On Monday, February 5th, we kicked off the eighth annual “Color Our Collections!” This initiative asks libraries, museums, and other cultural institutions to submit coloring books based on their collections. These coloring books don’t just live on our site for that one week; you can access them whenever you want! Over the years we have collected over 800 free coloring books for everyone to enjoy.
Maybe you need an excuse to color? Well, besides just being a fun activity, coloring has been shown to provide other benefits. Research has shown that it makes your brain feel a sense of relaxation. You don’t have to be an artist to break out crayons or colored pencils. The “low stakes” nature of the activity lets you enjoy it more. There may also be the subconscious thought of nostalgia lingering as you color; this used to be something you enjoyed! These factors combine to provide therapeutic effects to coloring (though it is important to keep in mind “therapeutic” is not the same as actual therapy!).
For the NYAM coloring book this year, we chose images of what it was like to be healthy in the 19th and 20th centuries. “Living Well in the 19th and 20th Century” shows activities meant to relax and help people taking care of one another, a woman ready for a bike ride, and acquaintances stopping to shoot the breeze on the grass. These are just some routes that you may take when practicing your own wellness routines.
You can use the hashtag #ColorOurCollections to show off your own work and see what others are doing.
A huge thank-you to our colleagues worldwide who have contributed coloring books to the collection. We couldn’t do it without you!
By Sean Purcell, The Media School, Indiana University-Bloomington and the Library’s 2023 Helfand Fellow
Mr. Purcell completed his Fellowship residency in the summer of 2023 and will present his research by Zoom on Thursday, December 7 at 4 p.m. (EST). To attend his talk, “A Portrait of Tuberculosis (as a Young Microbe): Representing Consumption at the Turn of the Twentieth Century,” register through NYAM’s Events page.
I spent a month over the spring and summer looking through the New York Academy of Medicine Library collections, working towards a mixed methods dissertation, titled The Tuberculosis Specimen: The Dying Body and its Use in the War Against the “Great White Plague.” I came to the library with an interest in the visual culture surrounding tuberculosis at the turn of the twentieth century, and in my research, I have cast a wide net, looking at an array of images, from doctors’ portraits to children at play, from histological samples to photographs of wet specimens.
The turn of the twentieth century saw major shifts in the public, professional, and governmental interventions against tuberculosis. Robert Koch’s 1882 essay on the microbial cause of the disease led to a broad shift in how medical professionals and the lay public understood and combatted the disease. Koch had figured out a process to isolate the bacteria in laboratory animals and used a series of chemical baths to stain Mycobacterium tuberculosis a bright blue (fig. 1). Seeing the bacteria clear as day under the microscope helped move germ theory forward, and forced doctors and health worker to reconsider how to treat a disease that was, prior to Koch’s essay, considered a constitutional malady. The period after Koch’s essay saw the rise of public health interventions against the disease and the popularization of the tuberculosis sanatorium.
Figure 1. An illustration of Mycobacterium tuberculosis. From Aetiology of Tuberculosis, 1890, Robert Koch.
The most influential figure in the burgeoning sanatorium movement was Edward Livingston Trudeau. A doctor who had sought a cure for his own tuberculosis in upstate New York, Trudeau built his own laboratory and sanatorium, the Adirondack Cottage Sanatorium, in 1880 (figs. 2 & 3). This institution became a central fixture in the decades to come, as it was equipped with research facilities, and published its public-facing journal for tuberculous patients, The Journal of Outdoor Life.
While Trudeau’s sanatorium was the most prominent institution, it was far from the only one. Many for-profit institutions opened their doors during this period, in addition to the development of publicly funded sanitaria in certain states. Assisting the larger, long-term treatment facilities, some cities and hospitals adopted a dispensary system, where tuberculous patients could get assistance and medicine within an urban space.
These dispensaries served patients, but also sought to teach the urban poor lessons on hygiene. Doctors and public health workers reeled at the dusty, ill kept living conditions of the urban poor, and argued that improper sputum management, poor ventilation, and dark living conditions were contributing to tuberculosis infections in American cities (figs. 4 & 5). While ideas regarding the “healing air” of a specific environment were becoming out of fashion for tuberculosis practitioners in the early 1900’s, most doctors argued that tuberculous patients should get away from the polluted and uncirculated air common to urban environments (figs. 6 & 7).
The fight against tuberculosis in this period saw a collection of different interventions, and the New York Academy of Medicine’s library offers a unique glimpse into the work of scientists and medical professionals who were trying to fight the disease. My time here as a Helfand fellow has been a boon to this research because of the library’s extensive collections, much of which has not been digitized.
The first panel of the AIDS quilt was put together in 1987—this year the Quilt is 36 years old!
Image courtesy of National AIDS Memorial.
The AIDS Quilt was the brainchild of gay activist Cleve Jones. A protégé of Harvey Milk, the San Francisco city supervisor murdered in 1978, Jones honored Milk’s life and service with candlelight marches through the city. For the 1985 march he saw the ravages that AIDS was making in the gay community and asked that marchers write the names of friends lost to AIDS on posters. Placed on a wall, the posters resembled a quilt; by 1987 the names had been captured in fabric, a traditional way of memorializing people and events. The NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt was born.
Cleve Jones, activist and founder of the quilt, in front of a panel. Image taken from Wikipedia.
The quilt was first displayed on the National Mall in Washington, DC, on October 11, 1987, and contained 1,920 names—a dramatic demonstration of the terrible effects of the disease, only a few years after it came to public notice. At the quilt’s October 1996 display, it covered the entire Mall and was the last time that the whole quilt could be displayed at once. In the years since the quilt began, it has been exhibited throughout the world, often in connection with World AIDS Day on December 1. Today the quilt contains almost 50,000 panels, representing 110,000 individuals. The National AIDS Memorial in San Francisco is responsible for the quilt, mounts special efforts to address the presence of HIV/AIDS in the Black and Native American communities, and shares the quilt online.
An image of the quilt being displayed in Washington, DC around 1987. Image taken from National AIDS Memorial.Advertising the digitization of the quilt from National Aids Memorial, as per their website.
This year, the New York Academy of Medicine is proud to host a portion of the AIDS quilt for World AIDS Day on December 1. We’ll reveal the quilt at our Celebration of the Library on November 29 and exhibit it in the Academy Building throughout December. We hope you can join us to view this sober but also hopeful reminder of how disease devastates communities, and how communities respond, through art, with remembrance and resilience.
A panel from the AIDS quilt at the National Building Museum used as part of Wikimedia Commons.
As we pass the longest day of the year, we arrive at summer!
We began our celebration of the summer with the annual Museum Mile Festival on Tuesday, June 13th. Each year, all the cultural institutions along 5th Avenue get together to highlight what we have to offer. Think of it as a block party for museums! The stretch starts around 85th Street with The Met and ends at 110th with The Africa Center.
This year the Museum Mile Festival celebrated its 45th anniversary. It also happened to be the 100th birthday of our neighboring institution, The Museum of the City of New York! From where we were set up, we could hear the titular song from the new musical “New York, New York” in observance.
NYAM’s table was set up outside 103rd Street right across from Central Park. Our set-up highlighted the treasures from our collection with replicas of assorted pamphlets. This included a photo-op with our new skeletal employee. There were plenty of crayons on hand for visitors to engage in sheets from our Color Our Collections coloring books. Sidewalk chalk was on offer to decorate the closed city streets.
The NYAM Team enjoyed talking with the passers-by. These encounters gave us ideas on how best to invite the community through our doors to engage with our organization. A reminder that throughout the year on the first Monday of every month at 12 pm (holidays excepted), we offer tours of our library highlighting a portion of the collection. While we understand it may not be possible for some to attend, we continue to look for other ways to highlight our rich holdings.
For some, the Museum Mile Festival is their unofficial kick-off to summer. Others wait for the official start on the day of the summer equinox. Students may celebrate on the last day of classes when their summer vacation starts.
While not all of us get that traditional summer vacation, the season brings to mind the need for some real relaxation. Whether it be lying by the beach, going for a run in the park, or seeing your favorite baseball team play, we each have our own ideas of what it means to take it easy. It could be a tropical vacation that’s been on your calendar for months, or a day trip you take with friends out East to a winery. One doesn’t have to spend time lamenting a lost youth!
Some like to relax by swimming. We’ve previously investigated tips and tricks to make your swimming more artful or, the proper scientific form. Others visit different places. Our blog has also shared what happens when the God of love needs some rest and relaxation. It goes to show that if they need it, we do too.
Here at NYAM, we want to hear how you are spending this leisure time. Send us a postcard detailing what you’ve been up to in your downtime or some photos or videos (no faces please!) at librarysocial@nyam.org or the New York Academy of Medicine, 1216 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10029 (Attn: Library). We’re excited to see what you are up to!
Throughout the summer we hope to share with you what others have been doing. We need to recharge once in a while. Your relaxation tips might inspire others! You never know what may lie in your own backyard.
(Enjoyed the colorful, illustrated images? They come from our William H. Helfand Collection of Pharmaceutical Trade Cards collection which is available to view online!)
By Dr. Evelyn Rynkiewicz, Assistant Professor of Ecology,. Department of Science and Mathematics at the Fashion Institute of Technology, State University of New York.
My name is Dr. Evelyn Rynkiewicz, I am a professor of ecology at the Fashion Institute of Technology. I teach a course there called “Disease Ecology in a Changing World,” and my background and research is in disease ecology of coinfecting parasites in mice. I wanted to present a course like this for FIT students because diseases are something that affect all of us, everyone has experience being sick, and because emerging infectious diseases are a growing global issue (even before the Covid-19 pandemic, which is of course still impacting us). The challenge in teaching science courses at FIT is that our students mainly have majors in the design and business fields, not in the sciences, so I try to make the course material relate to their backgrounds and experiences as much as possible, to make the content more relevant to them. I also want to increase science literacy in my students, making them comfortable reading, understanding, and talking about science in their personal and professional lives.
I learned about the New York Academy of Medicine Library after seeing the “Germ City” exhibit at the Museum of the City of New York. I got in contact with the Historical Collections Librarian, Arlene Shaner, who set up a visit to show me some of the materials she thought would relate to my course. I was blown away! I knew my students would love to see these historical documents. These materials highlight not only the art and history of how scientists and the public interacted with diseases through time, but also show how intertwined social, economic, and political issues are with how society’s experiences of disease.
Our class took a field trip to the NYAM Library and was shown an array of material; from Hooke’s book on microscopy, Edward Jenner’s work describing his development of the first vaccine, to posters and leaflets used from WWII to the present day to inform people about diseases such as malaria, HIV, or tuberculosis. I am always excited to see what students find interesting from this visit. Many enjoyed seeing the graphic design and illustrations used in the posters, such as those by Dr. Seuss and Keith Haring. Others picked up on how women and marginalized groups were often those who did a lot of the work caring for sick and infected people. Some just liked seeing the historical materials related to New York and being able to see how their home was impacted by diseases in the past.
One of the main assessments for the course is a creative research project where students choose a disease to study and then make a presentation with something creative related to that disease that would help someone learn more about it. I encourage the students to think about how they could use their skills learned from their major and apply it to this topic. The field trip to the NYAM Library provides the initial inspiration for this. I am always so proud and surprised at what they come up with!
Here are some of the things they created:
Arriana Tran, a Fashion Business Management major, created a movie poster. Inspired by the warnings her parents shared with her on the risk of becoming infected with Dengue in her parent’s home country of the Philippines.
Packaging Design major Ethan Wolfsberg designed a malaria testing and monitoring kit that would be able to be used in remote areas that are heavily impacted by this disease. A real-life version would be made in languages appropriate for the area.
To reduce the stigma of taking PreP, Francis Lavery, also a Fashion Business Management major, made an image that emphasizes that this treatment is appropriate for everyone.
Illustration major Leia Garrette wanted to visually show how infection with the agent of Lyme Disease impacts all parts of the body. She created a paper doll where each layer illustrated a different system (e.g. muscles, nervous system) accompanied by an explanation of how each is affected by the infection.
This flyer was created by Sarah Sepulveda from Fashion Business Management. Her plan was for a support group for parents worried about or impacted by Zika virus. There was a focus on Brazil where the outbreak was especially significant in 2016.
Once again, a huge thanks to Arlene and the others at NYAM for their help and insight. I look forward to more collaboration!
By Mario Rubano, MPH, Center for Healthy Aging, NYAM
Today’s guest blogger is Mario Rubano, Policy Associate at NYAM’s Center for Healthy Aging. Mr. Rubano plays a central role in the Academy’s next Then & Now event, “The Opportunities and Challenges of Healthy Aging in New York City.” He conducted the interviews documenting the experiences of older New Yorkers and will moderate the discussion of those experiences with historians Kavita Sivaramakrishnan, PhD, and David G. Troyansky, PhD. The event takes place online on Tuesday, November 15, 5:00 to 6:00 pm; you can register here.
The NYAM Library’s “Then & Now” series has explored a wide variety of medical and public health issues, bringing experts and researchers into dialogue with the broader NYAM community. As the Academy’s 175th anniversary celebrations wind down, we’re delighted to feature a different set of experts—older New Yorkers.
NYAM has been at the forefront of NYC older adult health and policy since 2006, when it first joined the Global Age-friendly Cities project, an international effort spearheaded by the World Health Organization (WHO). The following year saw the development of Age-friendly NYC, an award-winning partnership that reimagined how the City could meet the needs of its older residents. This shift was rooted in the 8 Domains of Livability, a collection of interconnected categories that captured the most vital aspects of healthy living for older adults in urban centers. Today, the Center for Healthy Aging (CHA) embodies this legacy in its ongoing mission to improve the health and well-being of current and future aging populations.
The 8 Domains of Livability
At present, New York City is home to roughly 1.2 million individuals aged 65+, and we were lucky enough to settle down with five of the busiest of them for personal interviews via Zoom. The participants, drawn from a network of grassroots age-friendly community groups, shared their insights, memories, experiences, and opinions (with classic New York panache) in a discussion structured around the 8 Domains of Livability. Each of the participants has maintained an active relationship with local community-based organizations, community boards, volunteer groups, or, in one case, as a part-time Reservist working with NYAM. What was immediately clear across each of the interviews was the devotion that each participant has to this city. Whether born-and-bred or a transplant, these New Yorkers were as energized by the city as one could possibly be, and it’s this vigor that brought their reflections to life.
Our Interviewees!
If a single takeaway were to be drawn from these five interviews, it would be that “progress” is a constant process rather than a state-of-being or condition that is achieved. The domain of transportation illustrates this idea. The participants all remarked on the tremendous improvements in comfort and capacity that the public transportation system has undergone over their lifetimes. The advent of air conditioning to ease the misery of a summertime, rush-hour commute, the growing fleet of accessible kneeling buses that simplify the boarding process for individuals with mobility challenges, and the creation of station transfers were all viewed as highlights over the years. Yet, we also heard about significant lapses in the management of bus lines that blatantly ignore the needs of older New Yorkers and, in many instances, place undue burdens on communities of color.
Healthcare access also changed in remarkable ways, both positive and negative, over the course of their lifetimes. House calls from family doctors who knew and treated entire communities gave way to newer models of care that, while noted for their efficiency and quality, were seen as impersonal and disconnected. We heard sobering stories of healthcare in the years before desegregation and the ongoing effects of Robert Moses’ infrastructure projects, like the Cross Bronx Expressway. These stories demonstrate the necessity of continued civic and community engagement, even after broad, landmark victories. Legislative progress—such as that initiated by the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990—must be continuously refined to ensure that the promises of better lives remain intact in an increasingly complex world.
This project has been a thrilling process in itself, and we look forward to sharing these New Yorkers’ stories, and hearing the commentary by our guest historians, Drs. Kavita Sivaramakrishnan and David Troyansky, at the upcoming November 15th Then & Now event.
By Joseph Bishop, Princeton University, and the Library’s 2022 Audrey and William H. Helfand Fellow
Mr. Bishop completed his Fellowship residency in summer 2022 and will present his research by Zoom on November 8 at 4:00 (EST). To attend his talk, “Pharmaceutical Visions: How US Drug Companies and Ad Agencies Revamped Their Credibility by Marketing with Scientific Imagery,” register through the Academy’s Events page.
This spring I spent weeks immersed in the vast historical materials available at the New York Academy of Medicine (NYAM) Library. I had the honor of receiving the Audrey and William H. Helfand Fellowship to pursue a project that I believe would have interested Bill Helfand: an examination of the changes in medical advertising at the turn of the twentieth century. During his life, Helfand amassed an extensive collection of fascinating drug and medical memorabilia and visual art. Much of his collection and work illuminates the dynamic between drugmakers and the public during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Significant portions of Helfand’s collection are available at NYAM, and I took advantage of the richly colored and wide-rangingcollection of patent medicine trade cards. NYAM also has mountains of pharmaceutical, medical, and allied trade journals and magazines brimming with pharmaceutical advertisements.
At the turn of the twentieth century, the American public saw the rise in large corporate pharmaceutical companies, national and corporate advertising, and federal drug regulation. An important question is what prompted the transformations in medical visual culture that helped to portray drug companies as scientific and research-oriented. To answer that question, I compare late-nineteenth-century patent medicine trade cards with medical ads in Ladies’ Home Journal in the 1920s. This comparison reveals a transition from entertainment and fantasy to a preoccupation with scientific progress and medical authority. My research at NYAM has led me to conclude that drug companies and ad agencies emphasized scientific and medical imagery to revamp their medical credibility and professional image amid national drug regulation and the public’s anger with the industry’s past association with patent medicine.
American patent medicine companies faced scrutiny for producing nostrums with cryptic contents and questionable efficacy during the first decade of the twentieth century. They depended on local advertisement imagery that reflected the nineteenth-century public’s anxieties and aspirations. Popularizations of science were created for various reasons—from entertainment to informing citizens—but they all served to increase scientific and medical awareness within the American public. Philadelphia-based ad agency N. W. Ayer’s accounts show that patent medicine was their most lucrative commodity category, carrying 26 percent of their total revenue in 1878, and their second-most lucrative commodity in 1900, carrying 15 percent. By 1879 in the US, more than 400 religious weeklies each needed a steady flow of advertising revenue to stay in business. Newspapers generated patent medicine business, and medical advertisements sustained newspapers. Nostrum manufacturers developed new marketing techniques, created novel distribution systems, pioneered brand-name products, became an economic link between urban and rural centers, and expanded markets.
Americans living through the last two decades of the nineteenth century saw an explosion of advertising trade cards. Retailers gave away these pocket-sized cards, often stuffed in product packaging as a bonus and easily collectible by customers. Patent medicine companies used these cards extensively, as they proved to be a very successful sales medium. Many people collected cards into albums and created scrapbooks, which children sometimes received as birthday or Christmas gifts.
Image 1:“Ayer’s Ague Cure Is Warranted to Cure All Malarial Disorders” Dr. J. C. Ayer & Co. (Lowell, MA) Produced ca. 1875–1895 From the William H. Helfand Collection of Pharmaceutical Trade Cards at The New York Academy of Medicine Chromolithograph, 6.1 x 11.6 cm
Trade cards such as Ayer’s Ague Cure (Image 1) evoke an aura of connection with nature and adaptation to the surrounding environment. The image in the bottom right corner depicts an alligator and a couple of frogs discussing Ayer’s Cure as if they used it to protect themselves from malaria. The ad implies that Ayer’s product helps one adapt to one’s environment just as well as the alligators and frogs adapt to theirs.
Image 2: “Cas-car-ria Is Worth Its Weight in Gold” Product: Cas-car-ria Produced ca. 1875–1895 From the William H. Helfand Collection of Pharmaceutical Trade Cards at The New York Academy of Medicine Chromolithograph, 5.8 x 7.8 cm
On the other hand, Cas-car-ria’s trade card (Image 2) depicts a young girl holding a switch and a dog together, fending off miniature demons labeled with ailments. Cas-car-ria’s ad evokes notions of animal protection and self-protection, implying that when patients take Cas-car-ria, they harness the animal within, unleashing the strength required to fight off external demons.
The explosion of ads promoting proprietary medicines and their incessant hyperbole and mistruths eventually provoked strong public reactions that demanded transparency and regulation. There were always calls to rein in the quackery, but the inundation of promotion drove the regulation of patent medicine to become a public priority.
Image 3: “What is in your medicine cabinet?” Ladies’ Home Journal, February 1924, p. 144 Manufacturer: E. R. Squibb and Sons From Ohio State University
Examining Ladies’ Home Journal during the 1920s illustrates these changes in advertising. At this point, advertisements offered a different portrayal of scientific medicine and appealed to a more docile public regarding medical professionals. A Squibb pharmaceutical ad depicts a well-organized medicine cabinet (Image 3). The caption asks, “What is in your medicine cabinet? Are they products your physician would approve?” This approval seeking from medical authority plays into the new values of placing faith in the trained judgment of scientific and medical authority.
Image 4: “Zonite: the World War Antiseptic” Ladies’ Home Journal, March 1924, p. 192 Manufacturer: Zonite From Ohio State University
Ads for Zonite (Image 4) ran images of scientists wearing lab coats and examining test tubes, drawing a scientific aura into its products. Zonite also associated its product with scientific discoveries, like the Carrel-Dakin fluid (i.e., diluted bleach), a critical antiseptic used in World War I.
Image 5: “Why the familiar cake of Yeast Foam is now eaten as well as used in bread” Ladies’ Home Journal, May 1921, p. 49 Manufacturer: Northwestern Yeast Co. (Chicago, IL) From the University of Michigan
The ad for “Yeast Foam” (Image 5) also appeals to scientific and medical authority, depicting a man wearing a medical coat and peering into a microscope. In the foreground are two circular illustrations of microscopic specimens—one containing germs and the other germ-free. The ad portrays a professional man immersed in scientific work, suggesting that the product has been carefully vetted through scientific scrutiny for quality assurance.
Similarly, the Fleischmann advertisement (Image 6) depicts two men in lab coats working at a table equipped with flasks, a beaker, a microscope, and other scientific instruments. The caption below the image states, “Messages of startling importance from the laboratory of the scientist.” Text within the ad notes how Fleischmann’s Yeast cures various diseases. In the case of skin diseases, the ad relies on a general sense of medical authority: “Many physicians and hospitals are prescribing Fleischmann’s Yeast for impurities of the skin. It has yielded remarkable results.”
Image 6: “Ten or fifteen years of life” Ladies’ Home Journal, September 1921, p. 45 Manufacturer: The Fleischmann Company (New York, NY) From the University of Michigan
The values of corporate ad agencies following the patent medicine era are not only a reaction to muckraking journalism and reform movements. The use of scientific medical imagery conveying authority and professional judgment was also largely about revamping the medical credibility of US drug companies and corporate ad agencies; they benefited handsomely during the patent medicine era but later needed to diminish their connections to these fraudulent products. Ad agencies traced the American public’s anxieties and aspirations as they shifted from loose whimsy about panaceas in the late nineteenth century to a reverence for qualified scientific and medical experts and institutions at the beginning of the twentieth century. By tracing this transition in medical imagery, we can glean how drug companies and ad agencies shaped products to elevate their professional clout.
By Paul Theerman, Arlene Shaner, Bert Hansen, and Melissa Grafe
On Tuesday, October 18, three esteemed librarians and historians will gather—virtually—to discuss the history and prospect of medical libraries. The event features the Library’s own Historical Collections Librarian, Arlene Shaner, speaking on the development of our collections; historian of medicine Dr. Bert Hansen, on how libraries helped shape the development of medicine through history; and Dr. Melissa Grafe, head of the Medical Historical Library at Yale School of Medicine, on the future of historical collections such as the Academy Library’s. If you are interested in attending, please register here. To learn about what these speakers will present, keep reading!
Étienne-Louis Boullée’s grand 1785 design for a French National Library.[1]
Arlene Shaner, “‘A Rich Storehouse’: The NYAM Library’s Extraordinary Collections”
Arlene Shaner, our first panelist, will talk about the evolution of the NYAM Library and its collections, starting with Isaac Wood’s gift of his set of Martyn Paine’s Commentaries to the brand-new organization on January 13, 1847. What he and the early Academy Fellows had in mind was a working collection of books and journals that they would create for their own use. Because the Academy had no home of its own, and very little money, the collections grew at a very modest pace for the first few decades.
The purchase of a building in 1875 provided space for the collections to grow. The generosity of Dr. Samuel Smith Purple, who donated over 2000 journal volumes of his own after the Academy moved into its West 31st Street brownstone (at left), coupled with the 1878 decision of the Fellows to open the Library to all who wished to use it, dramatically changed the Library’s trajectory.
The Academy Library at 17 West 43rd Street
It opened the door to what Librarian Janet Doe later referred to as “a snowball of gifts which has rolled down through the years, gathering momentum and throwing off new snowballs that roll into other libraries.”
Shaner will offer a brief overview of some of the major gifts that helped the library become one of the most important history of medicine collections in the country, if not the world, and also tell the much less well known story of how the Library contributed to the growth of many other collections. She will also look briefly at how changes in the way information is disseminated have transformed, and continue to transform, the NYAM Library.
The former Main Reading Room in the Academy’s current building.
The Rare Book and History Room in the 1930s, now the Drs. Barry and Bobbi Coller Rare Book Reading Room.
Bert Hansen, “The Academy Library’s Contributions to American Medicine.”
Our second panelist, historian Bert Hansen, notes that his earliest memories picture libraries as storehouses of precious treasure, an image reinforced by an architecture that made them look like giant-sized strongboxes or jewelry boxes. Built of large stone blocks and fortified like a castle, libraries he fondly recalls include the main public libraries in Chicago, Newark, and New York City, plus Butler Library at Columbia and the Morgan Library from his college years (as seen below, with NYAM the sixth). The decorated, jewelry-box style often continues inside with marbled lobbies and wood-paneled reading rooms.
But for this presentation, Hansen has gone in a new direction, focusing his attention on the kinds of contribution that libraries like that of NYAM have made to education and the world of learning in serving people who would never enter the building to examine the treasured volumes. In the recent past, virtual use through digitization has become common and will surely expand in the future. But his look at the prior century and a half will highlight other, sometimes-forgotten modes of service as examples of NYAM’s—and other research libraries’—many contributions to American medicine.
Melissa Grafe, “Preservation, Access, and the Future”
Our final panelist, librarian and historian Melissa Grafe, glimpses into the future of medical libraries and the role of physical collections in an increasingly online world. Grafe looks at the ways that technology has become deeply integrated in both medicine and in the libraries that support the medical community. Grafe will connect these modern currents to the rich trove of materials that NYAM assembled over 175 years, and the larger history that has made NYAM’s library one of the major collections connecting medical history to the present.
References
[1]Nancy Spiegel, the University of Chicago Library’s bibliographer for art and cinema, writes:
In the late 18th century, a new vision of the library arose within the context of expanding literacy, and the increased publication of books and journals for the general reading public. Enlightenment architect Étienne-Louis Boullée (1728–1799) envisioned a grand design in his proposal for a French National Library in 1785. In Boullée’s presentation, the state would take responsibility for the collection, ordering, and dissemination of all available information to its citizens.
The design for the main reading room featured a vast, barrel-vaulted ceiling and a modern shelving arrangement: stacked galleries of books over flat wall-cases. These seemingly endless bookcases were open and easily browsable, in dramatic contrast to the earlier medieval system of chaining that bound both books, and readers, to a specific location. Visitors are free to wander about and converse in small groups, but there is no provision of study desks or chairs for extensive research in this idealized environment.
Now “175 years young,” the NYAM Library is one of the most significant historical medical libraries in the world. In an earlier post, we looked at how we came to that position. Now I’d like to look to explore where we are now, and where we might go in the future.
Two shelves of books in the Academy Library’s Drs. Barry and Bobbi Coller Rare Book Reading Room.
Every good special collections library has a distinct identity, focused around its collections. This is ours: we are a research library holding medical and public health literature ranging from the earliest days of printing to the early years of the 21st century. Though formed by many forces, our collection now exists to serve the advanced academic humanities researcher in a variety of disciplines, chiefly the history of medicine and public health. Much of our collection is rare, such many of the books published before 1800, or the 6,000 journal runs found in fewer than four libraries throughout the country; some of it is unique, such as the Smith papyrus, the ancient Egyptian surgical text, and the 9th-century cookbook, Apicius’ De re culinaria. To support this identity, we continue to add to our collections, selectively, focusing on books and other materials that are not found locally, and may be rare nationally. This year so far, we have added seven rare and historical books, including a 17th-century treatise on the plague, an 18th-century book on retaining one’s reason into old age, and a 19th-century promotional pamphlet on curing chronic disease. Collecting physical books remains crucial. Not all the medical literature of the past has been digitized, and reading the bare information contained in the words of the text does not begin to exhaust the experience of learning from a physical book.
Supporting academic research into the collections is important. The Library awards two residential fellowships annually, the Audrey and William H. Helfand Fellowship and the Paul Klemperer Fellowship, each supporting a month’s work. Our application period for 2023 Fellowships just closed and our review committee is now working through the applications. Through our participation in the academic group, the Consortium for the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine (CHSTM), we serve as a venue for their fellows as well, both short-term exploratory visits as well as longer term research trips.
Danielle Laraque-Arena, MD, NYAM Senior Scholar; Barbara Berney, PhD, CUNY Graduate School of Public Health and Public Policy; and Adam Biggs, PhD, University of South Carolina, Lancaster, at “How Long Will We Wait? The Desegregation of American Hospitals,” July 10, 2019, part of the Race and Health series
Why support academic research? Historical scholars lay the groundwork and generate the ideas that will inform discussions in the years to come. The discipline of history provides a particular lens through which to understand our society today—and the role of medicine and public health in shaping society and being shaped by it, a central concern before the COVID-19 pandemic, brought even more sharply into relief since. Scholarly research may start in the rarefied atmosphere of academia, but that’s where concepts are developed and refined, and then honed through vigorous debate. As ideas emerge, they are picked up by thought leaders and informed citizens, and they help to shape the shared understanding and open debate of a healthy society. The Library does its part, not only in supporting academic scholars, but also in presenting their work: both our Fellows’ works-in-progress talks, part of their fellowship experience, and in lively series of more popular yet academically based talks . In 2018 we started the programmatic series Race and Health, followed in 2022 by Then and Now, pairing academic historians with public health researchers and policymakers, so that each may learn from the other, and the audience may learn from both.
A Library conservator repairs one of our rare books.
What’s next for the Library in its support of academic work? Certainly continuing to add to the collections; and certainly continuing to award fellowships and welcome researchers. We will also continue our work behind-the-scenes: cataloging our holdings, so that everyone will know that we have them, and conserving our books, so that researchers of the future can use them too.
But the future should not be just more of the same! We want to support our academic researchers better going forward. How can we not just support individual researchers, but develop and sustain a creative intellectual community that can spark ideas and deepen understanding? How can we find the hidden voices in our collections, which have been smoothed over by the descriptive practices of the past? How can we supplement those voices now, by going beyond the printed word? These are all serious questions. Over the next decade, I hope we can dig more deeply and understand our collections better, to serve our users better. I hope we can find a way to support more research in our reading room, and even commission oral histories, as history starts just in the last moment.
Furman University class at the Library in 2017, interacting with Historical Collections Librarian Arlene Shaner.
The second great strand of the Library’s work is connecting the public with our collection. Our work is broad-based. Our practice of hosting school groups and providing tours goes back decades. While we had to pause this work during the pandemic, we then started “Virtual Visits”: online explorations of collection materials around a common theme. This past year, class visits have started up again in earnest, opening the worlds of the past through our books and images—for college students—while we offer everyone drop-in tours on the first Monday of each month.
Engaging with the physical book is important—for everyone, and for many reasons. In an increasingly digital world, we tend to think of facts, ideas, opinions, and images as disembodied—unmoored from the circumstances of production, distribution, and presentation—and therefore, mistakenly, as more authoritative. The reality of books (even acknowledging how books’ have their own ways of asserting authority) helps bring matters down to earth. Beyond that, books have a particular beauty. But this I mean not only the beauty of a well-crafted binding, or a pleasing or dramatic illustration, or a fine type-face—though I do mean those qualities, best appreciated with an authentic piece, not a facsimile, digital or otherwise. Part of the beauty of books comes rather from different qualities: its heft; a variety of different sizes of books; the thinness or thickness of the paper, and its quality, brightness, look, and feel; an exemplary job of printing and binding, or, alternately, signs of wear caused by generations of use; or even the gradual unfolding of the text as one turns from one page to the next—or bounces around, going forward and backward, engaging with the text physically while one engages with it intellectually. I should add: to appreciate the book is not to disparage the digital revolution—digital texts provide ways of advancing both intellectual and aesthetic life that are different from traditional books. In many ways digital books are better, but in many ways they are not—their experience is often “flatter.” As a society, we have room for both experiences of knowledge.
A Dundas Dick and Co. trade card from the William H. Helfand Collection of Pharmaceutical Trade Cards, with an autumnal scene on the front and calendars for 1876 and 1877 on the back.
Libraries like the Academy’s are well-positioned to provide an exemplary experience of books and other library materials. Our collection is both deep and broad, even with its medical focus. And while many people may not have had an experience of a Renaissance-era oversize anatomical atlas, say, or 19th-century patent medicine ads, or 20th-century pamphlets on improving one’s health, because these materials are no longer common—well, we have them! Beyond this, though, current teenagers’ chief literary experience may well be digital, a trend that only promises to grow. We can provide students, and lifelong learners as well, with an experience not otherwise readily available: not just the book itself—though we can do that—and not just the content of the book—though we can do that, too—but also the deeper experience of understanding the book: how it came about, how it was used, how it’s made, and how it’s conserved. As other libraries empty their shelves and go all-digital, the Academy Library has an increasingly rare and valuable perspective to offer.
How can we do this better? We could engage more people in more ways. Digital products reach a broad swath of people and can draw them to the Library for an in-person experience. Hybrid models could be explored and exploited, for example marrying larger digital exhibits on expansive themes, with smaller physical displays and personal tours. We could explore taking our materials out to the community, rather than always asking people to come our way. We could make a concerted effort to find ways for all facets of society to encounter our collections. All these are possibilities, many of them being investigated and developed elsewhere. We should be actively exploring what works for us at the Academy Library.
The Drs. Barry and Bobbi Coller Rare Book Reading Room, where users engage our books.
I’m excited about the Academy Library, not just what we are doing now but what lies ahead of us. Keep connected and see what comes next!
On Wednesday, September 21, the Academy Library celebrates its achievements and looks to the future. Join us for a festive evening with a chance to meet the NYAM Library Team and explore a special display of some of our rare treasures. Register here.
By Jamie Marsella, Department of the History of Science, Harvard University, and the Library’s 2022 Paul Klemperer Fellow
Ms. Marsella completed her Fellowship residency in summer 2022 and will present her research by Zoom on September 7 at 4:00 pm (EDT). To attend her talk, “‘Where Once There Was Only Friction’: Religion, Eugenic Maternalism, and the Babies’ Welfare Association, 1908–1920,” register through the Academy’s Events page.
I’ll start this blog post with a confession: before sitting down in the NYAM Rare Book Room, I was worried there might not be enough materials to keep me busy for a full month. How profoundly wrong I was!
I arrived at NYAM to conduct research for my dissertation—an exploration of the New York Babies’ Welfare Association (1912–1920). The BWA was an organization that aimed to standardize maternal and pediatric public health programs while remaining a loose federation of public health and child welfare organizations, including private philanthropic and religious groups.
The Babies’ Welfare Association was created by the New York City Bureau of Child Hygiene in 1912. Neither organization has a stand-alone archival collection, nor do most of the 120+ individual organizations within the BWA. Before arriving, I could not have known that the NYAM Library would hold more relevant materials than I could ever have imagined.
The BWA was abundantly represented within the NYAM collections. This makes sense since, for the first two decades of the twentieth century, the BWA was a well-known, highly publicized organization in New York City. The Chief of the Bureau and President of the BWA, Dr. Sara Josephine Baker (1873–1945),[1] was a household name not only in New York, but throughout the country, with movie reels produced by Fox Studios, a monthly Good Housekeeping column, multiple books on child health and parenting, a regular radio broadcast, and constant coverage in the local and national press.
An informative organizational chart created by the BWA from Report of the Babies’ Welfare Association, 1912–1915.
Unlike negative eugenic programs (i.e., sterilization, anti-miscegenation laws) that came to dominate later in the century, early twentieth-century reformers understood eugenic reform as a combination of heredity and environmental conditions. In this framework, improved sanitation, nutrition, and hygiene could improve individuals and enable them to pass on these improvements to their future offspring. The BWA emphasized these changes in the environment, promoting them as eugenic maternalism. In other words, the BWA understood mothers as the family’s first line of defense against disease and, therefore, an essential part in preventing “racial degeneration.” The BWA, therefore, targeted immigrant neighborhoods with the explicit desire to “improve” white-ethnic communities and prevent future supposedly dysgenic generations.
I came to NYAM hoping to better understand why Catholic and Jewish organizations might be interested in participating in this eugenic standardization project and how their participation may have shaped how the BWA understood and operationalized eugenics. I also hoped to clarify the role that Black reformers and patients played within the BWA. Based on what I had gleaned from digitized sources, the BWA’s work with Black philanthropic groups was inconsistent, and their relationships were unclear.
Sisters of Charity and their young charges at the New York Foundling Asylum. Image Courtesy of the New-York Historical Society.
The materials I’ve reviewed at NYAM paint a complicated and nuanced picture. Some religious organizations, like the New York Foundling Asylum and other benevolent institutions run by women religious, understood their own religious missions as Catholics in a way that blended nicely with the assimilationist goals of eugenic maternalism.
Young girls from the Hebrew Orphan Asylum practicing patriotism at a camp excursion. Hebrew Orphan Asylum. Report of the Ninety Ninth Annual Meeting and the Ceremonies Commemorating the Centennial Anniversary of the founding of the Hebrew Orphan Asylum, 1822–1922. 1922; New York Academy of Medicine Library.
Similarly, Jewish organizations like the United Hebrew Charities or the Brooklyn Federation of Jewish Charities understood their work as both a religious mission and an assimilating force. Such groups were eager to associate their religious and cultural practices with Americanism, especially in the face of rising antisemitism.
Most BWA members held a capacious view of their work beyond childcare, health and hygiene, or charitable aid. As I continued to work through the Library’s documents, it became clear that members of the BWA were pursuing something far broader than public health or bodily hygiene. These programs were about “right living”—teaching women and children how to conduct themselves in public and private, how to understand one’s role as a (future) citizen, or how to raise and nurture the future citizens in their care.
The graduating class of nurses trained at the Lincoln Hospital, 1905. Lincoln Hospital and Home. Sixty-Fifth Annual Report, 1904–1905. 1905; New York Academy of Medicine Library.
Within these different organizational records, there were also small glimpses of public health work specifically targeting the Black community. While the connections between the BWA and Black New Yorkers remained muddled, my time at NYAM has helped me understand this reflects the nature of the work, which was sporadic at best and exploitative at worst. The Lincoln Hospital and Home (a BWA member) is one exception to this general rule. The hospital trained Black nurses, many of whom then worked in the hospital treating both Black and white patients or worked with the Henry Street Settlement House (another member) in their Visiting Nursing Service.
Ultimately, my time at NYAM was invaluable. The materials there allowed me to better understand how the members of the BWA negotiated amongst themselves to create a standardized eugenic program that could encompass different ethnicities and religions.
Books, Health and History 