives of veteran patients to verify the progressive narrative offered by medical officials. In addition, contemporary medical journals reveal increasing resentment from American citizens regarding the spiralling costs of veteran medical care with little in return in terms of cure and recovery.6 This counter-narrative also appears worthy of further research.  

Before arriving in New York, I was unsure how exactly the USA would fit into my larger project of Great War veterans during the Great Depression. However, my time at the NYAM proved incredibly rewarding by revealing how fascinating and unique an American case study is. I look forward to continuing this research into 2025. 

Notes: 

1 Nineteenth Annual Report of the Ministry of Pensions, 1935-1936, 33. 

2 For a write-up of Salmon’s observations and recommendations, see Thomas Salmon, The care and treatment of mental diseases and war neuroses (“shell shock”) in the British Army (War Work Committee of the National Committee for Mental Hygiene, 1917). 

3 E. D. Bond, Thomas W. Salmon: Psychiatrist (W. W. Norton & Co, 1950), 160. 

4 For more information on the Salmon Committee on Psychiatry and Mental Hygiene and its records that are held in the NYAM, see https://www.nyam.org/library/collections-and-resources/archives/finding-aids/ARN-0006.html/ [last accessed 18 November 2024]. 

5 E. O. Crossman and Glenn E. Myers, ‘The neuropsychiatric problem in the US Veterans’ Bureau,’ Journal of the American Medical Association, vol. 94, no. 7 (1930), 473–478. 

6 For example, see the Crossman and Myers article cited above. 

Tracing the Transmission of Early Modern Recipe Knowledge in the New York Academy of Medicine Library

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By Sheryl Wombell, University of Cambridge, and the Library’s 2024 Audrey and William H. Helfand Fellow.

In seventeenth-century Europe, knowledge about health and healing was shared with family, friends, and acquaintances. In the case of printed books, wider audiences were reached. A significant subset of these communications took the form of recipes: sets of instructions telling one how to make something. These might be instructions for making medicines in the home, with a range of ingredients from the inexpensive and easily sourced, to the rare and exotic products available due to expanding trade. Or they could be instructions to make culinary formulations, which were interpreted as having an impact on the body’s condition due to the lasting influence of the ancient theory of the four humours. Individual recipes, which could be as short as a line or as long as tens of pages, were gifted, traded, and passed around early modern social networks.

A letter penned by the courtier and privateer Sir Kenelm Digby, likely to Sir Richard Grenville, 1st Baronet of Kilkhampton, demonstrates the mobility of recipes in the mid-seventeenth century.i In it, Digby thanks Grenville for sending him a recipe for ‘Sir Walter Rawleys great Cordiall’ but questions its provenance:

I beleive th[a]t it came from me, for it agreeth word for word with my Receipt that I had out of his owne originall book written with his owne hand; & whereof I made at one time as much as stood mee in above 500 [pounds] sterling; & stored the Court, Citty, & Country with it; But I add to it, the Magistery of Rubies, of Emeralds of granales of amethystes, of Saphyres, of each halfe an Ounce to the proportion that you sayth, also, magestery of Crabbs Eyes [3 oz], of Crabbs Clawes [2 oz]; of Contra yarva stone [1 oz], of snakweed of Virginia, of Contra yarva root, of each halfe an Ounce and of Tincture of gold made by spirite of Honey [1 oz]; and I finde this much more efficacious.

The circular path of recipes that Digby describes – when a recipe he believes to be his own is unwittingly returned to him – is testament to the lively early modern traffic in recipe dissemination and collection.

Fig. 1: Copy of a letter from K. Digby in MS ‘Old Doctor 1690’, f. 76, New York Academy of Medicine Library.

Manuscript collections of recipes survive in archives around the world, and the New York Academy of Medicine Library holds a rich cache of such volumes. Thanks to winning their Helfand Fellowship in 2024, I had the privilege of spending five weeks on a close reading of the early modern medical recipe collections at NYAM. This research forms part of my PhD project, which looks at the mid-seventeenth century production, management, and transmission of knowledge about health and healing amongst exiled and mobile elites, including Digby. While my work to date had focused on three key media – printed medical books, manuscript recipe collections, and consultation letters – somewhat in isolation from each other, at NYAM I had the time and resources to explore the relationships between these formats.

One such connection was the integration of transcribed letters into larger manuscript collections. Digby’s letter, for example, was copied into a large bound volume of recipes, letters, and transcriptions from printed books titled ‘Old Doctor 1690’. But in handling the manuscripts I was also confronted with material traces of transmission. In another manuscript, for example, is a recipe for ‘Costiveness to help’, that is, how to relieve constipation. Next to the instructions are two small, shiny blobs of dried red sealing wax. While this is not conclusive evidence that the recipes on the page were copied into a letter, it does indicate that the notebook lay open while a letter was sealed – and likely written – in its vicinity. Through this tiny physical sign, we learn something of the co-presence of writing and collecting practices across the distinct but interrelated media of letters and recipe books.

Fig. 2: Wax in ‘Pagett recipes for medical remedies: autograph manuscript signed, c. 1640–1650’, f. 73, New York Academy of Medicine Library.

The objects of transmission themselves also appear in these recipe collections. A notebook belonging to Owen Salesbury holds a loose paper slip with instructions ‘To Make Elder Claret’ and sent ‘To Mrs Longford att her hous in Wrexham’. Folded slips could be enclosed in a larger letter, or they could constitute the entire missive. The inclusion of the address on this example suggests the latter. The contents of the slip were not transcribed into the body of the notebook but containing it within the bound volume preserved its knowledge. We don’t know precisely how or when a slip sent – or intended to be sent – to a Mrs Longford ended up in Salesbury’s manuscript, but it offers further evidence of the close connections between ephemeral letter formats and the more durable objects of recipe collections.

Figs. 3 and 4: Paper slip in ‘Collection of medical recipes, poems, prayers, and charms: autograph manuscript signed, 1638–1642’, New York Academy of Medicine Library.

Spending time in the NYAM Library’s collections allowed me to get to grips with evidence of early modern recipe transmission. While digitised surrogates of manuscripts have been invaluable in my research, handling these collections has enriched my analysis by bringing their material qualities – size, varying durability, the spatial relationships between their contents, and signs of use – to the fore.

Further Reading:

Ken Albala, Food in Early Modern Europe (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2003).

James Daybell, The Material Letter in Early Modern England: Manuscript Letters and the Culture and Practice of Letter-Writing, 1512–1635 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).

Elaine Leong, Recipes and Everyday Knowledge: Medicine, Science, and the Household in Early Modern England (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2018).

Alisha Rankin, ‘Recipes in Early Modern Europe,’ Encyclopedia of the History of Science (2023), https://doi.org/10.34758/fvw2-w336.

Sinking Our Teeth into a Poem

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by Anthony Murisco, Public Engagement Librarian

As the April showers (hopefully) dwindle down, out come May flowers. The passage of the month means the conclusion of April’s celebrations, including National Poetry Month, and the commencement of the festivities of May, including National Dental Care Month. We’re going to combine both, with a poem by a dental care worker.

Anterior teeth model from Ash & Sons Catalogue (1886)

John Thomas Codman (d. 1907) was the an active speaker at various dental gatherings. He was also one of the more prolific writers on dentistry. But he wrote about more than teeth and dental issues. Dr. Codman’s writing appeared in mass market publications and he wrote about the co-op community he belonged to in the 1894 book, Brook Farm, Historic and Personal Memoirs.
 

Codman broke a sensitive issue when he wrote his essay, “Foul Breath.” When speaking on the problem, he hinted at dentistry’s higher involvement with the human body; “I cannot but think that the neglect is occasioned by want of that knowledge of its primary causes, and a lack of general knowledge of the relation of all the organs, one to another, that work together for the sustenance and maintenance of the life and health of all of our corporate frames.” His words call for a well-rounded, holistic approach to the whole profession. Really, who knew one could wax so poetic about bad breath?  

Well, if you were at the 1866 meeting of the American Dental Association, you would know. In the Doric Hall of the State House in Boston, Dr. Codman welcomed the guests with a poem encompassing the birth and battles fought by our nation. It includes dental puns and nods to popular attractions in Boston. He even manages to add in a few pop culture references!

Today we bring you a slightly abridged version of this welcome poem. 

The Dentists’ Welcome.

Welcome, ye knights of the forcep and plugger,
The Bay State invites, embrace her and hug her;
Her arms are outstretched, and her years not so few,
That her check might mantle with blushes anew;
The friends of her dear sons from near and from far,
To her impulses pure, how welcome they are.

So, friends, from the West take a chair and sit down,
In the capitol old of this capital town;
In the hall where the “assembled wisdom” meet,
When the winter comes in with its flying sleet,
And leave only when the tubers begin to grow,
And shoots of the corn are too old for the crow.

‘Ecod, what is that which hangs high in mid air?
My professional friend, no wonder you stare;
‘Tis the ghost of a fish, long salted and sold,
But never like Hamlet’s, shall its tale unfold;
‘Tis a pity, for if he was minded to blow,
And tell all he knows of the actions below,
The “lately Departed” would wriggle and squeak,
And some heads, like curs’ tails, be drooping and weak;
He’d prove to us all what we know not before,
That men could be made of nothing but jaw.

Ye friends from the East, as ye trod the rotunda,
Saw yet the battle-flags rent all asunder?
Uncover! Bow low! For those stains are of blood
Of the martyrs that fell by field and by flood.
Ah! Could but th enote of the trumpet again
Awake the departed by hill and by plain,
And turn back the tide of the nation’s great day,
With the blot on its banner of slavery, say,
Who would sound it? Lives there such a man now?
Then shrivel his muscles and wrinkle his brow;
His right arm be palsied and dried up by his tongue,
In lines most accursed let his name be sung.

Rest, martyrs, the sound of battle is o’er,
And your feet tread soft on the Elysian shore.

Ye who come from North, Easy, South, and “far West,”
Our programme is ready, so join in with zest.
Here’s Liberty’s “cradle,” where the babe was rocked,
Such a naked little thing that the nurse was quite shocked.
She has grown pretty large since that time you’ll say,
And larger still grows with the flight of each day.
New members she’s had, and as everyone knows,
The president adds daily V. toes and V. toes.

There’s Breed’s hill, called Bunker’s where the boys had a fight,
What there is left of it, just a very small mite,
With a big pile of stones on it, so it shan’t blow away,
And to commemorate a sort of Bull Run in its day,
Only the bull didn’t run on that eventful morn,
And the Yankee boys’ pluck took the bull by the horn.

Here’s Harvard beyond, the famed “seat of learning”
For lads who are able to keep the torch burning;
The poor must digest what the schoolmaster teaches,
Driven in at the head and seat of the breeches.

Here’s Agassiz’s museum of fishes and bones,
With birds, beasts and reptiles, plants, skeletons, and stones,
And many other things that deserve your attention,
As the auctioneer says, “too numerous to mention.”

Here’s the Natural History, with molusks and “crusty”
Pickled snakes done in bottles, and specimens musty;
Here’s a good chance to “compare” the jaw-bones of owls,
With the dodo and eagle, and all sorts of fowls;
Here you can sit on a “rush-bottom” and study with ease
Whether the walrus eats pork, or the elephant cheese;
Here’s molar teeth, to pull would take forceps immense,
Got up, like the drama, at unlimited expense.

But now let us hasten, the mastodon waits;
Just imagine the creature wearing two pair of skates,
Gliding about on thick ice in the river;
Should the cold climate his carcase make shiver,
The Yankees might “guess” that his heartiest shake
Was a touch of the long-remembered earthquake.
Here’s the footprints of birds, tremendous “Shanghies,”
That could life young pigs high and dry from their sties,
And swallow them whole, spite of any protest,
With paving stones plenty to make them digest.

We’ll look at the Hospitals, City and State;
Should fortune be right, or unfortunate fate,
We need not the privilege seek for or beg
Of seeing the surgeon “make a hand of a leg.”
If Paddy could jest thus, why can’t I declare
That oft a broken arm is a humerus affair.

‘Twould take paper and ink by the ton, more’s the pity,
To tell all the wonders to be seen in our city;
So I shan’t do it, but let you explore for yourselves,
And lay up your treasures on memory’s fair shelves.

Then there’s the serious part, the weighty discussion,
The clash of ideas in serious concussion;
The din of the clinic with twenty filled chairs,
And the usual amount of splitting of hairs.
There is delegate 1, with wisdom erratic,
And delegate 2, with mallet automatic;
Like Uriah Heep, here’s a chair that can tumble
From dignified straight-back to posture most “’umble;”
But to make the thing equal, and state it right fair,
The owner is sure to set a “heap” by his chair.

…………………

My welcome is most done—it’s no welcome that tires–
And I fear that I keep you from other desires.

And now for a breath of the saltiest sea air,
A dip and a splash in Venus’ deep lair;
The steamer is ready, we wait not the oar,
Strike up, sweetest music,– away goes the shore!

Now let the gay laugh grow louder and louder,
As sweet on the nostril comes smell of the chowder;
Here’s filling to put in—there’s plate-work enough here
To last a smart dentist to the end of the year.
Success to him, say I, he fortune can win
Whose filling, in spite of the water, stays in.

With great hopes for our future, for peace while we stay,
May the star of the dentist mount high into day,
Is my wish; so, therefore, to part in good cheer,
One little conundrum I’ll venture just here.
Why is the dentist, when fishing, I pray,
Engaged in the trade he follows each day?
Can’t guess it, you say, you slyest of vulpines–
Because he, no double, will pull out some skull-pins.

A short little poem from another dentist, Dr. Ferguson.

Some of Dr. Codman’s other writings can be found in our collection. You can also find there’s a lot of poetry written by medical professionals. To see for yourself, contact library@nyam.org for an appointment.

References:  
“John Thomas Codman Brook Farm collection,” Harvard Library,https://hollisarchives.lib.harvard.edu/repositories/24/resources/3381, accessed April 30, 2024. 

Codman, John T. Foul Breath. Boston, 1879. 

Codman, John Thomas. Welcome poem: to the members of the American Dental Association. Boston : Wright & Potter, 1866.