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.
Relaxation is just what the doctor ordered! Specifically, Dr. George S. Stevenson of the National and International Association for Mental Health. In his book, How to Deal with Your Tensions (1957), he says that “anxiety and tension” are essential parts of being alive. If we did not experience these feelings, we wouldn’t be equipped to manage the high or low-intensity situations we experience day to day. It is indeed an anxious time. We face threats such as climate change and the spread of misinformation. Writing in 1957, Dr. Stevenson spoke of real high tensions his society faced, “While it is true that we live today under pressure of intense competition, economic uncertainty, and the possibility of war…” Stevenson continued, “our ancestors faced other perils of equal magnitude.” It is important to realize each generation has its own struggles.
Dr. Stevenson produced eleven tenets for dealing with our feelings. These range from “Talk It Out” to “Shun the ‘Superman’ Urge’ to “Give the Other Fellow A Break.” We know these ideas but hearing them prescribed feels different.
The two that we want to focus on are #2, “Escape for a While,” and #11, “Schedule Your Recreation.” His ideas of escape are not necessarily jetting off to an island vacation! You can find escape by “[losing] yourself in a movie or a book or a game.” Even a “brief trip or change of scene” can make you feel relaxed. Public parks are beautiful places to go for a stroll.
Scheduling recreation is sometimes hard—especially for an adult. When we are younger, we get scheduled vacation. The summer is ours! As adults, we have more responsibilities. As Dr. Stevenson mentioned, we don’t have to schedule a week-long trip! We can buy tickets in advance to the latest blockbuster or art-house film. We can schedule an hour or two before bed to transport ourselves with the help of a book.
This summer we asked, “How are you recharging?” We want to hear what recreation and relaxation you have been taking part in. Dr. Stevenson has spoken of the benefits but so have others.
In 1924, Joseph Ralph, a psychologist and psychoanalyst, declared that he had found the fountain of youth. It was not in some unobtainable secret cave, and he was not going to keep it to himself. The secret to still being young was electronic relaxation, a method of inducing tension.
Ralph declared that the secret to eternal youth lived in the cell’s protoplasm. Through wear and tear, the protoplasm becomes weak, causing us to age. The agent responsible was not our physicality but instead our mental conflicts. Our intense emotional reactions cause the protoplasm inside the cells to harden. If hardened, they can no longer provide us with the energy we need. He deduced that this is why we acted “older.” By creating tension, Ralph believed the protoplasm was being stretched and worked out like a muscle.
Even your insurance company wants you to relax! Metropolitan Life Insurance gave advice in their pamphlet “Relax and Revive.” In comparing the body to the mechanical machines, we use daily, they remind us that “extra care avoids shutdowns.”
Whether we get a day, a whole weekend, or the entirety of a season, it’s important to carve out time for yourself. As Met Life put it, “How you use your precious hours of leisure is of the greatest importance in keeping yourself fit, and in fighting the good fight on the home front.” To take care of what you need to take care of, you have to start with yourself.
Like Dr. Stevenson, the insurance company wanted you to figure out what works best for you. Besides the typical ways we think of recreation, the pamphlet stated that perhaps just sitting there is what works for you! “Maybe idleness is your recreation. That’s all right too.”
While we all may have ideas of what recreation is, it looks different for all. We wanted to share how people have been relaxing so far this summer. We’ve gotten pictures, postcards, and stories from fellow NYAM staff, friends, family, and patrons. We thank everyone for their responses so far.
The staff here at NYAM filled out beautiful New York City—centric postcards. They relayed their goals for the summer, which included personal goals (vacations, exercise, spending time with family and pets, and of course, recovery), as well work goals (planning notable events, organizing office space, and remembering to respond to emails on time).
We even got a response from a friend of a famous 100-foot-tall ape…
Parks are always fun to visit during the summer. This one comes from Theodore Roosevelt National Park in North Dakota, one of 63 with that distinction.
Indiana seems like a popular destination this summer. Three of our postcards come from different parks there.
Rachel visited Wolf Park and talked about the different wildlife she saw there, including foxes, turtles, and of course, wolves! She mentioned how the park gave her tips on how to help the wildlife there and in the larger environment.
Megan went on a trip to Turkey Run State Park in Indiana where she went on a hike for her recent birthday. She loved being in nature with her sister and best friends.
Our Historical Collections Librarian sent a postcard from a road trip she took. One of her stops brought her to the Indiana Dunes National Park. There she got to walk along the Lake Michigan Shoreline!
One of our patrons, Dr. Sharon Packer, sent us these photos from Bearsville, New York. The pictures remind us of the beauty and therapeutic power of relaxing in our natural environment. For those in a big city, it’s nice to get away for a bit. We are lucky to live only a train ride away from such different scenery. There also looks to be delicious home cooking! Both making and eating are perfect relaxation practices.
We don’t want to scare you; the summer is not over yet! With that, we are still collecting postcards and pictures.
Postcards/letters can be sent to: Attn – NYAM Library The New York Academy of Medicine 1216 Fifth Avenue New York, NY 10029
We look forward to hearing from you! And more importantly, we hope you are having a relaxing summer.
References: Harris, Antron. The Man Who Stopped Growing Old : Joseph Ralph, Psychologist and Psycho-analyst, Discoverer of the Electronic Relaxation Method of Mental and Physical Rejuvenation. B.F. Tibby, 1924.
Metropolitan Life Insurance Company. Relax and Revive. Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, 1920?.
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!)
When my office is perfumed by the smell of crayons and stocked with boxes of jumbo-sized sidewalk chalk, I know its Museum Mile Festival time. This year’s Museum Mile Festival takes place on Tuesday, June 14 from 6:00-9:00 pm, rain or shine.
Museum Mile (New York City’s Fifth Avenue from 82nd to 105th Street, which is technically three blocks longer than a mile) is one of the densest cultural stretches in the world.1 For the last 38 years, Fifth Avenue closes to traffic for a few hours on an early June evening. The eight major museums and their neighbors–that’s us!–throw open their doors and spill out onto the street in a block party.
Museum Mile at the New York Academy of Medicine. Courtesy of the Academy’s Communications Office.
The first festival was held in 1979, the brainchild of the Museum Mile Association, to increase cultural audiences and garner support for the arts in time of great fiscal crisis in the city. The festival has since brought many New Yorkers and tourists to upper Fifth Avenue for the first time, and total attendance over the years has surpassed one million visitors.
Besides free admission to the museums along the mile, street performers, chalk drawing, live bands, balloons, and family-friendly activities abound. Dedicated to improving the health and well-being of people living in cities, the Academy has partners from the East Harlem Asthma Center of Excellence and Shape Up NYC joining us for the evening.
Getting physical with our community partners at Museum Mile. Courtesy of the Academy’s Communications Office.
The Library has planned some special crafts for the festival. We have the perennial favorite: coloring pages based on images from our collections. Feel free to download your own pages any time from #ColorOurCollections online.
Coloring sheets from the New York Academy of Medicine Library. Photo: Emily Miranker.
Among the treasures of our collection are the anatomical flap books. These are detailed anatomical illustrations superimposed so that lifting the sheets reveals the anatomy and systems of the body as they would appear during dissection. We created a simple DIY version of a flapbook inspired by these remarkable figures from the 1559 edition of Geminus’ Compendiosa totius anatomiae delineatio, aere exarata. The sheets are quite delicate, so it’s rare to see intact versions like this 400 years after they were made. Make your own flapbook with us during the festival.
Male flap anatomy from The Academy’s copy of the 1559 English edition of Geminus’ Compendiosa.
Female flap anatomy from The Academy’s copy of the 1559 English edition of Geminus’ Compendiosa.
Make this flap anatomy craft with us at Museum Mile! Photo: Emily Miranker.
And there’s nothing like using your own body to create art—finger print art!2
Make fingerprint art with us at Museum Mile! Photo and artwork: Emily Miranker.
Today’s guest blogger, Merlin Chowkwanyun, is an assistant professor of sociomedical sciences at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health. He will present “The Lincoln Collective: The World of New York City Health Activism in the 1970s” at the Academy on May 24. Learn more and register.
I’m really looking forward to visiting the New York Academy of Medicine next week, in no small part because the health activism I’m going to discuss took place in New York City itself. My talk will focus on a couple dozen physicians, fresh out of medical school, who decided to do their residencies at Lincoln Hospital in the South Bronx in the 1970s.
They arrived in the summer of 1970 and called themselves “the Lincoln Collective,” hoping to form a critical mass of politically conscious physicians who could effect change in one institution, and in the process, provide a model for other activists across the country to follow. In its recruitment pamphlet, the Collective’s founders wrote that they intended “to become part of the solution rather than part of the problem” and “affirm[ed] that we are in training to serve the community, and that we are committed to dealing with the problems of the urban ghetto community in a long-run way.” That commitment entailed not just ephemeral service projects that lasted a few weeks, but finding ways to facilitate more permanent community input into healthcare facilities’ operations.
Cover of a Lincoln Collective Recruitment pamphlet.
Lincoln epitomized the overtaxed, under-resourced urban hospital. One official document described it as “a hopelessly inefficient and inadequate building” with “dirt and grime and general dilapidation [that] make it a completely improper place to care for the sick…” And locals had nicknamed it “The Butcher Shop.” By conventional standards, then, Lincoln was not exactly a desirable or prestigious choice for your typical medical graduate at this time. So what was it that set the Lincoln Collective’s members apart? Who were these people? And where did their values come from? What were they hoping to get by converging on one of the most dilapidated hospitals in one of the most resource-deprived areas of the United States? And most important of all, what did it all mean in the end, when the Lincoln Collective came to a close in the mid-1970s?
To answer these questions, I’ll place the Lincoln episode in a wider story about changes that wracked the healthcare sector during the 1960s and 1970s. Many Collective members had been involved in student organizing on medical campuses, not exactly known, then and now, as cauldrons of political foment. Others had come from community organizing. And some were not particularly political and simply looking for a place to serve the most indigent and medically deprived. They came to Lincoln when the health field was undergoing what I have called a “governance revolution”—multi-pronged efforts throughout the era to decrease hierarchy within medicine and increase the participation of professionals in healthcare governance.
Article on medical student unrest in Medical World News, Oct. 13, 1967, pp. 63–67.
The Collective arrived at a time of tumult around the hospital itself. Groups like the Black Panthers and the Young Lords had made healthcare equality a major tenet of their organizing. At times, the Collective’s relationship with these groups was cooperative and fruitful, at other times, tense and ambiguous. Much of that depended on Collective members’ individual ideological inclinations, which were hardly uniform throughout the group. Tensions undergirded the encounter between mostly white physicians and mostly non-white, non-professional activists, and I’ll explore these challenges throughout the talk.
Pamphlet of Health Revolutionary Unity Movement, a health-oriented adjunct of the Young Lords that also organized around Lincoln.
I’ve been thinking about the Lincoln Collective for more than a decade now. The title of my talk is an utterance I heard repeatedly when I was a college student in New York City studying activist movements in public health and medicine. “Have you heard of the Lincoln Collective?” people would ask. Some who posed the question were in it (and some claimed to be but, I’d later discover, were not). When I went off to graduate school, I put the story aside for a long time. At the confused age of 22, I didn’t feel I had the political maturity to really write about some pretty politically fraught and emotional events. Now, with more distance, I’ve returned to it.
We’re now in an era when people in the health sector—in the wake of a wave of police brutality and the Flint disaster—are asking themselves serious questions about the role political activism should play in their work. Turning back the clock and looking at a group of health activists from 50 years ago is a way of moving that conversation forward.
The New York Academy of Medicine’s Section on the History of Medicine and Public Health invites you to submit abstracts for presentation at its upcoming Sixth Annual History of Medicine Night. This event will take place at the Academy, 1216 Fifth Avenue at the corner of 103rd Street, on March 9, 2016 from 6:00 pm–7:30 pm.
We invite all those interested in presenting to submit an abstract concerning a historical subject relating to medicine.
Please note the following submission requirements:
Abstracts (not to exceed 250 words) must be submitted together with authors’ contact details, titles, and affiliations.
Abstracts must be submitted no later than Friday, January 15, 2016
Selected speakers will be asked to prepare a presentation of not more than 12 minutes, with an additional three minutes for questions/discussion. Papers selected for presentation will be determined by a panel of History of Medicine Section members and staff of The New York Academy of Medicine.
Submit abstracts electronically to Suhani Parikh at sparikh@nyam.org. Questions may be directed to Suhani via email or phone (212-419-3544).
Evelyn J. Kim, today’s guest blogger, was our guest curator for this year’s Eating Through Time Festival.
With speakers from Jacques Pepin, Tom Colicchio, Lori Silverbush, Bryant Terry, and so many others, there was something for everyone at the Eating Through Time Festival on October 17, whether one’s interests were in history, public health, or culture.
The wide range of topics speaks to the various ways we perceive food. Our first main stage speaker, food justice activist and cookbook author, Bryant Terry, succinctly expressed these perceptions: “Start with the visceral, move to the cerebral, end with the political.”
Bryant Terry speaks at the Eating Through Time Festival. Photo: Mike Cinelli.
Politics was a theme for many of our panelists. University of Maryland Law Professor Frank Pasquale emphasized the need for transparency in food regulation appointments. At the local level, Ellie Wilson, a nutritionist and policy maker for New York state, and the New York Academy of Medicine’s own Kimberly Libman focused upon the need to support more than food on plates: wellness programs and support for produce farmers are also a part of just and healthy food systems. This holistic view of changing food policy was encapsulated nicely in our screening of Lori Silverbush’s A Place at the Table. Looking at food insecurity in the U.S., producers Silverbush and Tom Colicchio underscored the need for both federal and local efforts in solving hunger.
Lori Silverbush and Tom Colicchio discuss A Place at the Table at the Eating Through Time Festival. Photo: Mike Cinelli.
Are there other ways of tackling nutrition and health disparities in the U.S.? On our all-woman “Starting Up Health” panel, moderator Nina Meijers spoke with three start-ups on how technology can empower consumer decisions. The “Eating the Future” panel also asked similar questions regarding how new technologies, such as insect proteins and 3-D printing, could feed the world sustainably and address malnutrition concerns.
The “Starting Up Health” panel at Eating Through Time. L-R: Nina Meijers, Shireen Yates, Jasmina Aganovic, and Taryn Fixel. Photo: Mike Cinelli.
To demonstrate those possibilities, lead researcher at Nordic Food Lab, Josh Evans, proposed entomophagy as a possible response to food insecurity and sustainability dilemmas worldwide. Passing out insect-based food and beverages, Joshua proved that deliciousness and sustainability could go together. Dr. David Eisenberg called upon more doctors and health professionals to learn about food and nutrition by enrolling in cooking classes, such as Harvard Public Health and Culinary Institute of America’s collaborative program “Healthy Kitchens, Healthy Lives.”
Josh Evans leads the “Insects with Nordic Food Lab” workshop at the Eating Through Time Festival. Photo: Mike Cinelli.
Culture and the arts can also be a conduit for action. Poet Simone Bridges and non-profit Hip-Hop Health performed pieces that could teach today’s youth about nutrition and health through the spoken word. In a historical context, culture has also been a driver of nutritional theories and practices. Historians Ken Albala presented his research on sex, power, and food in the Renaissance while Betty Fussell discussed purity and danger in food advertisements in the 20th century.
Betty Fussell presents “From Food Purity to Food Porn” at the Eating Through Time Festival. Photo: Mike Cinelli.
The power of food is also an embodied knowledge. Betty Fussell, our oldest presenter, gave some sage advice on how food (along with naps, sex, and good friends) is a key factor in longevity not only from a nutritional, but also affective standpoint. No one could be a better spokesperson for this than our keynote speaker, Jacques Pépin. Reminiscing on his nearly eighty years, Chef Pépin’s lecture, “Food Memories,” touched on his life in food from his childhood in France to his most recent (and 14th food show!) on PBS. While Chef Pépin attributed his continued stamina to lots of wine, he also stressed the importance of the social and the sensory in his work as a chef. Despite the materiality of food, Pépin reminded us that food is ephemeral: “Food is fragile. You eat it, it goes. What remains are the memories.”
Jacques Pépin and Evelyn Kim at the Eating Through Time Festival. Photo: Mike Cinelli.
I can’t thank the Academy enough for giving me the opportunity to assemble a day’s worth of programming about the issues I care about most: Food, social justice, and public health. And I certainly will have those memories for a lifetime.
Evelyn J. Kim, today’s guest blogger, is an author and writer working on issues of food and food justice through the lens of science. Trained as a historian of science, her work has been in the The New York Times, Scientific American, and The Atlantic. She is our guest curator for this year’s programming, Eating Through Time.
Les Aphorismes de Brillat-Savarin. From the Margaret Barclay Wilson Collection.
“Dis-moi ce que tu manges, je te dirai ce que tu es” (Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are)
– Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin (1755-1826), Physiologie du Goût ou: Méditations de Gastronomie Transcendante
“Let food be your medicine and medicine be your food” – Attributed to Hippocrates
What do you do every day, beyond sleeping, breathing and thinking? You eat! This year, The New York Academy of Medicine is proud to announce its programming theme for 2015: Eating Through Time.
Top Chef. The Salt. Lucky Peach. Grub Street. Modernist Cuisine. And thousands upon thousands of food blogs. Unless you’ve been living underneath a rock, food seems to be all around us. On television, on the web, in art, in books, in science…Food seems to be having its own “moment” as form of cultural currency. But lest anyone think that this is a new phenomenon, food has always been with us, from pre-history to the present, a basis of our bodily, social, economic, and historical selves.
To that end, we are sponsoring a whole year of activities around food, including guest lectures at the Academy and panel discussions at this year’s Food Book Fair, culminating in a full-day festival at the Academy on October 17, 2015. Based on the Academy’s collection of more than 10,000 volumes on food and health, the festival will include speakers, demonstrations, and performances centered on the topic of food. Featured speakers include our keynote speaker, famed chef Jacques Pépin, food historian Dr. Ken Albala, and Nordic Food Lab’s Joshua Evans, as well as the Culinary Institute of America and Harvard School of Public Health’s Healthy Kitchens, Healthy Lives program.
This year’s programming will encompass not only contemporary debates surrounding food, medicine, and culture, but also the historical linkages that undergird much of those discussions. We will ask chefs, historians, writers, and public health experts their perspectives on not only food’s past influence but also what’s in store in the future for us as eaters and as a society.
To kick off this year’s programming, our inaugural lecture on March 17 will feature historian of science Dr. Steven Shapin from Harvard University. Dr. Shapin has written on several topics, from Dr. Robert Boyle to the role of business in scientific research, and his current interests lie in the history of dietetics. His lecture, entitled “Beef-Eaters: A Cultural History of Food and Identity” exemplifies the complicated nexus between our dietary habits and our social identities—and is a perfect start to this year’s theme.
We’re excited about this year’s programming and we hope to see you at any or all our events. Visit www.nyam.org/events for event details and registration, and follow this blog for more delicious tidbits on our year in food.
Books, Health and History 