Medical Historical Library News

New Exhibition: The Enduring Appeal of “The Doctor”

Curated by Katherine Isham The Medical Historical Library announces a new exhibition in our reading room: “The Enduring Appeal of ‘The Doctor’” featuring recent gifts from medical historian Bert Hansen, Ph.D. “The Doctor,” painted by Sir Luke Fildes in 1891, has been a popular and influential image in the history of medicine for more than a century. The painting of a Victorian doctor attending a sick child in a poor workman’s cottage held great appeal for the general public, who responded to the sympathetic portrayal. Members of the medical profession embraced the painting as a depiction of the ideal physician firmly rooted in the humanitarian traditions of medicine and not defined by the pristine clinical coldness of laboratory science which was redefining modern medicine at the end of the 19th century. By 1900, over one million prints of “The Doctor” were sold in the United States alone. In the 20th century, the enduring charm of “The Doctor” was employed in advertising, merchandise, political campaigns, and publishing, making it one of the most recognized images in modern medical history. Some of the most famous uses of “The Doctor” include a life-size three-dimensional exhibition at the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair, a United States postage stamp, and the image for an anti-nationalized medicine lobbying campaign by the American Medical Association. The exhibition displays a variety of prints and objects dating from 1907 to 2009.

The Bert Hansen Collection of Medicine and Public Health in Popular Graphic Art

The Medical Historical Library announces the availability of Ms Coll 67 The Bert Hansen Collection of Medicine and Public Health in Popular Graphic Art, which includes over 1200 images and items produced between 1850 and 2010 with additional reference materials. The collection is a gift of historian Bert Hansen, Ph.D., whose goal was to document the visual record of medical practice and research and public health in America. Over a period of thirty years, Hansen selected materials produced for the general public (not medical or public health professionals) that use medical imagery as an accompaniment to news items, for advertisements, for political satire, or for decorative items that celebrate medical history. Items in the collection include magazines, prints, posters, film publicity materials, product brochures, and promotional materials. Hansen also donated photocopied reference materials, such as newspapers, as part of this gift. The Bert Hansen Collection of Medicine and Public Health in Popular Graphic Art includes over 600 prints, including chromolithographs and wood engravings from 19th-century magazines like Harper’s Weekly, Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, Puck, Judge, and Scientific American on topics including Pasteur’s treatments for rabies, cholera, diphtheria, polio, tuberculosis, vaccinations, hospitals, mental asylums, unsafe foodstuffs, and public sanitation. There are numerous illustrations using medical imagery in political satire. The collection also contains 20th-century popular magazines such as Life, which often included multiple page photographic essays featuring cutting-edge photographic techniques, Look, Saturday Evening Post, Newsweek, and Time. These magazines regularly reported on medical and scientific advancements and noted medical and public health practitioners. Topics covered in this series include polio, cancer, organ transplants, development of artificial organs, medicine in wartime, midwifery, contraception, fertility, mental health, gender, sexuality, and medical ethics. Finally, the collection includes ephemeral material such as medical history themed frameable prints, publicity materials for Hollywood films about physicians, brochures for medical devices, health department signs, calendars, and event posters. Hansen has been teaching history at Baruch College of CUNY since 1994. He holds degrees in chemistry (Columbia) and history of science (Princeton). Prof. Hansen has written on obstetrics teaching in the 1860s, the new medical categorization of homosexuals in the 1890s, the advocacy for public health and sanitation in political cartoons from 1860 to 1900, and the popularity of medical history heroes in children’s comic books. His book, Picturing Medical Progress from Pasteur to Polio: A History of Mass Media Images and Popular Attitudes in America (Rutgers University Press, 2009), was honored with an award from the Popular Culture Association and named to the “2010 Best of the Best” for Public and Secondary School Libraries by the American Library Association. All materials in The Bert Hansen Collection of Medicine and Public Health in Popular Graphic Art are available for use at the Medical Historical Library reading room. Collection items are listed and described, using information from Bert Hansen’s database, in a finding aid available through Archives at Yale.

Explore some of the earliest printed medical books in our collection online

The Cushing/Whitney Medical Library is pleased to announce that parts of our incunable collection are now available online! The effort to digitize these incunables and make them freely available worldwide was generously funded by the Arcadia Fund. The Medical Historical Library, part of the Cushing/Whitney Medical Library, contains over 300 medical and scientific incunabula, which are books, broadsides, and pamphlets printed before 1501. These incredibly rare incunables represent the earliest history of printing in Europe and the first examples of medical knowledge circulated in printed form. Many of the incunables display elements of the print and manuscript world, including marginalia, historiated initials, and some of the earliest printed depictions of the human body, often derived from manuscript illustrations. The 44 incunables digitized in this project represent ones not found online anywhere. Topics include astrology, medicine, plague, anatomy, remedies, herbals and much more. The incunable collection was donated to the Medical Library by one of our founders, Dr. Arnold Klebs (1870-1943), a Swiss tuberculosis expert and bibliophile. The last decade of Klebs’ life was especially devoted to his ambitious incunabula project. He hoped to publish a catalog with full entries for scientific and medical incunabula. In 1938, he published a short-title catalog (i.e. brief entries), Incunabula scientifica and medica, of all known scientific and medical incunabula. Klebs did not purchase many incunabula himself. Instead, he encouraged fellow bibliophile and famed neurosurgeon Dr. HarveyCushing to buy them and acted as intermediary with book dealers in Europe. Through the efforts of Klebs and Cushing, Yale’s Medical Historical Library holds one of the largest medical and scientific incunable collections in the United States. Please explore these incunables on the Cushing/Whitney Medical Library site on Internet Archive, as part of the Medical Heritage Library. You can also find other Arcadia-funded digitized texts, including medieval and Renaissance medical and scientific manuscripts, Yale Medical School theses and early Arabic and Persian books and manuscripts, in this collection.

MS COLL 64 The Martha H. Roper Papers

By Michelle Peralta, Resident Archivist for Yale Special Collections Yale Class of 1974 Alumna Throughout the 2019-2020 academic year, Yale University is celebrating fifty years of co-education with many events and exhibitions that demonstrate the magnitude of contributions of Yale’s women graduates in all areas of life, including politics, sports, academia, and medicine. Thus, it feels particularly fitting that the latest archival collection available at the Medical Historical Library, Ms Coll 64 The Martha H. Roper Papers, was created by an alumna of one of Yale’s earliest co-education classes. The collection contains research, publications, and subject files that document the professional career of Martha H. Roper, Yale class of 1974, and her expertise in international epidemiology. A global health authority on maternal and neonatal tetanus, Roper worked for the World Health Organization, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF). A Lifetime of Service Martha Roper (known as Marty to most) dedicated her life to serving the underserved. A colleague wrote that Roper “fought for the uplift of those who were poor, marginalized and whose voices are rarely heard. She loved the human moments that come with being in the field, which keep us honest and true to purpose.” Roper’s service brought her across the world, traveling often to remote locations, and sometimes working in challenging conditions, but she remained committed to her cause of providing health care solutions to the most disadvantaged. This commitment was apparent early on in Roper’s career, when she worked as a research assistant at Yale Medical Center providing support for women experiencing domestic abuse in New Haven and contributing to research on battering and domestic abuse of women by their partners. Afterwards, Roper moved to the West coast and eventually worked as the medical director of Highland General Hospital’s Acute Care Clinic in Oakland, California where she was instrumental in providing support and resources for people dealing with substance abuse, alcoholism, and pelvic infections. Roper continued to work for public health almost until her untimely passing from lung cancer in 2016. Meticulous Attention to Detail Roper was known for her attention to detail, and her papers arrived at the Medical Historical Library in records cartons filled with folders arranged by topic and labeled with neat handwriting. The collection includes several notebooks filled with research notes and data, but one journal from Roper’s early career labeled “Die Naturphilosophie,” containing a few entries about Roper’s relocation to Alaska to temporarily fill in for a local doctor in his medical clinic, provides a glimpse of Roper’s personality beyond the known medical professional. “Enough for today. Tomorrow the adventure truly begins. Tonight, I’ll retire with a book, my usual evening occupation, and thereby bridge my familiar past and unfamiliar future.” An Emerging Field Martha Roper was an early adopter of the Global Positioning System (GPS) and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and her papers document howthese new technologies became important tools for the field of epidemiology in the 1990s. The collection includes workshop materials, maps, and her presentation: “Spatial Patterns of Malaria Case Distribution in Padre Cocha, Peru” from the third ever conference on Geographic Information Systems (GIS) in Public Health in 1998. Ms Coll 64 The Martha H. Roper Papers is open and available for research at the Harvey Cushing / John Hay Whitney Medical Historical Library at Yale University. A description and listing of collection contents is available at Archives at Yale.

Plastic Surgery at Yale: Surgical Expertise, Innovation, and History

NEW EXHIBITION Plastic Surgery at Yale: Surgical Expertise, Innovation, and History On view in the Cushing Rotunda from October 30th 2019 - February 24th, 2020 Surgical attempts to reconstruct the human body after injury or illness have long been at the forefront of medical innovation. The expansive field of plastic surgery emerged over centuries, now including reconstruction and cosmetics and aesthetic surgery. In this exhibition, evolving techniques and procedures dating from ancient times through the present day are on display through a sampling of major historical plastic surgery texts from the Medical Historical Library. Discover technologies used in reconstructive and cosmetic surgery today through the models and tools on loan from Yale Plastic Surgery. Learn about innovations from Yale's own plastic surgery faculty through various publications, instruments, and the international non-profit work performed around the globe. The exhibition, in partnership with Yale Plastic Surgery, was curated by Marc E. Walker, MD, MBA, with assistance from Melissa Grafe, Ph.D, Head of the Medical Historical Library.

Celebrating 10 Years of the Cushing Center

Exhibition curated by Terry Dagradi and Deborah Streahle The Medical Library celebrates the first decade of the Cushing Center with a special exhibition leading up the its anniversary. Throughout his career as a groundbreaking neurosurgeon, Dr. Cushing took detailed notes on what patients told him about their serious, often mysterious ailments. He had patients sit for diagnostic photos and sketches, and he followed up with them for years after treating them. With precision, he removed and preserved their tumors and, after they died, their brains. These materials became the Cushing Brain Tumor Registry, a vast collection that medical students and scholars traveled to study until the materials fell out of use in the 1970s. Creating the Cushing Center took over 15 years, from the resurgence of interest in the collection in the 1990s to the opening of the Cushing Center during Alumni Weekend in June 2010. While the collection was originally assembled to educate the medical elite, the Cushing Center opens the Brain Tumor Registry to the public from which it came. Since opening, the Cushing Center has provided a new place of honor for the materials of the Cushing Brain Tumor Registry. The Cushing Center has also hosted workshops, meetings, and classes ranging from drawing to divinity and has inspired many projects within and beyond medicine. Serving as a unique record of neurosurgery’s early days, the space has generated abundant national and international media attention. And, as a poignant reminder of the people whose lives depended on Cushing’s expertise, the Center sparks important conversations about the ethics of collecting and displaying human tissue. Featured in the anniversary exhibition are materials that tell the story of the Cushing Center’s first decade. If you visit, consider the next decade of the Cushing Center and share your ideas, reflections, and suggestions online and on the bulletin board near the entrance.

New Collection: The Hall-Benedict Drug Company Logbooks and Ledgers

The Medical Historical Library is pleased to announce the addition of a new collection to our archives: The Hall-Benedict Drug Company Logbooks and Ledgers (Ms Coll 66), a collection of seventy-five volumes and six boxes, that documents the history of one of the oldest independent drug stores in Connecticut. The collection includes bound prescription logbooks and bound and loose financial ledgers from the Hall-Benedict Drug Company, which was in operation from 1909 to 1998 in the East Rock neighborhood of New Haven, Connecticut. The collection contains an almost continuous record of the pharmacy’s operations from 1909 to 1970 and is a wonderful resource for researchers interested in the history of pharmaceuticals, pharmacies in the twentieth century, and business in New Haven. The collection was a gift from Thomas F. and Helen Formichella. History The Hall-Benedict Drug Company was formed in 1909 when Alonzo Benton Hall took on Edward N. Benedict as junior partner. Both men had previous experience in the pharmacy business. Before forming the partnership, Hall operated a pharmacy on Chapel Street in New Haven and Benedict had worked as a druggist and a clerk. Following a national trend of small businesses opening in emerging neighborhoods, they opened the Hall-Benedict Drug Company at 767 Orange Street, a new three-story building located on the northern edge of development in East Rock, New Haven. The business and the business partners were well integrated with the neighborhood. Alonzo Hall and his family lived above the business and Edward Benedict and his family lived on Bishop Street, a few blocks south. The pharmacy provided a message service for local physicians, who would stop by after making house calls, had a bicycle delivery service for customers who couldn’t leave home, and the pharmacy’s soda fountain was a popular hang-out for children from nearby schools and busloads of visitors to East Rock Park. The Hall-Benedict Drug Company remained in operation at 767 Orange Street until 1998, when the business was closed. By that time, they had dispensed over a million prescriptions. During the eighty-nine years it was in operation the Hall-Benedict Drug Company was a family run business. After senior partner Alonzo Benton Hall's death in 1923, junior partner Edward N. Benedict purchased his share and became sole owner of the company and the property. In 1949, Edward N. Benedict died, and ownership of the business and property passed to his wife, M. Katherine Benedict, and after her death to the Benedict's children, Mary Benedict Killion, Frank D. Benedict, and Edward J. Benedict. In 1977 Thomas F. Formichella Jr., Edward N. Benedict’s nephew, who had been with the company since 1953, purchased the business and property and ran the pharmacy until the business was closed in 1998. He passed away in 2007 and his family retained ownership of the 767 Orange Street building until recently. You can still see the Hall-Benedict Drug Company building with the original pharmacy sign capped with the mortar and pestle emblem, ancient symbol of druggists, at the corner of Linden and Orange Streets in New Haven, CT. Prescription Logbooks The Hall-Benedict Drug Company collection includes fifty-two prescription logbooks dating from June 3, 1909 to March 14, 1970. The logbooks are organized by date and each hand-written entry includes a prescription number, the name of a medication, and a name, most likely that of the prescribing physician. In 1909, when the Hall-Benedict Drug Company opened, pharmaceutical companies were producing some medications, but most prescription medicines were made to order by local pharmacies, a process known as “compounding.” Entries in the earlier logbooks of this collection often include the formulas for compounding the medication and directions for patients, which makes them especially interesting. The pharmacists also used the blank spaces inside the book covers to write down useful information, such as formulas for non-prescription medications and products sold by the pharmacy and contact information for local vendors, or to paste in newspaper articles about new medicines or other topics of interest. These logbooks provide researchers with a wealth of details about the use and preparation of medications during a significant time in the history of medicine. Financial Ledgers The Hall-Benedict Drug Company collection also includes 22 volumes and six boxes of financial ledgers dating from May 7, 1909 to December 31, 1967 that contain hand written entries recording income and expenses for the pharmacy. Most of the financial ledgers contain daily income and expense entries with monthly totals, but there are also expense details, summaries and adjustments, balance sheets, profit and loss reports, and a payroll journal. The financial ledgers trace the growth of the business and relationships with vendors, including many local businesses, over a span of almost sixty years. Even for those unfamiliar with accounting, these ledgers provide a wonderfully detailed glimpse into the financial realities of operating a pharmacy in the twentieth century and operating a local family owned business in New Haven. See the Collection All materials in Ms Coll 66 The Hall-Benedict Drug Company Logbooks and Ledgers are open for research and may be requested through Archives at Yale. Selected materials are currently on view in the exhibition cases in the Medical Historical Library reading room through November 2019. Images from top to bottom: 1. Three pharmacists at the Hall-Benedict Drug Company look through prescription logbooks to refill an old prescription. Photo from “A Pioneer Drug Store Fills a Million Prescriptions.” New Haven Register Magazine, December 18, 1960, page 4. 2. John H. Korn, who started with the Hall-Benedict Drug Company in 1917, working at the soda fountain. Orange Street and the lower portion of the sign are visible through the front window. Photo from “A Pioneer Drug Store Fills a Million Prescriptions.” New Haven Register Magazine, December 18, 1960, page 4. 3. Hall-Benedict Drug Company building today with the original sign, East Rock Park is visible in the background. 4. Page from the first prescription logbook used by the Hall-Benedict Drug Company. Prescription entries in this logbook include formulas for compounding medicines and instructions for patients.

Grant Wood’s American Gothic Repurposed and Several Anti-Smoking Acquisitions

Grant Wood’s American Gothic Repurposed and Several Anti-Smoking Acquisitions on view now at the Cushing/Whitney Medical Library. “American Gothic” is one of the best known works by an American artist. Iowa native Grant Wood was inspired by the small town Iowan home in Gothic Revival style and asked his sister and his dentist to pose for the painting as father and daughter residents of the well kept property. To many viewers of “American Gothic” the scene was, and is, interpreted as a satire on rural life, but Wood avowed that the painting portrayed traditional American values, pointing out the residents’ resilience, fortitude and pride. The painting was first exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1930 where it won a prize of $300. It remains on view at the Art Institute. Currently on display in the medical library hallway leading to the rotunda are: Bruce McGillivray's Recycling, An Iowa Way of Life, Iowa Recycling Association, 1988. Purchased through the John F. Fulton Fund 2018 Marcia Cooper's We Can Live Without Nuclear Power, 1979. Purchased through the John F. Fulton Fund 2018 S. Cooper's Crop Rotation Pays, no date. Screen print. Copyright Compass Points, Memphis, Tenn. Purchased through the Lucia Fulton Fund 2016 About our collection This year, sixty-seven posters were acquired for the Historical Medical Poster Collection, a few of which are currently on display in the Cushing/Whitney Medical Library. The library regularly acquires posters, prints, drawings, instruments, manuscripts, rare books, and other objects and materials of interest in the understanding of medical and public health issues over time. The library’s special collections holdings are available for use in classes and for study. To use these materials, contact the Historical Library or your departmental librarian.

Celebrating 90 Years of the Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine (YJBM)

Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine (YJBM) is celebrating 90 years of continuous publication. Founded in 1928 by Milton C. Winternitz, YJBM is the oldest medical student-run publication still in production and has grown to be a peer-reviewed, internationally ranked journal aimed at featuring outstanding research in all areas of biology and medicine. Explore this exhibition featuring the accomplishments and challenges of student editorship and the vivid history of YJBM. Exhibit to run May 30, 2019 - September 30, 2019 in the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library Rotunda

Explore Medieval and Renaissance Medical and Scientific Manuscripts

The Cushing/Whitney Medical Library is pleased to announce that our medieval and Renaissance manuscript collection is now online! The effort to digitize the manuscripts and make them freely available worldwide was generously funded by the Arcadia Fund. The manuscripts contain early medical and scientific knowledge on a variety of topics, including surgery, gynecology, medicine, herbs and remedies, anatomy, healthful living, astronomy, and mathematics. They are handwritten in Latin, Italian, Greek, German, and English. Some are illustrated, like MS18, De herbis masculinis et feminis [and other botanical and zoological works, including the Herbarium of Apuleius]. Turning the pages of this manuscripts reveals numerous hand-colored drawings of plants and animals, including the mandrake root. The mandrake root was valued for a variety of medical uses, including as an aid for reproduction. Mandrake root, as depicted in Harry Potter and in legend, would let out an ear piercing, killer scream when uprooted. Other manuscripts are filled to the very edges of the paper with text, including marginalia and commentary, like MS11, which has 24 different texts including Aristotelian treatises. The earliest work is the Bamberg Surgery, dating from the 12th century and purchased, like most of this collection, by Library founder and famed neurosurgeon Dr. Harvey Cushing. As medieval medical scholar Monica Green writes, “The Bamberg Surgery doesn’t get a lot of love in histories of surgery, because of its patchwork character. As [George] Corner himself said, “it is a notebook, a partially organized collection of notes, memoranda, prescriptions, and excerpts from other books.” Please explore these manuscripts on Cushing/Whitney Library site on Internet Archive, as part of the Medical Heritage Library. You can also find other Arcadia-funded digitized texts, including Yale Medical School theses and early Arabic and Persian books and manuscripts, in this collection. The Library plans to make the medieval and Renaissance manuscripts available through Findit, Yale University Library’s Digital Collections site.