Please join the History of Medicine Collections for our next Trent History of Medicine Lecture Series event. Dr. Ed Halperin, M.D., M.A., will present “This is a Christian institution and we will tolerate no Jews here”: The Brooklyn Interns Hazing Episodes.
Anti-semitism in U.S. medical education rarely flared into acts of violence, except in Brooklyn. Presenting the results of recently completed research, Dr. Halperin will describe the assaults on the Jewish interns of Kings County Hospital in 1916 and 1927 and the implications of these assaults for the contemporary debate on immigration and higher education.
Dr. Halperin is Chancellor and Chief Executive Officer at New York Medical College and Professor of Radiation Oncology, Pediatrics, and History as well as Provost for Biomedical Affairs at Touro College.
This exhibit highlights the effects of epidemic diseases on society by examining one of the most famous outbreaks in U.S. history – the 1793 yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia. Drawing chiefly on letters written by Dr. Benjamin Rush, an eighteenth-century physician and U.S. Founding Father, to his wife Julia Stockton Rush, the exhibit examines the timeline of the outbreak, early responses, stages and symptoms, and the “cure” for yellow fever that Rush developed. Finally, the exhibit looks at the anatomy of an epidemic, focusing on the social and psychological effects exemplified by Rush’s emotion-filled letters, as well as stories that emphasize the fear, panic, and mental anguish that accompany epidemic disease outbreaks even today.
Coinciding with this exhibition is a new digital collection of the Benjamin and Julia Stockton Rush papers held by the History of Medicine Collections in the Rubenstein Library. We encourage you to visit the exhibition and check out the new digital collection as well.
A gallery talk led by Mandy Cooper will be held on Friday, February 26, at 2 pm in the Mary Duke Biddle Room. All are welcome to attend. Light refreshments will be served.
Post contributed by Rachel Ingold, Curator of the History of Medicine Collections
The grants are open to undergraduate and graduate students, faculty, independent scholars, artists, and activists who live more than 100 miles from Durham, NC and whose research projects would benefit from access to collections held by one of the centers.
More details—and the grant application—may be found on our grants website.Applications must be submitted no later than 5:00 PM EST on January 29, 2016. Recipients will be announced in March 2016.
The Cook’s Oracle was a bestseller when it was first published in 1817. Its author, William Kitchiner (1775-1827), was a household name in England at the time, and was known for being an atypical host to his dinner guests – he prepared the food rather than his staff and even did the cleaning up as well. In addition to being an avid cook and successful cookbook author, Kitchiner was also an optician and inventor of telescopes, which perhaps explains why this particular cookbook is in the History of Medicine Collections here at Duke.
In the United Kingdom, the origin of the potato chip is attributed to Kitchiner, with The Cook’s Oracle including the earliest known recipe. The recipe, “Potatoes fried in Slices or Shavings,” instructs readers to “peel large potatoes, slice them about a quarter of an inch thick, or cut them in shavings round and round, as you would peel a lemon; dry them well in a clean cloth, and fry them in lard or dripping.”
Other notable entries include eleven recipes for ketchup – including two types each for walnut, mushroom, and tomato ketchups – and the recipe for wow-wow sauce, which is parodied (though retains the same name) in the Discworld novels by Terry Pratchett. [Ed. note: Earlier this year, one of our cooks made Kitchiner’s Shin of Beef Stewed with Wow Wow sauce, complete with mushroom ketchup.]
Looking through our copy of The Cook’s Oracle, I was drawn to the recipe for Boston Apple Pudding. It seemed like a simple recipe, and I was curious to know what apple pudding would be like.
As I was gathering ingredients, some things were unclear. How does one determine what constitutes “one dozen and a half good Apples”? I ended up buying a five pound bag of apples and peeling all of them with the help of a friend.
The apples actually cooked down pretty quickly – it probably took less than thirty minutes in total. I didn’t know what “moist sugar” is, but it turns out it is actually a thing. Because we already had brown sugar, that’s what I used to sweeten the apples.
Next, it was time to strain the apples through a hair sieve. You can see a hair sieve at the British Museum here – but as it turns out, I don’t have one! We first tried to pass the apples through a fine-mesh sieve, to no success. Next we went out and bought some cheesecloth to try and pass it through that. Again, no luck! Finally, I used my colander to press the apples through.
We mixed in the butter, eggs, and lemon zest. For the crust, I used a sheet of puff pastry, but since puff pastry is square, I used some of the other sheet of puff pastry to fill in the missing pieces. As you can see below, it ended up looking like a giant flower!
The recipe only says to bake for 30 minutes, so this part required a little finagling. First, I set the oven to 350 degrees and baked for 30 minutes, but the pudding didn’t seem to be setting up, so I added on another ten minutes. It was really unclear what the final product would be like, but even after an additional ten minutes, it still didn’t seem quite right. At this point, I turned off the oven, propped the door open with a large slotted spoon, and left it for a final fifteen minutes. At this point, I was worried about burning the crust, so I accepted the pie as is.
The final pudding was really interesting. It wasn’t quite what I think of as a pudding, but it definitely wasn’t a pie either. The crust added a nice variety to the texture, and the apples had a really robust flavor – cooking them with the lemon peel really made a difference.
To see this recipe and others in The Cook’s Oracle, the book can be found in our catalog here.
Post contributed by Amelia Holmes, History of Medicine Collections Intern
Post contributed by Amelia Holmes, Josiah Charles Trent Intern for the History of Medicine Collections.
Anatomical specimens emerged as an art form near the end of the seventeenth century. Although they may seem morbid today, at the time of creation, they were viewed as striking a balance between the scientific and the artistic. They served to educate people on human anatomy as well as to remind them of the fleeting nature of life.
Illustration from Opera Omnia Anatomico-Medico-Chirurgica, ca. 1737.
One of the more notable creators of anatomical art is Frederik Ruysch, a Dutch botanist and anatomist who lived from 1638 to 1731—an impressive 93 years in a time when many died young. A capable researcher, Ruysch was the first to describe bronchial blood vessels, the vascular plexus of the heart, and the valves of the lymphatics. However, his real interest lay in anatomical preparations, and he has been described by a recent biographer as “probably the most skilled and knowledgeable preparator in the history of anatomy” (Gould, p. 20). Ruysch served as the chief instructor to midwives and the “legal doctor” to the court of Amsterdam. Through these positions, he had easy (and legal) access to the bodies of stillborns and dead babies.
The preparations were initially created to use in his classes, but they eventually gained an interest from the public. To showcase his vast collection (he created more than 2,000 from 1665 to 1717 alone), he opened his own cabinet of curiosities to the public, which for many marked the first time they were able to see human internal organs. The collection was also noteworthy because of the lengths to which Ruysch went in an effort to make the specimens appear more natural. For example, embalmed children were clothed or held bouquets of preserved flowers. In 1717, Peter the Great, who was an admirer of Ruysch, purchased the entire cabinet of curiosities for 30,000 guilders. The collection was then shipped to St. Petersburg, and along with the cabinet of curiosities formed by Albertus Seba, they became the core of the Kunstkammer—the Academy of Sciences of Russia’s first public museum.
Although a number of Ruysch’s wet preparations still exist today (a fact which he would find unsurprising), none of his dry specimens have been located. He used fetal skeletons and other body parts to create multi-specimen scenes. These scenes served as the centerpieces for each of the literal cabinets within the rooms of his museum. As Gould points out, these tableaux were focused on allegorical themes such as death and the transience of life. The small skeletons are decorated with symbols of death and short life: mayflies rest in hands, skulls weep into handkerchiefs made of mesentery, and snakes made of intestine wine their way through bones. Today, these still-life scenes exist for us only through second-hand descriptions and, fortunately, through a number of engravings.
Date: Thursday, October 29, 2015 Time: 2:00-4:00 PM Location: Holsti-Anderson Family Assembly Room Contact: Amy McDonald, amy.mcdonald@duke.edu
Y’all, we hear you. The semester is getting more and more intense and sometimes Duke is just so . . . gothic, you know? Sometimes you just need to eat some free candy and look at cute things. And what better time to do that than in celebration of that traditionally cute holiday, Halloween?
Your cuddly Rubenstein librarians would like to invite you to visit us for Screamfest III, an open house featuring creepy ADORABLE things from our collections.
Like this postcard of these sweet black kitty-cats, bringing you Halloween joys in their happy hot air pumpkins.
Or this illustration of these precious babies from our History of Medicine Collection’s Opera Omnia Anatomico-Medico-Chirurgica by Frederik Ruysch. Yes, fine, they’re skeleton babies, and they’re standing on a pile of human organs, but they’re totally listening to a song by The Wiggles.
You can also page through the 1984 Chanticleer to view the photos of this friendly library ghost, who just wants to bring you fuzzy slippers so you can study comfortably.
And sure, scourge and sword-wielding demons are very scary when they’re life-sized. But swing by our open house and you’ll be able to bravely make kissy-faces at this little dude (paperclip for scale) from the Edwin and Terry Murray Collection of Role-Playing Games.
In fact, we promise that there will be so much cuteness (and candy) that, well, you might die. See you there!
Is there damage to be done from meddling with the ear or attempting any cure for deafness?
“Now, right here,” says T.Page, “stop and think a moment…If your stove smoked constantly, day after day, you would not place a poultice around the stove pipe, would you? You would clean out the flue or chimney, wouldn’t you?” Well, would you? Well, the same should go for fixing deafness, according to Page in his 1891 pamphlet: “Clean out the obstruction inside of your head, and you hear again as well as ever.” Why should one pay for a high-priced aurist (a specialist of the ear), when an easy remedy promises to do the same, at half the cost, and with minimal pain?
Indeed, what motivated people with hearing loss to select amongst an abundance of deafness cures or make plans to visit the aurist? My monograph, tentatively titled Deafness Misery, Hearing Happiness: Fakes and Fads in Deafness Cures, 1850-1950, examines these motivations, exploring how the lines between reputable medical treatment and “quack cure” were frequently negotiated as newer surgical procedures and technologies redefined, if not reflected, cultural expectations of “normalcy.” As it was difficult to distinguish between the “quack with a scheme” and the “visionary with a theory” promising a permanent cure for hearing loss, deaf persons were portrayed as particularly vulnerable to the clutches of fraud, since once “cured,” they were no longer condemned to the “miserable,” “isolating” state of deafness.
In June, I visited the David M. Rubenstein Rare Books and Manuscript Library at Duke University, a trip made possible thanks to the library’s generous History of Medicine Travel Grant. My research had two aims. First, to examine through the advertising collection in both the History of Medicine collections and the John W. Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising & Marketing History to investigate the cultural history of American advertisements for deafness cures and hearing aids. This research, which will be incorporated into one of my book chapters, “Those Instinctive, Invisible, Improved Aids,” examines how these advertisements embodied the rhetoric of “curability” and what disability scholars refer as “passing”—the masking of disability or infirmity to appear as “normal”—as marketing and sales techniques. Advertisements not only reveal the kinds of technological options available for deafened persons, but enable us to investigate the ways in which deafness was constructed as a stigma and how goods for hearing loss was marketed and sold. Indeed, many adverts propagated the refrain “Deafness is Misery,” addressing the despair and desperation deaf people felt over failed medical therapeutics. They also justified the exorbitant price of goods by connecting to the marvels of electricity and communication.
Secondly, I hoped to uncover (hidden) stories of deaf persons or persons with (temporary) hearing loss, and whether they attempted any treatment(s) for deafness. This was a more challenging task, but a good place to start was the collection of recipe books/receipt books in the History of Medicine collection. Some of these books were written by physicians and surgeons, who kept tally of the treatments they advised to their patients. For instance, I came across the receipt book of John Kearsley Mitchell (1793-1858), which lists a treatment for deafness:
“If deficy [sic] of cerumen – use salt dropped into ear or place on coarse wool some of Rx __ terebinth [an aromatic used to interrupt condition by stimulating senses and dissolve wax] gtt 10. [10 drops]. Ol olio [to oil in Italian] [symbol for fluid ounce].”By the way, I had a difficult time comprehending Mitchell’s writing—so I did what any historian fluent in social media would do: I asked my twitter followers to help me decipher the text!
Another receipt book, this time belonging to Dr. William R. Blakeslee, a civil war surgeon, contains a list of prescriptions the surgeon recommended while stationed at Camp Muhlenburg with the 48th Regiment of the Pennsylvania State Militia (near Scranton) during August 1863. Blakeslee provides details for various soldiers’ treatment(s) and his prescribed remedy, but in the case of Private William Workeizer (?) who suffered from otitis, there was no remedy listed. Does this mean that Blakeslee did not provide a treatment? Or that there was no remedy for otitis that would help the private?
There are also recipes for ear ailments written in home recipe and remedy books. One from 1896 copies a recipe from “Farmer’s Friend” for earache: “A remedy which never fails is a pinch of black pepper gathered up in a bit of cotton batting wet in sweet oil and inserted in the ear. It will give immediate relief.”
I came across many more examples, far too many for this blog post. I’d like to share one more, a letter that was out of place in the Eva Parris Letters (1892-1909) collection, written by a Virginia P. Dean of Montgomery, to G.H. Branaman of Kanas City, on July 10, 1909. In the short, carefully written letter, Dean thanks Branaman for his “cure,” which left her hearing “as good as it ever was,” and promises to recommend his method for anyone else afflicted with catarrhal deafness. This was a tremendous find for me: Branaman established the Branaman Medical Institute, which was notoriously exposed in the 1910s by the U.S. Post Office for its mail-order fraud and quackery in delivering deafness “cures.” His deafness treatment was a strange combination treatment, which made use of a special nostrum medicine and the use of his “electro-magnetic head cap.” Used properly, Branaman claimed his method could cure even the most incurable cases of deafness—or your money back! He was eventually charged with four counts of fraud and eventually put out of business.
Submitted by Jaipreet Virdi-Dhesi (Brock University), 2015-16 History of Medicine Collections Travel Grant Awardee
The Rubenstein Library’s research centers annually award travel grants to undergraduate and graduate students, faculty, and independent scholars through a competitive application process. Congratulations—we look forward to sharing our collections with you!
History of Medicine Research Grants
Lindsey Beal, MFA, for photographic research on late nineteenth and early twentieth century obstetric and gynecological instruments.
Forceps from the History of Medicine instrument collection
Elaine LaFay, PhD candidate in History and Sociology of Science, University of Pennsylvania, for dissertation work on “Weathered Bodies, Sickly Lands: Climate, Health, and Place in the Antebellum Gulf South.”
Jaipreet Virdi-Dhesi, PhD, for work on “Deafness is Misery: Advertised Cures for Hearing Loss in Early 20th Century America.”
John Hope Franklin Center for African and African-American History and Culture Research Grants
Wangui Muigai, Princeton University, “An Awful Gladness: Infant Mortality and Race from Slavery to the Great Migration”
Jessica Parr, University of New Hampshire at Manchester, “’Saved from My Pagan Land:’ the Role of Religion in Self-Making in the Black Atlantic, 1660-1820.”
Whitney Stewart, Rice University, “Domestic Activism: The Politics of the Black Home in Nineteenth-Century America”
Brandon Winford, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, “Building New South Prosperity: John Hervey Wheeler, Black Banking, and the Economic Struggle for Civil Rights”
N.C. Mutual Home Office and Mechanics and Farmers Bank
John W. Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising & Marketing History Research Grants
Dana Alsen, Department of History, University of Alabama, “Changing Patterns of Food Consumption in North Carolina, 1945-1989”
Dr. Makeda Best, Dept. of Visual Studies, California College of the Arts, “Sensing Memory: Kodak Cameras, Class, the Haptic, and the Labor of Memory in Late Nineteenth Century America”
Cari Casteel, History of Technology, Auburn University, “The Odor of Things: Deodorant, Gender, and Olfaction in the United States, 1888-2010”
Advertisement for Jergens Dryad Deodorant
Dr. Victoria Greive, Dept. of History, Utah State University, “Childhood and the Ideology of Domestic Security: Advertising During the Cold War”
Kira Lussier, Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, University of Toronto, “Managing Your Self: Personality Testing in Corporate America, 1960-present”
Dr. Einav Rabinovitch-Fox, Visiting Scholar, Institute of Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality, Columbia University, “Ad Women in a (Mad)Men World: Negotiating Gender in the Advertising Business 1910-1930”
Dr. Rebecca Sheehan, United States Studies Center, University of Sydney, “The Rise of the Superwoman: How Sex Remade Gender in America’s Long 1970s”
Dr. Mark Tadajewski, Professor of Marketing, Durham University, “Jean Kilbourne: Recalling the Contributions of a Feminist Critic of Advertising”
Seth Tannenbaum, Department of History, Temple University, “Take Me Out…To the Concession Stand: Baseball, Food, and Citizenship in the Twentieth Century”
Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture, Mary Lily Research Grants
Meaghan Beadle, Ph.D. candidate, history, University of Virginia, “This is What a Feminist Looks Like! Photography and Feminism, 1968-1980.”
Hanne Blank, Ph.D. candidate, history, Emory University, “Southern Women, Feminist Health: Activist Health Service and Communities of Radical Conscience in the Southeastern U.S., 1968-1990.”
Feminist Women’s Health Center
Samantha Bryant, Ph.D. candidate, history, University of Nebraska at Lincoln, “‘Black Monster Stalks the City’: The Thomas Wansley Case and the Racialized Cultural Landscape of the American Prison Industrial Complex, 1960 – 1975.”
Jaime Cantrell, Visiting Assistant Professor of English, The Sarah Isom Center for Women’s and Gender Studies, University of Mississippi, “Southern Sapphisms: Race, Sexuality, and Sociality in Literary Productions, 1968-1994.”
Ariel Dougherty, Independent scholar, for book research on film teaching programs for young women, women of color, and queer women.
Anne Gray Fischer, Ph.D. candidate, history, Brown University, for dissertation research on the politics of prostitution in the US from 1960s – 1980s.
Anna Iones, Ph.D. candidate, English language and literature, University of Virginia, “Shocking Violence, Contested Consent: The Feminist Avant-garde from Kathy Acker to Riot Grrrl.”
Catherine Jacquet, Assistant Professor, history, Louisiana State University, Responding to Rape: Contesting the Meanings of Sexual Violence in the United States, 1950-1980.
Whitney Stewart, Ph.D. candidate, history, Rice University, “Domestic Activism: The Politics of the Black Home in Nineteenth-Century America.”
Mary Whitlock, Ph.D. candidate, sociology, University of South Florida, “Examining Forty Years Of The Social Organization Of Feminisms: Ethnography Of Two Women’s Bookstores In the US South.”
Leah Wilson, Master’s student, English, Iowa State University, “Fleeing the Double Bind: Subverting the ‘White Trash’ Label through Female Solidarity and Erotic Power in Dorothy Allison’s Cavedweller.”
Join us for a round table discussion on how the federal Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) impacts research conducted in libraries and archives.
Thursday, April 16, 5:30 pm, Room 217 of Perkins Library
Panelists include:
Cynthia Greenlee, Post-Doctoral Fellow, Richards Civil War Era Center and the Africana Research Center, Penn State
Phoebe Evans Letocha, Collections Management Archivist of the Alan Mason Chesney Archives of the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions
Laura Micham, Merle Hoffman Director of the Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture, Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University Libraries
Stephen Novak, Head of Archives & Special Collections at Columbia University’s Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library
Kevin Smith, Director of Copyright and Scholarly Communication, Duke University Libraries
Scholars and researchers encounter issues with accessing information when researching 20th century materials containing sensitive health information. Archivists grapple with how to collect and describe sensitive health information. This roundtable discussion will discuss the legal and ethical implications of HIPAA and how to move forward in a scholarly community.
The History of Medicine Collections has over 850 unique medical instruments and artifacts. These items compliment our incredible book and manuscript collections. Along with the largest collection of ivory anatomical manikins in North America, we hold numerous surgical instruments and devices, microscopes, and an assortment of other unusual items.
Check out our collection guide for descriptions and thumbnail images of these items. And stay tuned – as our renovation nears completion, a number of these items will be on display in the Josiah Charles Trent History of Medicine Room.
Post contributed by Rachel Ingold, Curator of the History of Medicine Collections
Dispatches from the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Duke University
Please join the History of Medicine Collections for our next Trent History of Medicine Lecture Series event. Dr. Ed Halperin, M.D., M.A., will present “This is a Christian institution and we will tolerate no Jews here”: The Brooklyn Interns Hazing Episodes.
The Cook’s Oracle was a bestseller when it was first published in 1817. Its author, William Kitchiner (1775-1827), was a household name in England at the time, and was known for being an atypical host to his dinner guests – he prepared the food rather than his staff and even did the cleaning up as well. In addition to being an avid cook and successful cookbook author, Kitchiner was also an optician and inventor of telescopes, which perhaps explains why this particular cookbook is in the History of Medicine Collections here at Duke.
The apples actually cooked down pretty quickly – it probably took less than thirty minutes in total. I didn’t know what “moist sugar” is, but it turns out it is 
We mixed in the butter, eggs, and lemon zest. For the crust, I used a sheet of puff pastry, but since puff pastry is square, I used some of the other sheet of puff pastry to fill in the missing pieces. As you can see below, it ended up looking like a giant flower!
