Some new titles for May

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OslerNiche_BooksSmaller copyInterested in some historical summer reading? Here are some ideas from our new acquisitions from last month:

 

Ways of regulating drugs in the 19th and 20th centuries / edited by Jean-Paul Gaudillière and  Volker Hess. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire ; New York : Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.

The essays assembled in this volume share the perspective that the historiography of science, technology, and medicine, therefore, needs a broader approach toward regulation; an approach taking into account the distinct social worlds involved in regulation, the forms of evidence and expertise mobilized, and the means of intervention chosen in order to tame drugs in factories, offices, consulting rooms and courts. Focusing on case studies, the volume explores the ‘ways of regulating drugs’, which surfaced in the 19th and 20th century, and play a central role in the present world of science, market and medicine.

Includes a contribution by McGill Social Studies of Medicine prof Alberto Cambrosio (with Peter Keating and Andrei Mogoutov ): “What’s in a Pill? On the Informational Enrichment of Anti-Cancer Drugs.”

 

The identity of the history of science and medicine / Andrew Cunningham. Farnham, Surrey, England ; Burlington, VT. : Ashgate Variorum, c2012.

From the publisher’s website:

In these essays, Andrew Cunningham is concerned with issues of identity – what was the identity of topics, disciplines, arguments, diseases in the past, and whether they are identical with (more usually, how they are not identical with) topics, disciplines, arguments or diseases in the present. Historians usually tend to assume such continuous identities of present attitudes and activities with past ones, and rarely question them; the contention here is that this gives us a false image of the very things in the past that we went to look for.

 

The great Manchurian plague of 1910-1911 : the geopolitics of an epidemic disease / William C. Summers. New Haven : Yale University Press, c2012.

The  Manchurian plague (or “third pandemic”) was a severe episode of bubonic plague that began in southwest China in the 1850s. Check out a review of this book from the Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 68, no. 2 (April 2013) [McGill users only]

 

Remèdes, onguents, poisons : une histoire de la pharmacie / sous la direction d’Yvan Brohard ; préface et postface d’Axel Kahn. Paris : Université Paris Descartes : Éditions de la Martinière, 2012.

Full of anecdotes and alchemy! Find a discussion with the author Yvan Brohard on the history of pharmacy and medication on the radio show La tête au carré on France Inter.

 

Inventing intelligence : how America came to worship IQ / Elaine E. Castles. Santa Barbara, Calif. : Praeger, c2012.

Written by a clinical psychologist, this book traces the rise of the IQ test as the key measure of mental capacity, as well as describing historical initiatives to quantify intelligences (phrenology, anyone?). Have a look at a more detailed description on the publisher’s website.

 

Homöopathie in der DDR : die Geschichte der Homöopathie in der Sowjetischen Besatzungszone und der DDR 1945 bis 1989 ; Hans-Walz-Preisschrift / Anne Nierade. Essen : KVC Verlag, c2012.

This book uncovers the history of homeopathy in the German Democratic Republic. Published as the 2011 winner of a book prize in the history of homeopathy sponsored by the Institute for the History of Medicine of the Robert Bosch Foundation in Germany, this book explores homeopathy as a popular lay medical tradition.

 

P.S. Ever wondered how to find book reviews? Find some tips here.

 

World No Tobacco Day, 31 May

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Today seems a fitting day to take a look at an oldie-but-goodie from the Osler Library Newsletter, no. 15, February 1974.

An article by then-cataloguer Janis Shore describes an exhibit on the history of smoking:

Prompted by a suggestion from one of our overseas correspondents, the Library staff organized an exhibit on the history of smoking. There was little problem in finding sufficient materials within the Library as Dr. Osler expressed great interest in the use of tobacco and selected 30 books for the Osleriana collection that dealt with this subject.

 

One sixteenth-century book in particular was responsible for much of what Europeans knew about tobacco.

Monardes, Nicolás, ca. 1512-1588. Historia medicinal. En Seuilla : En casa de Alonso Escriuano, 1574. 4º. Osler Library, B.O. 3431.

Monardes, Nicolás, ca. 1512-1588. Historia medicinal. En Seuilla : En casa de Alonso Escriuano, 1574. 4º. Osler Library, B.O. 3431.

Written by Nicolas Monardes in 1574 and titled ‘Primera y segunda y tercera Partes de la Historia medicinal de las cosas’, it states that the tobacco plant would cure coughs, asthma, headache, cramp in the stomach, gout… and malignant tumours.

 

 

Another book,  ‘A Counterblaste to Tobacco’ issued by King James I of England, represents one of the earliest stop-smoking campaigns, highlighting an important premodern reason to quit.

Many monarchs were as concerned as King James because smoking had drastically increased the hazards of fire and hundreds of European villages were being destroyed because of careless smokers.

 

Reader's annotation in a 1644 compendium including a Latin translation of James's Counterblaste, among other works. Osler Library, B.O. 2550. "Tobacco! Injurious herb, an oily plant with horrible smoke."

Reader’s annotation in a 1644 compendium including a Latin translation of James’s Counterblaste, among other works. Osler Library, B.O. 2550. “Tobacco! Injurious herb, an oily plant with horrible smoke.”

 

William Osler himself recognized certain dangers related to over-indulgence in tobacco and warned against it (though he was far from a non-smoker himself).

 

Lady Nicotine in William Osler's speech "A Way of Life", 1913. Typed manuscript, Osler Library, B.O. 7653.

Lady Nicotine in William Osler’s speech “A Way of Life”, 1913. Typed manuscript, Osler Library, B.O. 7653.

Read the whole article here.

To check out other issues of the OLN, see our website.

 

Osler Library Guide: Archives

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This is part of a series of posts designed to expose readers to the range of materials we have here at the Osler Library and provide tips on how to find and use specific resources. These various installments will form the basis of a comprehensive Osler Library user guide. Your questions and feedback are welcome!

Pile of PapersAbout

The Osler Library holds nearly 200 individual archives. These include both fonds—bodies of documents accumulated by a person or institution during the course of their activities—and collections—groupings of materials arranged thematically.

The majority of the archives are fonds received from physicians and medical professionals attached to McGill University and the Faculty of Medicine. The most notable example would be the collection of William Osler material. Other fonds or collections relate to medicine and medical practitioners in Quebec or in Canada, such as the James Bell Johnston Fonds or the AIDS Collection. There are a small number of institutional archives (such as the Royal Victoria Hospital Women’s Pavillion Collection).

 

Finding information

Information about particular fonds or collections in the Osler Library can be accessed in two ways: in a specialized archival database or through the McGill Library’s online public access catalogue. The archival database can be found here. The database provides fonds-level descriptions of each fonds or collection (that means, a brief overview of the materials included, a biography or history of the person of institution that created the documents, the date range of material, and information about its provenance.) Many also have links to inventory lists, available in PDF, which provide information about each folder or item in a fonds or collections. These are linked to from the description.

The same information is also found in the McGill Library Catalogue. An easy way to find archival material in the library catalogue is by using the Classic Catalogue (also linked to on the library homepage). Once in the Classic Cataloge, you can select an Advanced Search, which will give you the option of selecting “Types of materials.” Select “Archive” then enter in your search terms above and only archival material will be retrieved. The same information is provided, except that if there is a link to a PDF inventory list you will have to copy and paste the link.

 

User information

Visitors to the archives are welcome during our opening hours. It’s recommended to make an appointment, but not necessary. You will be asked to leave coats and bags in our coatroom, fill out a form with your information, and leave a student card or other piece of identity with us during the time that you’re consulting materials. Only pencils can be taken into our reading rooms and staff will instruct you on proper handling of fragile materials.

 

Happy researching!

 

 

McGill professor wins history of science book award

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Professor David Wright of the History Department and the Institute of Health and Social Policy has been awarded the biennial Dingle Prize from the British Society for the History of Science. The prize is awarded to the best recent book that succeeds in both engaging non-specialist audiences and making a sound scholarly contribution to the history of science.

Have a look here.

 

 

Bring a Child to Work Day at Osler

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And continuing with our recent theme of special visitors to the library, we had some real VIPs last Friday.

In the Osler Room

We hosted an event here for McGill’s campus-wide Bring a Child to Work Day. The first part was a tour of the Osler Room and a peek at some of its treasures, including a 19th century surgeon’s kit and a couple very precious scientific and medical books.

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Next, our visitors took on an accelerated training program in medieval medicine, complete with urinalysis and patient case histories.

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Here are some of our graduates for the degree “Magister medicinae medievalis.” Look one of them up the next time your humors are acting up!

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Photos: Lily Martin and Sabrina Hanna

 

Anatomical atlas donated in honour of outgoing principal

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This Tuesday, April 30th, at Osler, Principal Monroe-Blum was presented with a significant rare work donated in her honour. The Exposition anatomique de la structure du corps human by Jacques Fabien Gautier d’Agoty (1716-1785) was published in France in 1759. D’Agoty was an artist who trained in colour printing with Jacob Christoph Le Blon (1670-1741), a German painter and engraver who developed the technique of colour mezzotint printing. D’Agoty took on the difficult and elaborate project of printing a complete, life-sized anatomy in colour. The resulting book is an elephant folio with nineteen pages of text and twenty colour mezzotint plates.

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Mezzotint is an intaglio printing technique, meaning that a design is incised into a surface and the resulting image is created by the ink in the grooves. In mezzotint printing, the negative space in the image on the plate is roughened up and pitted with a tool called a rocker in order to achieve half-tones and shading. Le Blon’s colour mezzotint process involved making multiple engravings, one for each colour of ink, and then overlaying them. His original technique involved the use of red, blue, and yellow inks to create a range of colours and he later added a fourth layer of black.

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This copy of the Exposition anatomique now held at Osler is among only a handful of existing copies. Others are held in the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Yale University, Harvard University, and the University of Edinburgh, among others. It is also the only known copy in Canada. The atlas was acquired thanks to several generous donors and presented in recognition of Professor Heather Munroe-Blum’s ten years as Principal and Vice-Chancellor.

Photos: Sabrina Hanna

 

 

Nickerson Fellowship Talk, May 2nd

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Nickerson Fellowship Talk

Abstract: Under specific consideration of the theoretical approaches and practical research influences of “interdisciplinarity” in neuroscientific research, this presentation (as the “Nickerson Fellowship Talk”) addresses a time period and a subject of investigation that has only marginally been dealt with in the history of medicine and neurosciences: the influences and the context of the creation of early centres of neuroscientific research at the beginning of the 20th century.

Breaking with the disciplinary set-up of “brain research” in the 19th century, prominent medical researchers such as Heinrich Obersteiner (Vienna), Otfrid Foerster (Breslau), Ludwig Edinger (Frankfurt), Emil Kraepelin (Munich), and Oskar Vogt (Berlin) helped to foster new trends in group-oriented neuroscientific activity.  These approaches later served as major templates for such influential North American brain researchers as Wilder Penfield (Montreal), Harvey Cushing (Boston), and Francis O. Schmitt (St. Louis) and strongly reshaped the manner in which research investigations in the biomedical life sciences took place in the 20th century.

Yet so far, we do not have a sufficient historical understanding nor a philosophical explanation of what triggered these developments in the first place and how theoretical, methodological, and pragmatic factors played together in creating these new and fascinating forms of research organization.  This presentation – by particularly focusing on Foerster’s Neurological Institute in Breslau and Penfield’s research visits in the 1920s and 1930s – intends to give some tentative answers as to the place, time, and culture in which these scientific and philosophical changes began to transform early neuroscientific research in Europe and North America.

 

Frank W. Stahnisch is an Associate Professor at the University of Calgary in Alberta, Canada.  Since 2008, he holds the AMF/Hannah Professorship in the History of Medicine and Health Care at the UofC, and is cross-appointed in the Department of History (Faculty of Arts) and the Department of Community Health Sciences (Faculty of Medicine).  He is also a full academic member of the Hotchkiss Brain Institute, the Institute for Public Health, as well as academic coordinator (History) of the Calgary History and Philosophy of Science undergraduate and graduate programs.  Prior to joining the University of Calgary, he has held teaching positions at the Humboldt University of Berlin; the University of Erlangen-Nuernberg, and Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz (Germany), and has also been a Visiting Professor at McGill University (Montréal), in Canada, the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (Berlin) and the University of Heidelberg, in Germany.

 

Spotlight on: Medical History of British India

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In this series, I’ll be highlighting a digital resource or collection of primary resource materials in the history of medicine. You can find a lengthy list of these at our history of medicine subject guide and feel free to share any resources you’ve found useful!

Medical History of British India is a fascinating digital collection from the National Library of Scotland. The materials digitized for this collection consist mostly of documents from the India Papers Collection. The India Papers Collection is made up of central British Imperial and British Indian government publications from the mid-19th century until the first decades of the 20th century. The Medical History of British India project has digitized and made available online the many volumes of reports relating to public health, disease, and medical research. It even includes 146 volumes (40,000 pages!) on veterinary medicine. The online collection is divided into 6 primary subject areas: disease, institutions, drugs, veterinary, mental health, and vaccination. You can browse by these sub-collections, or browse by other criteria such as form and genre (includes images, maps, and texts), place, subject, person and organization, and time period. All of the digitized volumes are also fully text searchable, a great research benefit. Another interesting feature is that you can download up to 30 images to create a custom PDF, which brings together only the pages you need.  The About the collection page gives a great introduction to all of the major subjects covered—click on the link to Institutions and you will get lots of good background information about the organization of medical research, hospitals, and healthcare services in British India.