Tag Archives: pandemics

Cataloging Roundup: New Library Acquisitions in the History of Medicine

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By Miranda Schwartz, Cataloger

2022 is the 175th anniversary of the New York Academy of Medicine and its Library. We have an exciting slate of events planned for this year, including a special evening celebrating the library in the fall, so please keep an eye out in our blog and on our website for further news.

As I did in a May 2021 blog post, I’m sharing some of the newer titles we’ve acquired in the history of medicine.   

Scholarship in American medical history covers the colonial era up until the early 21st century, with a range of topics: illness, activism, epidemics, and cesarean sections.

Jim Downs, Sick from Freedom: African-American Illness and Suffering During the Civil War and Reconstruction (Oxford University Press, 2015): Drawing from a plethora of sources, Downs has created a vivid account of illness, contagion, suffering, and death among Black soldiers and newly freed people during the Civil War and its aftermath.

Johanna Fernández, The Young Lords: A Radical History (University of North Carolina Press, 2020): In a thoroughly researched narrative, Fernández situates the Puerto Rican activist group the Young Lords in the context of 1960s U.S. political and cultural history. She links its mission and goals to current movements focusing on civil and social justice issues.

Jacqueline H. Wolf, Cesarean Section: An American History of Risk, Technology, and Consequence (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018): At a time when nearly one-third of American births are by cesarean section, it is crucial to understand this surgery, its purpose—and its dangers. Using oral histories and extensive research, Wolf has written an important account of this procedure and its now unquestioned place in current American birth practices.

David S. Jones, Rationalizing Epidemics: Meanings and Uses of American Indian Mortality Since 1600 (Harvard University Press, 2004): Through the lens of health disparities, Jones studies four distinct episodes of contagious disease in Native peoples in the United States from the 17th through the 19th centuries. He analyzes these episodes and disparities within a complex framework of economic and political considerations and offers new insight into their importance.

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Books on epidemics and contagion are of course very timely in this third year of life with COVID-19.

Nayan Shah, Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco’s Chinatown (University of California Press, 2001): Shah begins with the history of an 1876 smallpox epidemic in San Francisco in which the city’s Chinese residents were unfairly blamed for the spread of the disease. His study of outbreaks and contagion continues into the 1950s, while continually paying particular attention to the physical space of Chinatown and its representation in the public eye.

Charles Vidich, Germs at Bay: Politics, Public Health, and American Quarantine (Praeger, 2021): As global lockdowns, pauses, and reopenings have made clear, fighting endemic disease takes many tools and strategies. In this timely book, Vidich studies how officials used quarantine throughout American history.

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A cluster of books focuses on illness, diagnosis, and disability.

Elinor Cleghorn, Unwell Women: Misdiagnosis and Myth in a Man-made World (Dutton, 2021): Suffering from an undiagnosed autoimmune disorder but finding little clinical and medical support, Cleghorn undertook an investigation of how medicine has historically misdiagnosed women or left them to suffer the effects of illness without proper treatment. The result of her research is a fascinating look at women’s illnesses and misdiagnoses.

Emily K. Abel, Sick and Tired: An Intimate History of Fatigue (University of North Carolina Press, 2021): Abel studies fatigue, an often underdiagnosed syndrome of puzzling symptoms and outcomes. She analyzes both our culture’s disdain for those with fatigue and its admiration for productivity and devotion to work.

The Oxford Handbook of Disability History, edited by Michael Rembis, Catherine Kudlick, and Kim E. Nielsen (Oxford University Press, 2018): This handbook is a comprehensive, globe-spanning analysis of disability history written by 29 different experts.

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Addictive substances are examined in these two titles, one reaching back to the 17th and 18th centuries and the other an of-the-moment examination of cigarette marketing.

Keith Wailoo, Pushing Cool: Big Tobacco, Racial Marketing, and the Untold Story of the Menthol Cigarette (University of Chicago Press, 2021): At the end of April, the FDA finally released its proposed rule to ban menthol cigarettes. Wailoo’s excellent history of menthol cigarettes in the United States and their prevalence among Black American smokers provides the background to understand this overdue action and the harmful nexus of targeted advertising, race, and tobacco.

Benjamin Breen, The Age of Intoxication: Origins of the Global Drug Trade (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019): Addictive substances are further studied in Breen’s account of opium, tobacco, sugar cane, coffee, and other substances. His insight is to look at these substances in a purely historical lens, back before they were categorized the way we see and purpose them now.

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We added to our collection of biographies of figures in medicine with these titles.

David A. Johnson, Diploma Mills: The Rise and Fall of Dr. John Buchanan and the Eclectic Medical College of Pennsylvania (Kent State University Press, 2018): Johnson’s account of the reprobate Dr. John Buchanan and how he turned the Eclectic Medical College of Pennsylvania into an unseemly diploma mill is a fascinating story of a little-known piece of American medical history. Buchanan’s scheming and lying culminated in faking his death in a pretended drowning.

Howard Markel, The Secret of Life: Rosalind Franklin, James Watson, Francis Crick, and the Discovery of DNA’s Double Helix (W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2021): Markel focuses on the personalities of the ambitious scientists who discovered the key to understanding DNA, paying particular attention to Rosalind Franklin, a female Jewish scientist at King’s College at a time when there were not many women in the field. Franklin’s key contributions to the discovery have often been overlooked in the focus on the male scientists, particularly Watson and Crick. Markel skillfully tells a complicated story with sensitivity and exactitude.

James L. Nolan Jr., Atomic Doctors: Conscience and Complicity at the Dawn of the Nuclear Age (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2020): After the death of Nolan’s father his mother gave him a box of materials about his paternal grandfather, a radiologist who had worked on the secretive Manhattan Project. During his search for more information about his grandfather and others on the project, Nolan ponders the ethics of medical professionals working on lethal weapons.

John M. Harris, Professionalizing Medicine: James Reeves and the Choices That Shaped American Health Care (McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, 2019): In this well-researched biography of West Virginia physician James Reeves, Harris details Reeves’s accomplishments in professionalizing 19th-century medicine and the field of public health in the United States: pressing for the arrest of doctors who practiced without licenses; working to establish the West Virginia Board of Health; and co-founding the American Public Health Association.

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Black Surgeons and Surgery in America, editor Don K. Nakayama; principal contributors Peter J. Kernahan, Edward E. Cornwell (American College of Surgeons, 2021): Spanning American history from the colonial era to today, the book places numerous Black surgeons in their historical context while detailing their professional achievements. Particularly noteworthy is the chapter recounting the story of the 14 enslaved women Dr. J. Marion Sims operated on without anesthesia in his attempts to repair vaginal fistulas; the book is dedicated to Lucy, Betsey, Anarcha, and the 11 women whose names are unknown.

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Finally, Flesh and Bones: The Art of Anatomy (Getty Research Institute, 2022) is a gorgeously illustrated new book about anatomy, edited by Monique Kornell. One can spend hours paging through its exceptional illustrations, looking at the detail of the images, and reading the accompanying scholarly essays that complement the visual wonder of the book.

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I hope this roundup has inspired your interest in our ever-growing collections. For more books and other resources, the Library’s catalog can be explored here.

Cataloging Roundup: New Library Acquisitions in the History of Medicine

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by Miranda Schwartz, Cataloger

Founded in 1847 and fast approaching its 175th anniversary in 2022, the Academy Library is a vital part of NYAM. Even during the COVID-19 pandemic we are actively building our collection. As a historical library, we acquire books on a variety of topics in the history of medicine. I wanted to share a few of the titles we added in 2020, so that readers could see the breadth and depth of subjects in our collection. Cataloging these books let me see the fascinating connections among them and the insightful, probing work that is being done today in the history of medicine.

In an occurrence of timely scholarship, a few of our newly acquired titles relate to pandemics:

Epidemics and the Modern World by Mitchell L. Hammond (University of Toronto Press, 2020): This textbook uses primary sources, illustrations, and chapters on key epidemics (bubonic plague, yellow fever, smallpox, HIV/AIDS, etc.) to show how diseases have shaped the modern world.

Florence Under Siege: Surviving Plague in an Early Modern City by John Henderson (Yale University Press, 2019): Henderson’s treatment of the plague in Florence in 1630-31 provides a nuanced, detailed look at this year in the city’s history, with emphasis on the strategies that the government used to manage the crisis.

The Pandemic Century: One Hundred Years of Panic, Hysteria, and Hubris by Mark Honigsbaum (W. W. Norton, 2019): Honigsbaum looks at the 1918 influenza epidemic, AIDS, SARS, Legionnaires’ disease, Ebola, and Zika. About the spread of infectious diseases, he presciently observes that “Greater global interconnectivity driven by international travel and commerce is undoubtedly a key factor.” 

Epidemics and Society: From the Black Death to the Present by Frank M. Snowden (Yale University Press, 2019): Snowden discusses AIDS and influenza, as well as malaria, tuberculosis, smallpox, and yellow fever. Of particular interest now is his final chapter, titled “Dress Rehearsals for the Twenty-First Century: SARS and Ebola.”

The Filth Disease: Typhoid Fever and the Practices of Epidemiology in Victorian England by Jacob Steere-Williams (University of Rochester Press, 2020): Steere-Williams situates typhoid fever in English cultural context and theorizes that this disease and its treatment gave epidemiologists “a new kind of professional identity.”

Our material on the intersection of race, health, and medicine grew with the addition of these titles:

Medicalizing Blackness: Making Racial Difference in the Atlantic World, 1780-1840 by Rana A. Hogarth (University of North Carolina Press, 2017): Hogarth explores “physicians’ objectification of black people’s bodies in slave societies” in this work that covers 18th– and 19th-century Atlantic history.

Doctoring Freedom: The Politics of African American Medical Care in Slavery and Emancipation by Gretchen Long (University of North Carolina Press, 2012): An exploration of African American medical culture in the years preceding and following the Civil War. Long asserts that “African American patients and practitioners found themselves in a new medical landscape—one newly shaped both by scientific discovery and by a government that was in the process of recognizing and defining their citizenship.”

Examining Tuskegee: The Infamous Syphilis Study and Its Legacy by Susan M. Reverby (University of North Carolina Press, 2009): In this notable, meticulously researched book, Reverby analyzes the notorious 40-year Tuskegee Syphilis Study and its legacy of mistrust. She also examines the place “Tuskegee” has in our culture as “the word for racism, experimentation, and government deceit.”

Infectious Fear: Politics, Disease, and the Health Effects of Segregation, Samuel Kelton Roberts Jr. (University of North Carolina Press, 2009): Roberts looks at how the “demands and politics of tuberculosis” were managed in the early to mid-20th century, using Baltimore as a case study, while also addressing the issue of racialized medicine in a larger context of race and public health.

The Mismeasure of Minds: Debating Race and Intelligence between Brown and The Bell Curve by Michael E. Staub (University of North Carolina Press, 2018): Staub reexamines well-known psychological studies of race, IQ, and intelligence conducted between 1954 and 1994 with an eye to making clear the persistence of “the racialization of mental testing.”

A Terrible Thing to Waste: Environmental Racism and Its Assault on the American Mind by Harriet A. Washington. (Little, Brown Spark, 2019): NYAM Fellow Harriet Washington looks at lead, chemical pollution, and microbes in her probing of the Black-white IQ gap. She forcefully disputes the idea that this gap is hereditary, pointing instead to the connection between harmful environmental factors and the disproportionate exposure of minority communities to toxic living and working environments.

Another related cluster of books focuses on fertility, pregnancy, motherhood, and maternity:

Maternal Bodies: Redefining Motherhood in Early America by Nora Doyle (University of North Carolina Press, 2018): Doyle’s “redefining” involves centering women’s bodies and experiences in this focused look at women, maternity, childbirth, and motherhood in the United States between 1750 and 1850.

The Myth of the Perfect Pregnancy: A History of Miscarriage in America by Lara Freidenfelds (Oxford University Press, 2020): Miscarriages are common during pregnancy but attitudes and expectations around pregnancy and miscarriage have changed from 18th-century America to today, with changing emotional repercussions for women experiencing an early pregnancy loss.

Revolutionary Conceptions: Women, Fertility & Family Limitations in America, 1760-1820 by Susan E. Klepp (University of North Carolina Press, 2009): A scholarly look at fertility and family planning in early America.

Coming Home: How Midwives Changed Birth by Wendy Kline (Oxford University Press, 2019): Kline tracks changes in birth practices in mid-20th-century America, noting a growing trend toward midwife-assisted home births and away from hospital births attended by an obstetrician. She places this movement in a historical context by using the history of the Chicago Maternity Center and the midwives of The Farm in Tennessee.

I hope this roundup has inspired your interest in our ever-growing collections. For more titles, the Library’s catalog can be explored here. Though we are not able to accept readers because of the pandemic, we look forward to resuming our public hours and, perhaps, seeing you back in the Library in person when it is safe.

Living through COVID-19: What can we learn from typhoid epidemics of the past?

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by guest contributor Jacob Steere-Williams, PhD, Associate Professor of History, College of Charleston.

Join us for Steere-Williams’ talk on typhoid on September 23. 

For decades, thinking about and learning from past pandemics has largely been an academic exercise, one for historians and archivists who specialize in public health. Now, in the midst of a generation-defining pandemic, COVID-19, there has been an explosion of public interest in epidemics and epidemiology. Before 2020, few Americans outside of infectious disease specialists routinely spoke the words “contact tracing” and “case fatality,” or knew the difference between isolation and quarantine.

The recent surge in popular understandings of epidemics has centered on some familiar examples, such as the 1918–1919 influenza pandemic, the mistakenly called “Spanish Flu.”[1] As this was the most significant pandemic of the 20th century, the comparisons make sense, and the public health struggle between individual rights and community health is as apt now as it was then. Other historians, seeing the rise of xenophobia as a cultural response to COVID-19 in the West, have perceptively turned our attention to 19th-century pandemics of cholera and bubonic plague. Then, as now, a uniquely durable, yet startlingly western approach to framing pandemics has been to blame Asian people and Asian cultural practices.[2] 

At a time when the cultural mileage of past pandemics is perhaps at its height in modern history, we might fruitfully turn to the history of a relatively unexplored disease, typhoid fever, to think about our current moment.

Typhoid fever is a food- and water-borne infectious disease, the most virulent of the Salmonella family. The disease continues to wreak havoc on the Global South, killing about 200,000 people each year. In the western world typhoid was at its height in the 19th century, when it was a ubiquitous and insidious reality in North America and Western Europe. In Britain, for example, typhoid annually struck up to 150,000 people, taking the lives of 20,000 each year.

Thomas Godart, “Head and Neck of a Patient Suffering from Typhoid Fever.” Courtesy of the Wellcome Library.

Typhoid’s patterns of distribution were erratic; it might spare a community for months or even years, then erupt as a local outbreak. Epidemiologists today discuss COVID-19 as a cluster disease, exploding in localized events not unlike the way that typhoid did in the past.

Interestingly, typhoid outbreaks continued after the introduction of early sanitary improvements such as toilets, pumped water, and sanitation systems. In the second half of the 19th century no infectious disease was as central to the rise of public health than typhoid. Typhoid was a model disease because the burgeoning group of public health scientists, the first to call themselves epidemiologists, saw that stopping typhoid’s different pathways—through food, water, and healthy human carriers—could transform the nation through preventive public health.[3]

“Avoid the Grip of the Typhoid Hand,” in G.S. Franklin, “Sanitary Care of Privies” (1899), from “Health and Sanitation: Disease and the Working Poor,” https://www.wm.edu/sites/wmcar/research/danvilledig/millworker-life/health-sanitation/index.php.

The story of typhoid in the 19th century is one deeply tied to the emergence of modern epidemiology, which George Buchanan, Chief Medical Officer of Britain’s central public health office, called “the minute observations of particular outbreaks.”[4] Epidemiological practice does not operate in a vacuum, then or now with COVID-19; it is inherently a political exercise. Everyday people, business owners, and politicians have to be convinced about the science of disease communication, requiring complex rhetorical strategies that tell us a great deal about the inherent struggles of public health.

“Transmission of Typhoid Fever,” in George Whipple, Typhoid Fever; Its Causation, Transmission, and Prevention (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1908).

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Notes

[1] See, for example, a recent blog post in Nursing Clio: Jessica Brabble, Ariel Ludwig, and Thomas Ewing, “‘All the World’s a Harem’: Perceptions of Masked Women During the 1918–19 Flu Pandemic,” Nursing Clio. https://nursingclio.org/2020/09/08/all-the-worlds-a-harem-perceptions-of-masked-women-during-the-1918-1919-flu-pandemic/.

[2] Catherine E. Shoichet, “What historians hear when Trump calls coronavirus ‘Chinese’ and ‘foreign,’” CNN. https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/12/us/disease-outbreaks-xenophobia-history/index.html.

[3] Graham Mooney, “How to Talk About Freedom During a Pandemic,” The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/05/freedom-pandemic-19th-century/611800/.

[4] George Buchanan, “On the Dry Earth System of Dealing with Excrement,” Annual Report of the Medical Officer of the Privy Council for 1870. Parliamentary Papers. London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1871, 97.

From Cholera to Zika: What History’s Pandemics Tell Us about the Next Contagion

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By Sonia Shah

Sonia Shah, today’s guest blogger, is a science journalist and author of Pandemic: Tracking Contagions from Cholera to Ebola, and Beyond (Sarah Crichton Books/Farrar, Straus & Giroux, February 2016), from which this piece, including illustrations, is adapted.

On February 23 at 6pm, Shah will moderate the panel “Where Will the Next Pandemic Come From?,” cosponsored by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. Register to attend.

Over the past 50 years, more than 300 infectious diseases have either newly emerged or re-emerged into territory where they’ve never been seen before. The Zika virus, a once-obscure pathogen from the forests of Uganda now rampaging across the Americas, is just the latest example. It joins a legion of other diseases that have similarly broken out of earlier constraints, including Ebola in West Africa, Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) in the Middle East, and novel avian influenzas in Asia, one of which hit the U.S poultry industry last spring, causing the biggest animal disease epidemic in U.S history.

When such pathogens spread like a wave across continents and global populations, they cause pandemics, from the Greek pan (“all”) and demos (“people”). Given the number of pathogens in our midst with pandemic-causing biological capacities, pandemics themselves are relatively rare. In modern history, only a few pathogens have been able to cause them: Yersinia pestis, which causes bubonic plague; variola, which causes smallpox; influenza A; HIV; and cholera.

Cholera is one of the history’s most successful pandemic-causing pathogens. The first cholera pandemic began in the Sundarbans in present-day Bangladesh in 1817. Since then, it has ravaged the planet in no fewer than seven pandemics, the latest of which is currently smoldering just a few hundred miles off the coast of Florida, in Haiti.

Cholera first perfected the art of pandemics by exploiting the rapid changes in transportation, trade, and demography unleashed by the dawn of the factory age. New, fast-moving transatlantic clipper ships and sailing packets, which moved millions of Europeans into North America, brought cholera to the New World in 1832. Thanks to the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825, the bacterial pathogen easily spread throughout the country, including into the canal’s southern terminus, New York City, which suffered repeated cholera epidemics over the course of decades.

The spread of cholera after the opening of the Erie Canal.

Cholera was well-poised to exploit the filth of 19th-century cities. The pathogen spreads through contaminated human waste. And outhouses, privies, and cesspools covered about 1/12 of New York City, none of which were serviced by sewer systems and few of which were ever emptied. (Those that were had their untreated contents unceremoniously dumped into the Hudson or East Rivers.) The contents of countless privies and cesspools spilled out into the streets, leaked into the city’s shallow street-corner wells, and trickled into the groundwater.

Even those who enjoyed piped water were vulnerable to the contagion. The company chartered by New York State to deliver drinking water to the city’s residents—the Manhattan Company, which started a bank now known as JPMorgan Chase—dug their well among the tenements of the notoriously crowded Five Points slum, in what is today part of Chinatown. They delivered the slum’s undoubtedly contaminated groundwater to one third of the city’s residents.

The 1832 cholera outbreak in New York City. the Manhattan Company, now JP Morgan Chase, sank its well amidst the privies and cesspools of the Five Points slum, atop the site of the Collection Pond, which had been filled in with garbage. The water was distributed to 1/3 of the city of New York.

The 1832 cholera outbreak in New York City. The Manhattan Company, now JP Morgan Chase, sank its well amidst the privies and cesspools of the Five Points slum, atop the site of the Collection Pond, which had been filled in with garbage. The water was distributed to 1/3 of the city of New York.

Just as the Zika and MERS viruses confound modern-day medicine, so too did cholera confound 19th-century medicine. Under the 2,000-year-old spell of miasmatism—the medical theory that diseases spread through stinky airs, or miasmas—doctors couldn’t bring themselves to admit that cholera spread through water, despite convincing contemporary evidence that it did.

But that doesn’t mean there was nothing that could have been done to mitigate the cholera pandemics of the 19th century.

The Manhattan Company knew the water they distributed was dirty. As a former director of the company admitted in 1810, Manhattan Company water was rich with its users’ “own evacuations, as well as that of their Horses, Cows, Dogs, Cats, and other putrid liquids so plentifully dispensed.” New Yorkers decried its smell and taste, which they variously derided as “abominable” and “nauseating.”1 They suspected, too, that the company’s water made them sick. “I have no doubt,” one letter writer opined to a local paper in 1830, “that one cause of the numerous stomach affections so common in this city is the impure, I may say poisonous nature of the pernicious Manhattan water which thousands of us daily and constantly use.”2

And New York’s physicians knew that cholera was coming down the Erie Canal and the Hudson River, heading straight for the city. Dr Lewis Beck, who collected the data mapped above admitted that the pattern of disease did “favor the idea that cholera is contagious,”3 and travelling down the waterways into New York City. So many people feared the migrants coming down the waterways during cholera outbreaks that residents of towns lining the canal refused to let passengers on passing boats disembark. In 1893, in fear of a cholera outbreak, an armed mob surrounded the cholera-infected passengers of the Normannia, a vessel recently arrived from Hamburg, Germany, trapping hundreds aboard for days.

But despite the public’s fears of contagion and contaminated water, little was done to protect the city from either. The city’s leadership refused to enact quarantines along the canal or the Hudson for fear of disrupting the lucrative shipping trade that had transformed New York from a backwater to the Empire State. The Manhattan Company retained its charter, despite public outcry about the quality of their water. The political machinations of the infamous Aaron Burr, pursuing his murderous rivalry with the now-storied founding father Alexander Hamilton, assured that.

Instead, each wave of deadly contagion was met with minor adjustments to society’s defenses against pathogens. International conferences began in 1851 to organize cross-border quarantines against cholera and other diseases. New York City opened its first independent health department, staffed by physicians rather than political appointees, in 1865, as cholera loomed (thanks in large part to the efforts of the New York Academy of Medicine). These reactive, incremental measures couldn’t stave off nearly a century of deadly cholera pandemics, but as the decades passed, they formed the foundation for the global health system we enjoy today. Following New York City’s example, independent health departments were built across the country. The international conferences to tame cholera led to the formation of the World Health Organization, in 1946.

Today, we continue to fight contagions in a similarly reactive, incremental fashion. After Ebola infected tens of thousands in West Africa and elsewhere, hospitals in the United States and other countries beefed up their investments in infection control. After mosquito-borne Zika infected millions across the Americas, public health agencies focused anew on the problem of disease-carrying insects.

Whether these measures will be sufficient to defuse the next pandemic remains to be seen. But a more comprehensive, proactive approach to defanging pandemics is now possible, too. The history of pandemics reveals the role of human activity in the emergence and spread of new pathogens. Industrial developments that disrupt wildlife habitat; rapid, ad hoc urbanization; intensive livestock farming; sanitary crises; and accelerated trade and travel all play a critical role, just as they did in cholera’s heyday. In some places, we can diminish the pathogenic threat these activities pose. In others, we can step up surveillance for new pathogens, using new microbial sleuthing techniques. And when we find the next pandemic-worthy pathogen, we can work to contain it—before it starts to spread.

References

1. Pandemic, p 64. From Koeppel, Gerard T. Water for Gotham: A history. Princeton University Press, 2001, 121, 141.

2. Pandemic, p 63. from Blake, Nelson Manfred. Water for the cities: A history of the urban water supply problem in the United States. No. 3. Syracuse University Press, 1995, 126.

3. Pandemic, p 106. from Tuite, Ashleigh R., Christina H. Chan, and David N. Fisman. “Cholera, canals, and contagion: Rediscovering Dr Beck’s report.” Journal of public health policy 32.3 (2011): 320-333.