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

November 7, 2019 - 11:02am by Melissa Grafe

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

September 3, 2019 - 1:47pm by Melissa Grafe

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.

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

June 12, 2019 - 11:13am by Melissa Grafe

    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

March 1, 2019 - 10:35am by Melissa Grafe

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.

Picturing Disability Technology

February 27, 2019 - 9:47am by Melissa Grafe

Our first 2018-19 Ferenc Gyorgyey fellow, Jaipreet Virdi, Ph.D., shares an aspect of her research on disability technology through photographs and postcards, with little help from Twitter… Picturing Disability Technology Written by Jaipreet Virdi* In a 2014 article, historian Katherine Ott expressed: “Both the artifacts owned and used by people with disabilities and those that are used upon them or that are encountered in life create possibilities, impose limits, assert political and ideological positions, and shape identity.”[1] This statement has guided my research on the material culture of disability and the nature of disability as both an individual experience and a collective one. By examining how disabled people created, modified, and used technologies, tools, and machines as a medium of social interaction, my work aims to conceptualize how such objects shaped the meanings and management of disability – to understand, as Toby Siebers has written, the ways in which objects are “viewed not as potential sources of pain but as marvelous examples of the plasticity of the human form or as devices of empowerment.”[2] My research also examines representations of disability technologies: how did disabled people ascribe meanings and values to their objects? Wheelchairs, canes, walkers, braces, spectacles, hearing aids, prosthetics, and etc., all color various interactions with disability. Since most of these technologies are essential for navigating (sometimes literally) the world, visual representations of disabled people with these technologies provides us with valuable insight for understanding people’s lived experiences of disability. In photographs, for instance, everything from poses, dress, props, and the inclusion of disability technology, are visual evidence of conscious decisions to frame an image of disability. Such images enable us to perceive the kinds of technologies people used, how they adapted them to their bodies, and how they personalized them to reduce the stigma of “otherness”[3] or “freakery.”[4] The Robert Bogdan Disability History Collection at the Medical Historical Library (in the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University) contains over 3,500 photographs and ephemera representing disability. Since the 1980s, Bogdan had collected such representations, ranging from the 1870s-when photographic images became popularized—to the 1970s at the heights of the disability rights movement. Bogdan’s 2012 collaborative book with Martin Elks and James A. Knoll, Picturing Disability: Beggar, Freak, Citizen, and Other Photographic Rhetoric (Syracuse University Press), provides a broader historical context of the collection, including a history of different types of citizen portraits. The carte de visite was the most common photographic format from 1860 to 1885, with each photograph printed from a negative and mounted on a piece of thin cardboard; some people chose to have the photograph on a postcard, so as to send messages to family and friends. Cabinet cards were also popular at the end of the nineteenth century, though they were three times larger than the carte de visite. Citizen portraits were often taken at a local studio, positioning subjects to “echo family visual rhetoric, not disability conventions”—there is no obvious attempt to conceal the disability, for it is part of the family reality as conveyed in the photograph.[5] Other photographs also use props and positioning of people to convey “normal life” within an inconsequential setting to frame an image’s ordinariness, instead of using disability to define the situation.[6] Disability technologies and other visual indicators of disability are prominently present in many of these photographs. As Bogdan points out, “their presence is not so intrusive as to change this picture’s place in the category of atypical family photograph.”[7] In this wedding portrait, for instance, the two women in wheelchairs are part of the wedding party and positioned to provide balance—the same way a photographer will arrange individuals according to height to obtain symmetry in portraits—without drawing much attention to their wheelchairs.   Wedding party with 2 women in wheelchairs, from the Robert Bogdan Disability Collection MS Col 61, Book 1: Wheelchairs.   These photos also do not tend to specifically feature the disability object, rather positioning the people within normal portraiture conventions, whether it is to show romance or familial ties. The use of additional props, moreover, were used to further confine the photographs within portraiture traditions – the disability technology, though consciously included in the photos, are not the subject of the portrait. Rather, it is the people and their relationships with each other. As Bogdan asserts, “Although some of the images were shared, even sent through the mail, they were distributed privately to intimates, family members, and friends. They were not produced for commercial public relations, to solicit money, to sell, or for personal or organizational gain.”[8] Through these images, we can see most assuredly that people with disabilities were “too busy living to be restrained by our post-structuralist worries over the cultural contingencies of what they did or who they were,” as Ott has remarked.[9]   Assorted photographs of women in wheelchairs accompanied by other people, from the Robert Bogdan Disability Collection MS Col 61, Book 1: Wheelchairs. Assorted photographs of women in wheelchairs accompanied by other people, from the Robert Bogdan Disability Collection MS Col 61, Book 1: Wheelchairs.   Assorted photographs of women in wheelchairs accompanied by other people, from the Robert Bogdan Disability Collection MS Col 61, Book 1: Wheelchairs.   One series of photographs piqued my interest: of individuals outdoors in wheelchairs that have chains attached to the wheels. This design feature appears in different styles of wheelchairs, but I have never previously encountered it in my research, either in manuscripts and archives, or in material culture collections. Inspecting the photographs, I took an educated guess: would these be for raising or hoisting the individual from the chair? My guess didn’t seem right to me, so I took my question to twitter.     As historians have discussed, crowdsourcing on social media is useful for harnessing participatory knowledge. It blurs the boundaries between specialist and non-specialist knowledge, offering new insights for working with primary sources. What seemed to me to be a questionable, confusing design feature was quite obvious to others – the wheelchair is a hand-crank, with the chains fixed to move the wheels the same way that a bicycle pedal moves a bicycle. Now, since I don’t own or ride a bicycle, chain gears were not something I was familiar with, but others have shared their knowledge to enable me to paint a better picture of how this design feature was useful for wheelchair users. The exchange on twitter formed a conversation about self-propelled wheelchairs that governed my research through the Bogdan collection and the broader history of the wheelchair. Litters, swings, cradles, carts, carrying-chairs or sedan chairs were used prior to the formation of the wheelchair as we know it, and individual chairs were not mass-produced until the mid-twentieth century to assist the increasing numbers of soldiers surviving from spinal cord injuries. Wheelchairs became associated with disability and thus, users were stigmatized and perceived as unable to contribute to society. These photographs, however, reveal the extent to which disabled people governed their own lives and sought to be self-sufficient, even taking an action pose in their studio portraits to represent their maneuverability. Man in wheelchair formed like a cart, from the Robert Bogdan Disability Collection MS Col 61, Book 1: Wheelchairs.   As Penny Wolfson has shown, users relied on their own craftsmanship or that of others to shape a mobility device for their own needs.[10] Wheelchairs could be made by adding cart wheels on dining or library chairs, by repurposing motorcycle engines, or adding gears for hand-cranked wheelchairs. While most nineteenth-century wheelchairs were manufactured by furniture makers prizing comfort, adaptability, and mobility, some users repurposed from household furniture and included crafted additions for comfort: home-sewn cushions, crocheted blankets or feet mats, and trinkets attached to spokes. These features provide us with clues into the personalized relationship between user and technology, presenting experiences of disability that were not always negative or exclusive. Moreover, photographs of disabled wheelchair users in various settings—in a field, in the streets, on the porch—indicates the challenges of maneuvering within the built environment, especially of navigating on unpaved streets. The wheels, cranks, and other design features that are visible in the photographs additionally reveal variants of disability experience. By the 1970s, wheelchairs became markers of disability as well as symbols of activism, leaving behind intimate traces of their owner(s). And those hand cranks aren’t simply designs of the past; old designs can always be made new again.   *Jaipreet Virdi is a historian of medicine, technology, and disability. She is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the University of Delaware. Her first book, Hearing Happiness: Fakes, Frauds, and Fads in Deafness Cures will be published by The University of Chicago Press. The Ferenc Gyorgyey Research Travel Grant generously supported this research; special thanks to the grant selection committee and to Melissa Grafe. Photograph images from the Robert Bogdan Disability Collection MS Col 61, Book 1: Wheelchairs. You can find Jai on twitter as @jaivirdi.   [1] Katherine Ott, “Disability Things: Material Culture and American Disability History, 1700-2010,” in Susah Burch and Michael Rembis (Eds.), Disability Histories (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2014), 119. [2] Toby Siebers, “Disability in Theory: From Social Constructionism to the New Realism of the Body,” in Lennard Davis (ed), The Disability Studies Reader (New York & London: Routledge, 2006), 177. [3] Catherine Kudlick, “Disability History: Why We Need Another ‘Other,” The American Historical Review 108.3 (June 2003): 768-793. [4] Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997). [5] Robert Bogdan, Martin Elks and James A. Knoll, Picturing Disability: Beggar, Freak, Citizen, and Other Photographic Rhetoric (Syracuse University Press, 2012), 145. [6] Bogdan, Elks, and Knoll, Picturing Disability, 146. [7] Bogdan, Elks, and Knoll, Picturing Disability, 154. [8] Bogdan, Elks, and Knoll, Picturing Disability, 145. [9] Katherine Ott, “The Sum of its Parts: An Introduction to Modern Histories of Prosthetics,” in Katherine Ott, David Serlin, and Stephen Mihm (eds.), Artificial Parts, Practical Lives: Modern Histories of Prosthetics (New York: New York University Press, 2002), 1-42; 3. [10] Penny Lynne Wolfson, “Enwheeled: Two Centuries of Wheelchair Design, from Furniture to Film,” MA Thesis, Cooper-Hewit, National Design Museum, Smithsonian Institution and Parsons the New School for Design (2014).  

New exhibition on the Early Modern Pharmacy, 1500-1800

March 27, 2018 - 11:17am by Melissa Grafe

The Historical Library is please to announce our newest exhibition: The Early Modern Pharmacy: Drugs, Recipes, and Apothecaries, 1500-1800 April 2nd-July 5th, 2018 What did a pharmacy look like in Europe, between 1500 and 1800? What kind of activities took place within its walls? Who were the pharmacists? What kind of drugs did they make, and where did the ingredients come from? This exhibit, organized by the students in Professor Paola Bertucci's undergraduate seminar Collecting Nature and Art with the collaboration of Sarah Pickman, engages with these questions. It shows that, in the early modern period, collecting recipes and making medicines were common household activities carried out by women, while apothecaries often became targets of satire. The exhibit focuses also on a number of American ingredients, like coffee, cocoa, tobacco and chocolate, initially regarded as potential cure-alls, and on the mythical mandrake. Join us for an opening reception April 2nd at 5:15 in the Rotunda of the Medical Library.

Cataloging Cushing's Patients

May 30, 2017 - 3:26pm by Melissa Grafe

The Cushing/Whitney Medical Library is pleased to announce the completion of a grant funded to catalog 2,600 glass plate negatives from the Cushing Brain Tumor Registry.  The grant proposal, "Rethinking Early Neurosurgery: The Harvey Cushing Collection," was funded through a National Network of Libraries of Medicine-New England Region Knowledge/Data Management Award.  From mid-February through April 30th 2017,  a team of graduate and undergraduate students carefully inputted information on over 3,000 glass plate negatives into the Cushing Center database, exceeding the estimated amount in the grant. The negatives depict Dr. Harvey Cushing's patients, including histology.  Harvey Cushing, the pioneer and father of neurosurgery, was born on April 8, 1869 in Cleveland, Ohio. He graduated from Yale University in 1891, studied medicine at Harvard Medical School and received his medical degree in 1895. In 1896, he moved to Johns Hopkins Hospital where he trained to become a surgeon under the watchful eye of William S. Halstead, the father of American surgery. By 1899 Cushing became interested in surgery of the nervous system and began his career in neurosurgery. During his tenure at Johns Hopkins, there were countless discoveries in the field of neuroscience. In 1913, Cushing relocated to Harvard as the surgeon-in-chief at the new Peter Bent Brigham Hospital. Cushing continued to operate on several hundred patients a year with remarkable results.  In addition he was relentless in his recording of patient histories and continued his careful attention to the details and documentation of each surgery. In 1932 Harvey Cushing retired and in 1933 he agreed to join the staff at Yale University, his alma mater, as the Sterling Professor of Medicine in Neurology.  Cushing died in 1939. The negatives are undergoing rehousing and digitization, and will be made available for research through the Cushing Center database, which brings multiple parts of Harvey Cushing's work together in one place.  The database, still in development, will allow researchers to explore Cushing's medical work and patients.  Please contact Terry Dagradi, Cushing Center Coordinator, for details.  

Secret Miracles of Nature

December 12, 2013 - 9:41pm by Melissa Grafe

We have a secret!  Blog post on an item in the Books of Secrets exhibit, by student curator Nell Meosky    Levinus Lemnius (1505-1568) was a Dutch physician who served the community of Manhuissatraat for nearly fourty years, traveled throughout Western Europe, and was highly regarded for his work during epidemics in 1529, 1532, and 1537.[1] Late in life and after his wife’s death, Lemnius went to seminary and became a priest, a transition which informs much of his most well-known book, De Occultis Naturae, which was first published in 1564. [2]Nearly a century after Lemnius’s death, De Occultis Naturae (literally, “The Hidden Nature”) was translated into English by an unknown translator, and given the title The Secret Miracles of Nature.[3]  Later, the work would be combined with a German manual on midwifery to produce Aristotle’s Masterpieces. Upon first glance, The Secret Miracles of Nature is an imposing book, much larger than other books of secrets of its day at approximately 11” by 7”. This is likely a sign that the printer was able to invest significantly in creating an impressive image for the book, supported by the robustness of the paper and binding that were used to construct it. Thanks to the reputation of Lemnius, who is described on the title page as “that great physician” and is acknowledged by scholars as well-respected, the printer was probably able to expect good sales of the book to higher class readers. The size of the book allows for more generous margins, which a reader could use to take notes on the recipes recorded within. The font of the text is somewhat larger than that of contemporary books of secrets, but not to scale with the size of the book, creating a formidable amount of reading to be done to reach the end of its 300-some pages. It does not appear, though, that the book was necessarily meant to be read from cover to cover in one setting, as it is made of up discrete recipes. The cover is worn and the edges of the pages, particularly at the very front and back of the book, appear almost charred, very brittle and dark. This suggests that the book was in fact used frequently, and the uneven staining of the pages hints that some of the sections may have been used more often than others. Although no readers’ names are recorded in the book, it seems to have been last owned by an individual around 1911, 250 years after its debut. Lemnius (or the translator) organized the volume into four discrete books: the soul and its immortality; plants and living creatures; diseases, their symptoms and cures; and other rarities. There is also a “bonus book” at the end, containing rules for how a man should lead his life. This book is particularly interesting because of Lemnius’s late-life career as a priest, and it begs the question of whether the four books were penned previously, with the fifth being added once Lemnius completed seminary. Within these books are many chapters, which are named quite descriptively and leave little room to imagine what is discussed on the pages indicated. This organization, and the abstract-like titles of chapters, makes it very easy to find the particular question that you are looking for an answer to – in fact, the titles could serve as something of an executive summary for those who do not wish to read the entire text. However, despite the clear organization of the books in their titles, their content overlaps. In book 1 (on the immortality of the soul), chapter V, Lemnius writes “of the strange longing of women with child, and their insatiable desire of things; And if they cannot get them they are in danger of life.” This chapter, while tangentially related to the soul because of the generation of a new soul through pregnancy, does not seem to quite fit the theme of the rest of the chapters of that book. However, after paging through the rest of the chapter, a logical flow begins to emerge: Lemnius begins with relationships between men and women, then to pregnancy and determination of gender (…the chapter on driving pests away from corn not withstanding). In content, The Secret Miracles of Nature is highly comprehensive, blending natural knowledge with philosophy.The language of the forward is difficult and arcane, but the language of the chapters is often easy to follow and engaging, and Lemnius addresses the book to “those that practice physic, and all others that desire to search into the hidden secrets of NATURE for the increase of Knowledge.” Lemnius often makes references to Hippocrates when explaining his medical decisions, and in book 2 includes disease knowledge from the rare and mystical to the most mundane: on physical phenomena, unnatural vs. natural death, the virulence of epidemics, and drunkenness. These medical portions are interesting in their blending of observation and experience with belief and religious texts; for example, on pg. 108 in Book II Chapter X: Every filthy smell is not hurtfull to Man, Lemnius observes of smells that “for some of these will difusse contagions, and resist corrupt diseases. By the way, whence came the Proverb, that horns are burnt there.” Lemnius was an author of great medical and spiritual prowess, and does not shy away from sharing his wisdom of both kinds in this, his greatest work. [1]PC Molhysen and PJ Block,New Netherland biographical dictionary. Part 8. AW Sijthoff, Leiden 1930. Accessed Oct 27, 2013 https://www.dbnl.org/tekst/molh003nieu08_01/molh003nieu08_01_1789.php 2 Charlotte F. Otten, Hamlet and the Secret Miracles of Nature. Notes and Queries (1994) 41 (1):38-41. https://academic.oup.com/nq/article-abstract/41/1/38/4593545 [3] Ibid.  

Delightful Delusions: A reflection on Jan Van de Velde’s “The Quack: Populus vult decipi” (1615-1641)

December 5, 2013 - 9:57pm by Melissa Grafe

 We have a secret!  Blog post on an item in the Books of Secrets exhibit, by student curator Jarrell Ng          Something that has both puzzled and fascinated me throughout this course is how the professors of secrets and their books became so authoritative even though many of their recipes were fantastical, and probably never worked. The charlatans especially - as depicted in Jan van de Velde’s print “The Quack: Populus vult decipi” (1603-1641) - were blatant in their fraudulence, performing songs, comedy and cheap carnival tricks to attract crowds, “appropria[ting] recipes from earlier books of secrets”[1], and of course fabricating secrets of their own. How could people have been so enthralled by such falsities, and why was such a market of lies so sustainable?            A common narrative advanced is that the theatricality of their displays - “the mountebanks put on a slapstick comedy, using the characters, devices and gigs of what would later be called the commedia dell’arte”[2] - made the ciarlatania beloved source of entertainment for European publics. Sure, this may account for their popularity, but it fails to explain why people took the further step of actually spending moneyto purchase their phony remedies. Van de Velde’s print seems to acknowledge this; it de-emphasizes the theatricality of the charlatan’s display - he stands back with his arms on his waist, allowing his nostrums to speak for themselves - subtly hinting at the possibility that people were actually drawn to the mountebank’s secrets themselves, and not just beguiled by his diversions.            Perhaps then, those who purchased these false secrets were simply gullible; naive or desperate enough to be convinced of their authenticity. Yet, given the farcical methods that charlatans used to ‘prove’ their remedies, to merely conclude that all their customers were foolish seems unsatisfying. Even the professors of secrets, who made a more deliberate effort to establish legitimacy than the ciaralatani- and were therefore less obviously unreliable - should, conceivably, have lost their credibility once people tested out the recipes in their books and discovered that many were ineffective. Thus, unless one believes that European publics at the time were truly that half-witted, gullibility offers a painfully inadequate explanation for why commercialized secrets sustained such popularity; as we know, no less than 104 editions of Alessio Piemontese’s work were published from 1555 to 1699.            Van de Velde’s simple yet sophisticated proposition however, that people want to be deceived (populus vult decipi),is very compelling. As we know, the invention of print did not result in the universalspread of knowledge, or a complete shift away from esotericism. Many constituencies still jealously guarded their secrets from ‘vulgar’, common folk - the Church for instance fought to maintain control of occult forces, while alchemists used decknamenand allegory to obscure the truth of their ‘divine revelations’. Thus, when the professors of secrets published their discoveries in step-by-step recipes within inexpensive books, and the charlatans sold magical remedies in the piazza at affordable prices, they gave the masses a sense of empowerment that went above and beyond the actual utility of the secrets traded. The effectiveness of the recipes or potions was ultimately of little consequence, because what customers in the marketplace were searching for were perhaps not pharmaceutical, alchemical or agricultural recipes per se, but the delightful delusion that it was within their reach to manipulate Nature and control the world around them. The spread of cheap, tradable secrets took power away from traditional authorities such as the Church, and gave those deemed unworthy of such higher pursuits the opportunity to partake in the fashionable hunt for the secrets of nature - the ‘swines’ now had access to the ‘pearls’, and the powerful symbolism of this transition made the question of the pearls’ authenticity largely inconsequential.            There is something thoroughly romantic about this narrative - certainly much more romantic than the suggestion that people were simply too stupid to realize they were being deceived - and it is perhaps the same romanticism that drives our enduring obsession with the books of secrets today.[1]Eamon, W. (1994). Science and the Secrets of Nature: Books of Secrets in Medieval and Early Modern Culture. Princeton University Press. p.243.[2]Ibid., p.238.

A Vietnam War Surgeon Writes Home

June 17, 2013 - 11:41am by Melissa Grafe

The Kristaps J. Keggi Vietnam War service collection, recently donated to the Historical Medical Library, contains the complete correspondence between Dr. Kristaps J. Keggi and his wife, Julie, during his time as a surgeon in the Vietnam War. The materials were all donated by Dr. Keggi, the current Elihu Professor in Orthopedics at Yale School of Medicine. The scope of the collection—personal letters, photographs, teaching materials and war wound images- presents a unique and comprehensive look into the life of a war surgeon. Letters detail stories of MASH (Mobile Army Surgical Hospital), Montagnards plagued with leprosy, ceremonies with local tribes, a visit from a Playboy bunny and, of course, the extensive surgeries performed in a combat zone. A sample of photographs and letters are on display at the Historical Library.  
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