NYAM’s Culinary Highlights

Posted on January 7, 2015 by nyamhistorymed

On Monday, The Recipes Project featured an interview with Curator Anne Garner about the print and manuscript historical recipe books in our collection. We’re delighted to republish the interview, conducted by Michelle DiMeo, on our blog.

Could you give us an overview of the print and manuscript historical recipe books in NYAM’s collection? Can you offer any search tips for finding them in your catalog?

At the heart of our culinary holdings is the Collection of Books on Foods and Cookery, presented to NYAM by Margaret Barclay Wilson in 1929. Wilson was professor of physiology and honorary librarian at Hunter College; she also advised the city of New York on food economy during wartime.

The Wilson collection includes about 10,000 items, including the Apicius manuscript (see below), menus and pamphlets that demonstrate the way cookery changed over time, and a large collection of printed books, beginning in the 16^th century. Included here are works by Scappi, Platina, and Carême as well as many other milestones in culinary printing. Especially exciting are the wide variety of everyday cookbooks we own that show what daily cooking was like in a range of households, across the world. Using our collections, you can also trace the changes that occur when people have access to new innovations—refrigeration, for example, or the gas range.

9th-century manuscript De re culininaria (sometimes De re coquinaria), attributed to Apicius.

We have strong collections related to diet regimens and cooking for health, as well as cookbooks published during wartime when resources were scarce. More general texts on home economics and household management include much on cooking. Books on farming, viticulture and beer-making round out our strong print holdings.

The centerpiece of our food manuscripts is Apicius’ De re culinaria, one of two existing copies of an early Roman cookbook mixed with medical recipes, agronomical observations, and house-keeping advice. Our copy was penned at the monastery at Fulda (Germany) around 830 AD.

NYAM holds some significant early modern manuscript recipe books. Can you tell us more about these and give a couple of highlights?

Our library holds 36 manuscript receipt books, dating from the late 17^th through the 19^th century. The bulk of the manuscripts are German and English. The remaining manuscripts are American, Austrian, French, and Dutch. One of my favorites is the Choise Receipt book from 1680, which includes recipes for fruit preserves, baked goods, mead and beer, as well as hearty pudding and meat dishes. You’ll also find here a recipe ensuring a quick childbirth—central ingredient, baked eel livers!—as well as many other medical recipes. A tantalizing recipe for a “gam of cherries” is notable because the OED dates the earliest usage of “jam,” in any form, to 1736, almost sixty years after the date of this manuscript.

Index of late 17th-century manuscript A Collection of Choise Receipts.

Elizabeth Duncombe’s manuscript offers recipes from a later period (1791). Food historian Stephen Schmidt has cooked several of these recipes, with delectable results! Highlights include a fish sauce more French than English in spirit (akin to today’s beurre blanc), and recipes for pigeon, hedgehog and potted mushrooms. References to milking and to cows suggest that this was the cookbook of a farm household, and not a city residence.

Could you tell us a bit more about the Pine Tree Manuscript Receipt Book Project?

The 36 early modern manuscripts described above were all in need of both conservation and cataloging. All items needed basic stabilization and dry cleaning; in some cases, the bindings needed to be replaced with historically and structurally suitable materials. All can now be used by the public without worry of further damage. They’ve also been cataloged, and can be found by searching online here.

Both the conservation work and the cataloging was funded by the Pine Tree Foundation, overseen by Szilvia Szmuk-Tanenbaum. Szilvia is a bibliophile and a culinary enthusiast, and has been wonderfully generous to us.

I heard that “Food” is NYAM’s 2015 programming theme. Do tell us more! How will recipes be included?

We’re thrilled that our 2015 programming will focus on the history of food and food systems, working with historian and writer Evelyn Kim. Throughout the year there will be food-related events, culminating in our October Festival where we will offer a mixture of talks, demonstrations, and workshops, with noted chefs and writers. In April, we will also be participating in the Food Book Fair in Brooklyn. We will be drawing on our historical cookery collection for insights into changing ideas about food and health, nutrition, diets and more. Watch our blog for images, recipes and details of lectures and workshops to come.

NYAM’s Center for the History of Medicine and Public Health (which includes the Library) hosts the blog Books, Health, and History. Could you give us an overview of some blog posts that were related to historical recipes?

Food historian Stephen Schmidt did a wonderful post for us on a recipe for bread crumb gingerbread. The recipe can be found in a manuscript cookbook from the early 18^th century but is adapted from a much older recipe for a contemporary audience. Schmidt writes about the evolution of gingerbread as a stomach settler in the 17^th-century to its 18^th-century incarnation as a sweet dessert cake, made with molasses. Our manuscript offers recipes for both the old and the new gingerbread. Schmidt speculates that the old was probably made at Christmastime, the new, in everyday cooking.

Another highlight includes a blog featuring a staff member’s photo-documented chronicle of her experiences making Mother Eve’s Pudding, featured in this recipe book, and a post on the recipe itself, which is cleverly—and sometimes cryptically—told in verse. Other highlights include posts offering recipes for an authentic 1914 Thanksgiving dinner and on a pamphlet, the “Canape Parade,” featuring a procession of winsome vegetables.

A recipe in verse for Mother Eve’s Pudding, late 18th-century.

Louis Braille and His System: The Quest for a Universal Script

Posted on January 5, 2015 by nyamhistorymed

By Paul Theerman, Associate Director, Center for the History of Medicine and Public Health

“Louis Braille,” in J. Alvin Kugelmass, Louis Braille: Windows for the Blind. Frontispiece by Edgard Cirlin.

January 4 is the birthday of Louis Braille (1809–1852), the founder of the embossed dot system of representing letters that bears his name. Started in France and adopted world-wide, by the mid-20^th century Braille had become the hope for a universal system of writing for the blind, a dream that by the early 21^st century had faded away.

Born sighted, at the age of three Braille was blinded in an accident. He was sent to one of the premier schools for teaching the blind, the Institution Royale des Jeunes Aveugles, in Paris, where he excelled and became a teacher at an early age. By the time he was 16, Braille worked out his system of encoding language in raised dots. It swept away other systems, which usually tried to retain the shape of the letters of the Latin alphabet, using either large metal type or embossed letters, chiefly for the benefit of the teachers and patrons.¹

Braille’s innovation was related to “night writing,” a system developed by Charles Barbier in the French infantry in Napoleonic times to communicate without sound as part of tactical warfare. Night writing was phonetic, however—perhaps on the premise that most soldiers were illiterate. Louis Braille was literate, and intended his system for the literate. Each written letter corresponded to some arrangement of six dots, arrayed three high and two wide. With 6 dots to work with, there were 64 distinct possibilities—more than enough for letters, numbers, punctuation, and more. And encoding was simple: the dots were raised on the page by pressing or punching through from behind, allowing the blind to write as well as read.

“Position of Hand preferred by Best Readers,” in Kathryn E. Maxfield, The Blind Child and his Reading, opposite p. 54.

“Position of Hand preferred by Best Readers,” in Kathryn E. Maxfield, The Blind Child and His Reading, 1928, opposite p. 54.

A competing English system of encoding text for the blind, using symbols close to legible letters. In William Moon, Light for the Blind, 1879, opposite page 66. Click to enlarge.

Braille’s system eventually forced out its competitors. But as the system spread, problems of local use arose. Although Western European languages all used the Latin alphabet, different languages have slightly different character sets: some added umlauts, accents, and cedillas; others dropped letters; and yet others added non-Latin letters.

Early on, British English Braille and American English Braille diverged. Though British and American printed English share a single alphabet, it is subtly different from French. At the time, the French considered W almost as a “loan letter,” and it was made an addition to the regular alphabet. Thus French Braille followed that order and set up the letters so that X followed V, and W was last. Nineteenth-century British Braille followed the French pattern, while American Braille put the W after V, while using the French Braille character for X. Thus W, X, Y, and Z were differently rendered in British Braille and American Braille, and Braille productions of the two countries were mutually incomprehensible. (A similar situation had developed between Egyptian Arabic and Algerian Arabic.) An 1878 conference sorted it out, enshrining Louis Braille’s original transliterations as the international standard. ²

Braille systems extended worldwide, encompassing not only alphabetic systems using Latin, Cyrillic, Arabic, and Hebrew letters, but also ideographic ones. Chinese Braille made the letters represent spoken Chinese words, conveying meaning by a combination of phonetic expression and context. Local usages remained a problem, though, and by the middle of the 20^th century, the community of instructors of the blind were looking for “world Braille.” Initially prompted by the proliferation of Braille systems in India, UNESCO organized a meeting in Paris in 1950. The conference led to the establishment of the World Braille Council, which chose Sir Clutha Nantes Mackenzie (1895–1966) as its chair.³ Mackenzie was well known in the Braille world. A New Zealander, blinded at the battle of Gallipoli in World War I, he was director of the New Zealand Institute for the Blind from 1921–1938, and then variously worked in India, the United States, China, Malaysia, Uganda, Egypt, Aden (now Yemen), and Ethiopia on issues of blindness.⁴

“World Braille Chart,” World Braille Usage, 1953, p. 74. The full chart is four pages, extending to the right to cover Arabic, Hebrew, Devanagari, Swahili, and Indonesian, and down to cover the balance of the Latin alphabet, along with accented letters and a few marks of punctuation, 44 Braille characters in all.

Cover of World Braille Usage, 1953.

In 1953 he and the Council issued World Braille Usage: A Survey of Efforts towards Uniformity of Braille Notation (Paris, UNESCO), both a history of the development of Braille and, as its subtitle indicates, a survey of usage and a plea for uniformity. Two further editions of the report—1990 and 2013—expanded greatly the countries and languages covered. The 2013 edition presented different Braille renderings for 133 languages. But by that edition, the authors also acknowledged that the long-sought uniformity was not to be found. Unlike the earlier works, no attempt was made in the book’s organization to show commonalities of Braille letters across languages: instead each language is separately represented. “While there is still interest in universal agreement on characters that are used throughout the world, the emphasis now is on unification within languages, as driven by Braille authorities and other organizations.”⁵ The work was decentered from Europe: Latin letters were no longer the standard, and, instead of the World Braille Charts that marked the 1953 edition—derived from Louis Braille’s French—the 2013 editions began with a Braille “International Phonetic Alphabet.” Unity proved elusive, when faced with linguistic self-determination.

What is the future of Braille? Text-to-speech technologies have reduced Braille fluency. But technology has also increased Braille usage, with better ways of producing Braille texts, as well as ways of interacting with computers and smart phones.⁶ Nonetheless, over the last 50 years, American Braille literacy has dropped from 50% in school-age blind children, to about 10%. As a medium of cultural expression, Braille’s future is far from certain. But it’s had a 180-year run, quite remarkable for a technology!

References

1. The Moon System of Embossed Reading, developed by Englishman William Moon (1818–1894), used simplified letters based on the Latin alphabet, but Braille proved better for most.

2. Other complications came as some assigned the Braille letters with the fewest dots to the most common letters—much like Morse code assigns the shortest symbols to the most common letters—and thus both changed Braille’s assignments, and made the new ones language-dependent, as letter frequency differs between languages.

3. See Gabriel Ferrer, The Story of Blindness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1956), pp. 116–17; “International Meeting on Braille Uniformity,” in World Braille Usage (Paris: UNESCO, 1953), pp. 141–45.

4. “Sir Clutha Nantes Mackenzie,” An Encyclopedia of New Zealand 1966, in http://www.teara.govt.nz/en/1966/mackenzie-sir-clutha-nantes, accessed December 18, 2014.

5. World Braille Usage, 3^rd (Washington, DC: UNESCO, 2013), p. viii. http://www.perkins.org/assets/downloads/worldbrailleusage/world-braille-usage-third-edition.pdf, accessed December 18, 2014.

6. Ibid., pp. viii-ix.

The Doorstep of America

Posted on December 30, 2014 by nyamhistorymed

By Johanna Goldberg, Information Services Librarian

Ellis Island opened on January 1, 1892, a gateway to the United States for 700 immigrants on three steamships that first day.¹ By its close in 1924, more than 12 million people had passed through to America.²

Landing at Ellis Island. From “Quarantine Sketches.” Click to enlarge.

About 10 years after Ellis Island’s opening, The Maltine Company, a patent medicine manufacturer, released “Quarantine Sketches: Glimpses of America’s Threshold,” a pamphlet oddly juxtaposing photographs of Ellis Island with advertising for its products. The full pamphlet can be viewed online:

It begins with the text:

Hundreds of thousands—men, women, and children—pass over, or are detained at, the Doorstep of America every year. In this pamphlet are illustrated the various precautions which the Government takes to insure desirable material for future citizenship.

One such precaution described in the pamphlet was the two-day quarantine of all passengers arriving from Cuba between May 15 and October 1, an effort to prevent the spread of yellow fever in the United States. But for all other steerage passengers, the procedure was different.

The hospital at Ellis Island. From “Quarantine Sketches.” Click to enlarge.

During the “Line Inspection,” United States Public Health Service physicians reviewed each entrant as he or she walked past. According to a 1917 article, the process typically took two to three hours.³ Those who passed the initial review continued on to the Immigration Service, “who take every means to see that he is not an anarchist, bigamist, pauper, criminal, or otherwise unfit.”³ Those who did not pass the inspection, about 15–20% of immigrants in 1917, were routed to the Public Health Service.³

From Mullan EH. “Mental examination of immigrants: Administration and Line Inspection at Ellis Island.” Public Health Reports. 1917; 32(20): 734. Click to enlarge.

There, physicians assessed immigrants for “speech, pupil symptoms, goiters, palsies, atrophies, scars, skin lesions, gaits, and other physical signs,” along with “signs and symptoms of mental disease.”³ Some got sent to Ellis Island’s hospital (one of the best in the country), some to a detention room for further assessment.⁴

Filing past the doctors. From “Quarantine Sketches.” Click to enlarge.

Would-be immigrants could be deported for medical reasons—in 1898, 18% of deportations were medical; this rose to 69% in 1916.⁴ Even so, most immigrants entered the United States: in 1914, the peak year for deportations, only 2.5% of passengers were forced to return to their country of origin.⁴

Detention pen for immigrants awaiting deportation. From “Quarantine Sketches.” Click to enlarge.

Today, you can visit Ellis Island without going through a Line Inspection. You can even book a Hard Hat Tour to see the previously closed-to-the-public hospital complex. Can’t make the trip? Take a look at Hyperallergic’s recent Ellis Island hospital portraits.

References

1. Landed on Ellis Island – new immigration buildings opened yesterday. A rosy-cheeked Irish girl the first registered — Room enough for all arrivals — Only railroad people find fault. New York Times. http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=9802E3D8163BEE33A25751C0A9679C94639ED7CF. Published January 2, 1892. Accessed November 19, 2014.

2. National Parks of New York Harbor Conservancy. Ellis Island. Available at: http://www.nyharborparks.org/visit/elis-faq.html. Accessed November 24, 2014.

3. Mullan EH. Mental examination of immigrants: Administration and Line Inspection at Ellis Island. Public Health Reports. 1917;32(20):733–746. doi:10.2307/4574515. Available at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1999723/. Accessed November 21, 2014.

4. Yew E. Medical inspection of immigrants at Ellis Island, 1891-1924. Bull N Y Acad Med. 1980;56(5):488–510. Available at: http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1805119&tool=pmcentrez&rendertype=abstract. Accessed November 21, 2014.

“FEAR Narcotic Drugs!” The Passage of the Harrison Act

Posted on December 17, 2014 by nyamhistorymed

By Anne Garner, Curator, Center for the History of Medicine and Public Health

Ad published in American Druggist and Pharmaceutical Record, volume 36, number 6, March 25, 1900.

One hundred years ago today, Congress approved the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act. The Act’s passage critically impacted drug policy for the remainder of the century, and the habits of physicians with regard to prescribing and dispensing medicine.

By 1900, use of narcotics was at its peak for both medical and non-medical purposes. Advertisements promoting opium- and cocaine-laden drugs saturated the newspapers; morphine seemed more easily obtainable than alcohol; and widespread sale of drugs and drug paraphernalia gained the attention of medical professionals and private citizens alike.¹ State regulations failed to effectively curb distribution and use.²

Physicians and pharmacists recognized they had an image problem. In 1901, the American Pharmaceutical Association formed a committee to study the country’s drug problem and recommended the ban of non-medical drug use.³ The American Medical Association seconded the APA’s pitch and strongly advocated for federal legislation.⁴

Hamilton Wright. In Morgan, Drugs in America. A Social History 1800-1980.

Dr. Hamilton Wright. In H. Wayne Morgan, Drugs in America. A Social History 1800-1980, p. 99.

This groundswell in support of federal action among local medical professionals also had roots overseas. In the aftermath of the Spanish-American war, the U.S. inherited control of the Philippines, and with it a serious opium problem. An American missionary, Charles Henry Brent, convened a commission in 1903 that recommended narcotics be subject to international control.⁵ Roosevelt seized on these findings, recognizing an opportunity to improve relations with China. In 1908 he initiated an international conference in Shanghai to talk about the narcotics problem. The President sent Brent and Hamilton Wright, U.S. Opium Commissioner, to represent the U.S.⁶ Wright, an outspoken, charismatic, and controversial figure, was central to the eventual passage of the Harrison Act.

Passage of a federal law would not be easy. In April of 1910, at Wright’s behest, Representative David Foster proposed a bill banning the non-medical use of opiates, cocaine, chloral hydrate, and cannabis, with harsh penalties for violations. The purchase of patent medicines containing any of these ingredients would require tax stamps and strict record-keeping. Proponents of the bill stressed the link between criminalization and drug use. Despite Wright’s best efforts, the uncompromising Foster bill garnered strong resistance from manufacturers and druggists, and died in Congress.⁷

A clipping from the library’s Healy Collection, which contains 19th century images, mostly clipped from Frank Leslie’s Illustrated News and Harper’s Weekly. Click to enlarge.

Two more international conferences followed, at The Hague in 1911 and 1912. Soon after, Wright renewed his commitment to pass federal anti-drug legislation. A new bill proposed by Tammany representative Francis Burton Harrison, again at Wright’s urging, looked very similar to the Foster bill. But after two years of negotiations in Congress, the final legislation incorporated several key compromises. Physicians could dispense medication to patients without record-keeping. Patent medicines with legal amounts of narcotic substances could be sold by mail order or in general stores. Cannabis and chloral hydrate were omitted from regulation. With these concessions, opposition from pharmaceutical and medical professionals softened, agreement was reached, and the bill was signed into law on December 17, 1914.⁸

The immediate impact of the Act’s passage was confusion. The law offered only vague implementation guidelines. Was it largely a taxation measure, or was it intended to monitor and regulate professional activity? The Act’s major ambiguity related to the authority of physicians to prescribe maintenance doses of narcotics to already-addicted patients. Two 1919 Supreme Court cases clarified the issue. U.S. vs. Doremus found the Harrison Act constitutional and validated the government’s ability to regulate prescription practices for addicts. Webb et al. vs. U.S. denied physicians the power to provide maintenance doses.

The Supreme Court decisions forced addicts to locate new sources. They turned to the black market, where they paid top dollar. Petty crime increased.⁹ Penalties for violation of the Harrison Act were harsh. In the early years of the law, conviction numbers were relatively low—most years fewer than 500—but by 1919, the year of the Supreme Court rulings, convictions showed a marked upward trend. By 1923, convictions were approaching 5,000 per annum.¹⁰

The effect of the legislation on addicts was not viewed unsympathetically by the medical establishment, or even by law enforcement. Even the head of New York’s dope squad, Lieutenant Scherb, seemed concerned: “Many of [the addicts] are doubled up in pain at this very minute and others are running to the police and hospitals to get relief….the suffering among them is really terrible.”¹¹ Beginning in 1919, authorities and public health officials cooperated to develop 44 addiction recovery facilities. These new facilities were short-lived, and most had closed by 1921. Unpopular with the public, many shut down because the lion’s share of patients found themselves back on the streets again.

NYAM holds a scrapbook of newspaper clippings from 1926-1927 illustrating that drug abuse was still front and center in America’s mind well after the Harrison Act’s passage.¹² Most articles framed narcotic users as criminals: what was once a legal pastime was now seen as a major threat to American society. One clipping quotes Harvey Waite of the Association for the Prevention of Drug and Narcotic Addicts of Michigan: “Drug addicts are a menace to the peaceful citizens of the United States because from them come the most notorious criminals and lawbreakers.”

From the library’s scrapbook of 1926-1927 newspaper clippings. Click to enlarge.

The Harrison Act’s most lasting impact was in how it shifted the public conversation from a discussion about regulating a legal activity to eliminating an illegal one. The Act would form the cornerstone of all drug legislation to come, including the Controlled Substance Act of 1970.

References

1. Musto, David F. The American Disease Origins of Narcotic Control. New York: Oxford, 1999. Pp. 3-8.

2. Morgan, H. Wayne. Drugs in America. A Social History 1800-1980. Pp. 101-102.

3. Morgan, p. 102.

4. Musto, p. 56-57.

5. Courtwright, David T. Dark Paradise Opiate Addiction in America before 1940. Cambridge: Harvard, 1982.

6. Morgan, 99-100.

7. Musto, 47-48.

8. Morgan, 106-108 and Musto, 59-61.

9. Hodgson, Barbara. In the Arms of Morpheus. The Tragic History of Laudanum, Morphine, and Patent Medicines. Buffalo: Firefly, 2001. P. 128.

10. Erlin and Spillane, pp. 44-45.

11. The New York Times, April 15, 1915.

12. [Narcotics]. Clippings from newspapers from Dec. 1926-Sept. 1932. [New York?, 1926-1932]. 3 v. Email history@nyam.org to request.

Three Archival Collections Now More Accessible

Posted on December 12, 2014 by nyamhistorymed

By Rebecca Pou, Archivist

Three of our archival collections are more accessible: their finding aids are available online, both on our Archives and Manuscripts page and in our online catalog.

Medical Society of the County of New York Records, 1806-1989
The Medical Society of the County of New York was founded in 1806 and exists today as the New York County Medical Society. At 68 linear feet, it is one of our largest collections. The records document the society’s changing role over time. In its early years, the society regulated the medical profession in Manhattan; by the 20th century, it focused on education and public health concerns.

The Charaka Club Records, 1898-2012
The Charaka Club is a small, New York-based society of doctors interested in the historical, literary, and artistic aspects of medicine. The collection contains minutes, correspondence, publications, talks, and other materials. The talks, some which were not published in the club’s Proceedings, may be especially interesting.

Physicians Relief Fund Records, 1974-2005
The Physicians Relief Fund was a charitable organization that provided financial relief or loans to physicians and their dependents in times of need.

If you are interested in using any of these collections, please contact us at history@nyam.org. More finding aids will become available online in 2015.

From Master Dissector to Accomplished Author: Johann Gottlieb Walter

Posted on December 4, 2014 by nyamhistorymed

By Tatyana Pakhladzhyan, Rare Book Cataloger

Johann Gottlieb Walter, born on July 1, 1734, was a German physician and anatomist. He was born in Königsberg, studied medicine there, and received a medical degree at Frankfurt (Oder) in 1757. Walter continued his study in Berlin under Johann Friedrich Meckel the Elder, who appointed Walter prosector in the anatomical theater of the Medico-surgical College in 1760. After Meckel’s death in 1774, Walter became the college’s first professor of anatomy and obstetrics. He also held the chair of anatomy at Frankfurt University. Walter died in Berlin on January 4, 1818.¹

The title page of Tabulae nervorum thoracis et abdominis. Click to enlarge.

In 1783, Walter’s Latin-language Tabulae nervorum thoracis et abdominis was published in Berlin. He had reputedly dissected more than 8,000 cadavers, and he maintained a collection of nearly 3,000 anatomical specimens purchased by the King of Prussia for the Anatomical Museum of the University of Berlin.² Walter’s great skill as a dissector and his ability is well demonstrated in the illustrations of this text.

Walter dedicated this work to William Hunter, John Hunter, and Petrus Camper. William Hunter (1718–1783) was a Scottish anatomist and physician. He was a leading teacher of anatomy, who guided and trained his more famous brother, John (1728-1793), one of the most distinguished scientists and surgeons of his day. The Hunterian Society, founded in 1819, was named in John’s honor, and the Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons of England preserves his name and his collection of anatomical specimens. Petrus Camper (1722–1789) was a Dutch physician and anatomist interested in comparative anatomy and paleontology; he also invented the measure of the facial angle. Camper was also a sculptor and a patron of art.

This book contains four numbered plates depicting the nervous system of the thorax and abdomen, each accompanied by an outline drawing. All plates are signed by “I.B.G. Hoppfer, ad nat. delin” and “I.H. Meil, sculp.” “Ad nat. delin” indicates that Hoppfer drew from nature, while “sculp.,” or sculptor, would today mean “engraver.” Plates I-II are dated 1777; plates III- IV were completed in 1778.

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An English-language translation of Walters’s Tabulae was published in 1804, entitled Plates of the Thoracic and Abdominal Nerves, reduced from the original as published by order of the Royal Academy of Sciences at Berlin. The NYAM library owns this English translation as well.

The 2014 New York State Discretionary Grant for the Conservation and Preservation of Library Research Materials funded the conservation and rehousing of 24 oversize 19th-century German illustrated medical atlases, including Johannis Gottlieb Walter Tabulae nervorum thoracis et abdominis. Although all of the atlas volumes were represented in the library’s card catalog, they had not been entered into NYAM’s online catalog prior to the grant’s completion.

References

1. Julius Pagel: Walter, Johann Gottlieb. In: Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (ADB). Band 41, Duncker & Humblot, Leipzig 1896, p. 26.

2. Bibliographic note in NYAM’s copy of Tabulae nervorum thoracis et abdominis.

Tobaccoism: “Rapidity in the Spread of a Disease-Producing Vice”

Posted on November 20, 2014 by nyamhistorymed

By Danielle Aloia, Special Projects Librarian

The third Thursday of November was designated the Great American Smokeout back in 1976. Since then it has gained national attention and helped precipitate smoke-free policies in public spaces and workplaces. It is a day to commit to quitting smoking with the theory that if you can last one day without lighting up, then you can last a lifetime.

Efforts to end tobacco consumption have a long history. Cigarettes grew in popularity during the 1850s, in tandem with the rise of Antitobaccoism movement.¹ This movement was taken on by Seventh-day Adventists, whose most outspoken figure was Dr. John Harvey Kellogg.

John Harvey Kellogg, MD (1852– 1943). E. E. Doty, photographer. Source. Prints and Photographs Collection, History of Medicine Division, National Library of Medicine.

The Adventists believed in a healthful lifestyle, including abstinence from coffee, alcohol, tea, and tobacco. Kellogg termed this “biologic living.”² He and his compatriots established the American Health and Temperance Association in 1878 to expose the health risks of tobacco and other stimulants. Later, he became a member of the Committee of Fifty to Study the Tobacco Problem, presumably established after the First World War, when a “condition known as ‘soldiers’ heart’” affected British veterans.³ Kellogg also established a hydrotherapy sanitarium and wrote numerous books on healthful living. Today he is best remembered as the co-founder of Kellogg’s, a cereal company that grew out of his sanitarium’s dietary work.

Kellogg wrote Tobaccoism, or How Tobacco Kills in 1922, citing prior studies to document the ill-effects of tobacco on the biological system. This exhaustive account may be the result of his work on the Committee. Tobaccoism likely led Utah Senator Reed Smoot to introduce a bill into Congress including tobacco regulation into the scope of the Food and Drug Act of 1929, an effort that ultimately failed.⁴

Included in the book are some horrific images of the effects of tobacco on the human body. Unfortunately, the images are not sourced and it is hard to determine their derivation. In the text for the section “Damage Tobacco Does to the Liver,” Kellogg references, among others, a Graziani who showed “tobacco causes changes in the liver, particularly hemorrhages and areas of necrosis.” Part of the text of “Tobacco Cancer” reads: “Dr. Bloodgood, Professor of Surgery in Johns Hopkins University, in the study of 200 cases of cancer of the lip, finds smoking a common factor.”

Kellogg, John Harvey. Tobaccoism, or How Tobacco Kills. Battle Creek, MI: Modern Medicine Publishing; 1922.

Kellogg gave figures for the growth in the tobacco habit by manufactured cigarettes per year, via the Census Bureau (the large increase in production from 1910 to 1920 has a lot to do with the First World War, when soldiers received unrestricted cigarette rations):

1902—2,971,360,447
1906—4,511,997,137
1910—8,644,557,090
1920—62,000,000,000

According to Kellogg, this meant there were 460 cigarettes for every man, woman, and child, a disturbing “rapidity in the spread of a disease-producing vice.”⁵ He wrote Tobaccoism in part to slow this growth by making sure people understood that tobacco was harmful and its effects irreversible.

Even with a long history of Antitobaccoism, smoking remains the leading cause of preventable death in the U.S., with 443,000 deaths annually.⁶ In 2011, there were over 290 billion cigarettes sold.⁷

There’s no better time to quit smoking than right now.

References

1. Reducing Tobacco Use. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; 2000. Available at: http://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/sgr/2000/complete_report/pdfs/chapter2.pdf.

2. Marino RV. Tobaccoism revisited. J Am Osteopath Assoc 2003;103(3):120-121.

3 Lock, S. (ed.), Reynolds, L.A. (ed.), Tansey, E.M. (ed.). Ashes to Ashes: The History of Smoking and Health. Amsterdam: Rodopi; 1998.

4. Fee, Elizabeth, Brown, Theodore M. John Harvey Kellogg, MD: Health Reformer and Antismoking Crusader. American journal of public health 2002;92(6):935. Available at: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1447485/pdf/0920935.pdf.

5. Kellogg, John Harvey. Tobaccoism or How Tobacco Kills. Battle Creek, MI: Modern Medicine Publishing; 1922.

6. Broken Promises to Our Children: The 1998 State Tobacco Settlement Fifteen Years Later. Washington, DC: Tobacco-Free Kids; 2013:87. Available at: http://www.tobaccofreekids.org/content/what_we_do/state_local_issues/settlement/FY2014/StateSettlementReport_FY2014.pdf.

7. U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Economic Facts About U.S. Tobacco Production and Use. Smoking and Tobacco Use 2014. Available at: http://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/economics/econ_facts/index.htm#sales.

The Cure for Panic: Ebola in Historical Perspective

Posted on November 19, 2014 by nyamhistorymed

This post is part of an exchange between “Books, Health, and History” at the New York Academy of Medicine and The Public’s Health, a blog of the Philadelphia Inquirer.

By David Barnes, Associate Professor of History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania

The illness itself is scary: first the sudden aches, then the spikes of fever and chills, before the massive internal bleeding and copious vomiting and diarrhea. Death comes amid delirium and hemorrhaging from the nose, mouth, and other mucous membranes. A handful of isolated cases in the United States have been enough to spark a nationwide frenzy of fear and recrimination. Imagine what would happen if the nation’s capital lost a tenth of its population to the disease in the space of two months, and another half to panicked flight. And imagine if it happened again in the same city a few years later, then again, and again—four times in seven years.

The time was the 1790s, and the place was Philadelphia Vice President Thomas Jefferson even called for the city to be abandoned. The disease wasn’t Ebola, but yellow fever, another of the viral hemorrhagic fevers that wreak such terrifying havoc on the body’s internal organs. Yellow fever was also known colloquially by its most distinctive symptom: “black vomit,” which occurred when large quantities of blood accumulated in the stomach. Its ravages in Philadelphia and other seaport cities in the nation’s formative years constituted a serious national crisis.

The public discourse surrounding the ongoing Ebola epidemic has been singularly unedifying. In the United States, news media outlets have eagerly stoked groundless fears, which public officials have rushed to appease with policy responses that will do nothing to stop the disease’s spread. Meanwhile, help has been slow to arrive where it is desperately needed, in Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Liberia. Rural health centers there turn away patients for lack of staff and equipment, while well-funded American hospitals prepare for an influx of patients that may never come.

>>Read the full post at The Public’s Health.

Missing: Very Vicious Red Cow

Posted on November 18, 2014 by nyamhistorymed

By Rebecca Pou, Archivist

This is part of an intermittent series of blogs featuring advertisements found in our collection. You can find the entire series here.

I recently cataloged a small volume of clippings and manuscript notes. As is common in books of clippings, the clippings were pasted to the pages, with the article of interest facing up and whatever happened to be on the back facing the page, hidden from the reader’s view. In this case, some loose items gave me the chance to look at the back side of the clippings, which contained classified advertisements. Dated 1802, the ads were all intriguing, but one in particular stood out. Between a tailor advertising his services and a help wanted ad for a dry goods store, it read:

Strayed or Stolen, from the Subscriber lately a Red Cow with lofty horns, a white tail, a spot near her udder and very vicious. Any person giving information where she may be had, shall have two dollars reward with reasonable changes by applying to Robert Sleith.

An advertisement for a different lost cow offered three dollars as a reward. I suspect she was of a gentler disposition.

The back of a clipping in Clippings from “The True American” and manuscript notes, circa 1802. Click to enlarge.

The back of another clipping showed cows were not the only things gone missing:

The back of a clipping in Clippings from “The True American” and manuscript notes, circa 1802

As amusing as the classified ads are, the clippings and manuscript notes hold the real appeal. The volume was the work of Felix Pascalis Ouviere (1762-1833), a French-born physician. Pascalis, as he is commonly known, studied in Montpellier, lived for a time in St. Domingo, and moved to America. He co-edited the Medical Repository, the earliest American medical journal. He also wrote about yellow fever, commenting on the outbreaks in Philadelphia and New York.¹ The clippings in this volume are of his “Advice to the inhabitants of Philadelphia,” a series of nine parts published in the True American and Commercial Advertiser regarding yellow fever.

A clipping in Clippings from “The True American” and manuscript notes, circa 1802. Click to enlarge.

The volume of clippings will soon be available to readers after a visit to the Gladys Brooks Book & Paper Conservation Laboratory. In addition to this volume, our collection also holds several printed works by Pascalis, as well as considerable other materials (correspondence, manuscripts, diplomas, and more) that are not currently represented in our online catalog. If you are interested in these materials, please email us at history@nyam.org.

Reference

1. Kelly, Howard A. (1928) Pascalis-Ouviere, Felix A. In: Dictionary of American Medical Biography. New York: D. Appleton and Company.

See-Through Science: The Rise of the X-Ray

Posted on November 7, 2014 by nyamhistorymed

By Paul Theerman, Associate Director, Center for the History of Medicine and Public Health

One X-ray-related movie scene stands indelibly in my mind: Henri Charrière (Steve McQueen) getting X-rayed in the escape-thriller Papillon. While purchasing his escape from a French penal colony in the 1930s, Charrière dutifully submits to being X-rayed. He lies down, a photographic plate is put under his head, and a big glowing tube is brought near, which then glows even more brightly and loudly crackles for many, long seconds. The scene is repeated with Charrière on his stomach, a new plate next to his chest, and the tube right over his back. When I first saw this film, this X-ray scene brought out loud gasps in the audience. To me, the scene still captures some of the wildness, improvisation, and, viewed through today’s eyes, danger of early X-rays.

Wilhelm Röntgen. From the frontispiece to Charles E. Phillips, Bibliography of X-ray literature and research, 1896–1897.

X-rays were discovered on November 8, 1895, by Wilhelm Röntgen (1845–1923) of the University of Würzburg. Quite serendipitously, he found that an active vacuum tube, shielded with a cardboard sleeve so that no visible or ultraviolet light could come out, caused fluorescence on a light- and UV-sensitive screen some distance away. When he inadvertently passed between the tube and the fluorescing screen, he saw a projection of his own skeleton. As X-rays (as Röntgen named the effect; others later called them Röntgen-rays) also affected photographic plates, these ghostly images could be fixed. The first published X-ray was of the human hand, that of his wife Anna Bertha Röntgen. Röntgen presented it in a formal paper at the end of December 1895. A Viennese newspaper picked up the story on January 5, with international papers following—The New York Sun covered it on its front page on January 7—and Röntgen and his rays became a world-wide phenomenon. For his work, he received the first Nobel prize in physics in 1901.¹

X-ray of the hand of Anna Bertha Röntgen, submitted by Wilhelm Röntgen, to the Physico-Medical Society of Würzburg, December 28, 1895. Image from Bettyann Holtzmann Kevles, Naked to the Bone: Medical Imaging in the Twentieth Century (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1997), pp. 21.

X-ray of the hand of Anna Bertha Röntgen. Image from Bettyann Holtzmann Kevles, Naked to the Bone: Medical Imaging in the Twentieth Century.

The X-ray’s medical potential was glaringly obvious. By early February the first medical uses of X-rays began to make their way into the published literature. It wasn’t hard to work with X-rays: vacuum tubes and photographic plates, the basic tools, were readily available. In the United States, three different institutions made claim to the first documented use of X-rays for medical purposes. Likely the very first was at Dartmouth (like many claims of priority, this has its competitors) where two faculty brothers, Gilman and Edwin Frost, a physician and a physicist, respectively, took an X-ray of a local boy with a broken arm. Edwin mentioned this case in his February 14 article in the premier journal Science—the first known published American reference to medical X-rays.²

An 1897 set-up for taking an X-ray of the hand. David Walsh, The Röntgen Rays in Medical Work (reprint ed.: New York: William Wood and Company, 1898), opposite page 36.

An 1897 set-up for taking an X-ray of the hand. David Walsh, The Röntgen Rays in Medical Work, opposite page 36.

Perhaps the first published X-ray in the United States of a clinical condition. In “Rare Anomalies of the Phalanges Shown by the Röntgen Process,” Boston Medical and Surgical Journal 134(8), February 20, 1896: 198–99.

Two other institutions also took early medical X-rays, in each case resulting from a doctor- physicist pairing. New York surgeon William Tillinghast Bull brought in a case of a person shot in the hand to Columbia scientist Michael Pupin.³ And in Boston, physician Francis Henry Williams, who was both an MIT grad in chemistry and a Harvard Medical School–trained physician, asked MIT physics professors Ralph R. Lawrence and Charles L. Norton to take X-rays of patients. Though unsigned, some attribute a February 20 article in the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal to him, which provides the first published X-ray in the United States of a pathological condition.⁴ Yale physicist Arthur Williams Wright also did early X-ray work, but not in a medical context.⁵

The speed with which this technology developed medically is breathtaking. In 1897, British physician Dr. David Walsh—who already identified himself as honorary secretary of the Röntgen Society of London—published The Röntgen Rays in Medical Work (reprint ed.: New York: William Wood and Company, 1898), almost 150 pages of instructional anatomy, physiology, and legal medicine. The American Roentgen Ray Society was founded in 1900, and became a forum for working out some of the safety concerns about X-rays. By 1901, Boston physician Francis Henry Williams (who had done that early work with MIT) oriented his practice completely to the topic, as shown by his magisterial 650-page book, The Roentgen Rays in Medicine and Surgery: As an Aid in Diagnosis and as a Therapeutic Agent, Designed for the Use of Practitioners and Students (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1901)—the first of three editions and, in five years, his eighth book on the subject.

From the sales pamphlet, Roentgen Ray Apparatus, published in June 1897 by the Edison Decorative and Miniature Lamp Department of the General Electric Company, Harrison, NJ.

X-rays are now routine, but scientists continue to develop new modes of imaging. In 2000, the National Institutes of Health founded the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering. A lot of progress in just over 100 years!

References

1. Bettyann Holtzmann Kevles, Naked to the Bone: Medical Imaging in the Twentieth Century (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1997), pp. 17–23.

2. Edwin B. Frost, “Experiments on the X-rays,” Science New Series 3 (February 14, 1896): 235–36. See also Peter K. Spiegel, “The First Clinical X-Ray Made in America—100 Years,” AJR 164 (1995): 241–43, from http://www.ajronline.org/doi/pdf/10.2214/ajr.164.1.7998549, accessed November 6, 2014, for photographs of what is believed the first clinical X-ray session, at Dartmouth, and for a copy of that X-ray.

3. Kevles, pp. 35–36.

4. “Rare Anomalies of the Phalanges Shown by the Röntgen Process,” Boston Medical and Surgical Journal 134 (8), February 20, 1896: 198–99. See also Abdul-Kareem Ahmed, “The Race to Give X-ray Vision to Medicine,” posted December 18, 2012, http://scopeweb.mit.edu/articles/the-race-to-give-x-ray-vision-to-medicine/, accessed November 6, 2014.

5. National Academy of Sciences, Biographical memoir of Arthur Williams Wright, 15 (1932):252.

Books, Health and History

The New York Academy of Medicine

Category Archives: History of medicine

NYAM’s Culinary Highlights

Louis Braille and His System: The Quest for a Universal Script

The Doorstep of America

“FEAR Narcotic Drugs!” The Passage of the Harrison Act

Three Archival Collections Now More Accessible

From Master Dissector to Accomplished Author: Johann Gottlieb Walter

Tobaccoism: “Rapidity in the Spread of a Disease-Producing Vice”

The Cure for Panic: Ebola in Historical Perspective

Missing: Very Vicious Red Cow

See-Through Science: The Rise of the X-Ray