Hardin News

Fear and dread are no strangers to the Libraries, especially during finals week, as students fight the demons of procrastination, sleep deprivation, and over-caffeination. But this Halloween, we’re kicking it up a notch from fear to terror.

Drop by Main Library on Halloween for our “Ghosts From the Stacks” event, where library staff will draw from Special Collections, Iowa Women’s Archives and the John Martin Rare Book Room to presents artifacts related to grave-robbing, local hauntings, and demon conjuring. Also we will serve cookies.

Ghosts From the Stacks
Main Library, room 2032
Wednesday, Oct. 31, noon - 1:00 pm

The public is invited to a University of Iowa History of Medicine talk on “Poisoning on the Prairie: Abraham Lincoln, Nancy Hanks Lincoln and Milk Sickness” at 5:30 p.m. Tuesday, October 23, in Room 401 of the UI Hardin Library for the Health Sciences.

The speaker will be Edmund A. Franken, Jr., Professor Emeritus, Division of Diagnostic Radiology.

Light refreshments will be served. The lecture is part of a series of presentations sponsored by the UI History of Medicine Society.

Franken will discuss the epidemic of milk sickness that swept the wilderness of Southern Indiana shortly after seven-year-old Abraham Lincoln and his family moved to the area. The disease was responsible for the death of Lincoln’s mother and several relatives. While pioneers presumed correctly that milk sickness was due to a poison, the medical community pursued other causes and inhibited the development of knowledge to prevent the disease. The puzzle was not completely solved until the 20th century. The presentation will also include information about the young Abe Lincoln and the role that the social environment of the area played in his development.

The companion lectures to “From Monks to Masters,” an exhibit now being held at the University of Iowa Museum of Art, have been scheduled for broadcast on UITV. One of the presentations by Ed Holtum, “Breaking with Galen,” provides a glimpse at anatomical knowledge and illustration from the era of the manuscript through the first century of printing. The lecture airs tonight at 7:00 and is scheduled for rebroadcast throughout the coming weeks. For a complete schedule of the broadcast lectures, consult the UITV schedule.

The Well-Equipped Surgeon’s Chest — Don’t Leave Home Without It 

Woodall, John (1570–1643). The Surgeons mate or military & domestique surgery. 2^nd edition, London, 1639.

The John Martin Rare Book Room recently acquired a 1639 copy of John Woodall’s, The Surgeon’s Mate, the second and greatly expanded version of the work first published in 1617. Intended as a tutorial for apprentice ship surgeons, the book was extremely popular as an authority in its time and brings to light first-hand medical care as practiced aboard sailing vessels in the early 17^th century. The first surgeon-general of the East India Company, Woodall was responsible for supplying each ship with a surgeon’s chest. This accompanying volume details the various ailments, medicines, and surgical techniques for dealing with the myriad of health problems and injuries faced by sailors, including gunshot, gangrene, amputation, ulcers, and fistulas. In the passage, below, Woodall advises the junior surgeon on how to prepare a patient for the ordeal of amputation, a procedure in all too frequent use on ships.

“If you be constrained to use your saw, let first your patient be well informed of the eminent danger of death by the use thereof; prescribe him no certaintie of life, and let the work be done with his owne free will, and request, and not otherwise. Let him prepare his soule as a ready sacrifice to the Lord by earnest prayers, craving mercie and helpe unfainedly: and forget thou not also they dutie in that kinde, to crave mercie and helpe from the Almightie, and that heartily. For it is no small presumption to dismember the image of God.” [spelling from original].

Woodall was one of the first to recommend lemon juice for preventing and treating scurvy, years before James Lind confirmed its efficacy in his Treatise on the Scurvy in 1753. Woodall’s organizational talents were well recognized during his lifetime as was his courage; he remained in London to treat victims of the 1603 and 1638 plague outbreaks during which he contracted and recovered from the disease twice. Our copy of this important work is in excellent condition and includes well preserved leaves illustrating the vast armaments of surgical tools necessary for the well-equipped ship’s surgeon.

An Anatomical Work of Uncommon Beauty

Bourgery, Marc Jean (1797-1849). Traité complet de l’anatomie de l’homme, comprenant la médecine opératoire. 8 vols. Paris, 1831-1854.

Paule Dumaitre in his Histoire de la médecine et du livre medical (Paris, 1978) commented that Bourgery’s work is considered today without question the most beautiful French work of anatomy published in 19th century. It is also without question one of the most beautifully illustrated anatomical and surgical treatises ever published in any language. The 726 hand-colored lithographs were executed after drawings by Nicolas Henri Jacob (1781-1871), a pupil of David. Jacob made his drawings from dissections and other anatomical preparations, some of which were prepared by Claude Bernard (see Heirs of Hippocrates No. 1792 ff.). One of the activities Bernard undertook in 1845, most likely to compensate for income lost when he resigned as Magendie’s student assistant, was to prepare dissections for Jacob. Although he is not recognized as a contributor, drawings made from some of his preparations appear in this first edition. Bourgery studied medicine at Paris where he interned under Laennec and Dupuytren and won gold medals for excellence from the Paris faculty of medicine and hospital administration. After ten years as health officer at Romilly, Bourgery returned to Paris to continue his career in anatomy and surgery. In addition to the present work he prepared an earlier illustrated anatomy and contributed a number of papers to the medical journals of his day. Bourgery divided his treatise into four parts which covered descriptive anatomy, surgical anatomy and techniques, general anatomy, and embryology and microscopic anatomy. Four volumes of the set are devoted to surgical anatomy and cover in detail nearly all the major operations that were performed during the first half of the nineteenth century. The University of Iowa Libraries’ copy lacks Planche 85 in Volume IV (lymphatics of the axilla).

Click here for more images of Bourgery’s Traité complet de l’anatomie de l’homme, comprenant la médecine opératoire

Heirs of Hippocrates Now Online

We are pleased to announce that the book catalog, “Heirs of Hippocrates” last published in 1990 (3^rd edition), is now available as an online database and offered to the public on the internet at no charge.

“Heirs” is an annotated bibliography of the historic books in the John Martin Rare Book Room and has become a source of authority for antiquarian book dealers, librarians, bibliographers, historians, and collectors from around the world.

This new product is the result of the labor of many individuals, most notably, Linda Roth, Hardin Library’s Web Producer (please see the About Heirs Online for further acknowledgements).

The online version is much more than the full text of the book; although it can be browsed, the content has been entered in the form of a database to allow for precision searching and quick recall.

We invite you to take a look at this new and important scholarly contribution to the history of medicine and printing.

http://www.lib.uiowa.edu/hardin/heirsonline

Extreme Makeovers From The Sixteenth Century

Tagliacozzi, Gaspare (1545-1599). De curtorum chirurgia per insitionem, libri due. Venice, 1597.

Although Tagliacozzi was not the first plastic surgeon (it had been practiced in India centuries earlier) he is usually credited as the first modern practitioner of the art. Loss of facial parts from dueling, street fights, and syphilis were common during the 16^th century. His work covers the anatomy of the nose and includes sections on the restoration of the nose, lips, and ears by means of autografting; it is replete with stunning engravings illustrating the techniques and instruments used in the various procedures. The popularity of the work caused it to be plagiarized almost immediately. However, Tagliacozzi’s work was opposed on religious grounds by such authorities as Paré and Fallopius and condemned by the church whose authorities exhumed his body and reburied it in unconsecrated ground.

Click here for additional images

Judging By Appearances

Porta, Giovanni Battista Della (1535?-1615).
De humana physiognomonia libri III. , Naples, 1586.

The practice of attempting to discern personality traits from physical appearance goes back to antiquity. In fact, it was Aristotle who coined the term, “physiognomy” to support his own writings and inclinations on the subject. Since that time and until quite recently, the notion that character and personality are somehow imprinted in facial features has received considerable attention through a variety of approaches, many of which have been used for such nefarious purposes as racial stereotyping and the outright support of bigotry and racial superiority.

Porta was a Neapolitan philosopher, inventor, botanist, and playwright whose range of interest appeared to have no bounds. His scientific work set him at odds with the church from time to time and many of his books were banned during his lifetime. Porta posited the belief that human qualities can be discovered by noting similarities between human and animal visages. The work is made especially intriguing by the numerous wood-cut illustrations that correlate animal and human facial features.

Click here for more images.

A Withering Glance at Foxglove

Withering, William (1741-1799). An Account of the foxglove, and some of its medical uses, Birmingham, 1785.

William Withering was a keen observer of plants and their medicinal uses and had already published a widely respected and comprehensive treatise on “Botanical Arrangement of all the vegetables” when this, his most famous work was printed. A graduate of the University of Edinburgh and later appointed an early physician to General Hospital, he noted the success of a complex herbal folk recipe in the treatment of “dropsy” (cardiac edema). Withering isolated the active component as the dried leaf of the foxglove (Digitalis purpura) which had been used indiscriminately (mostly as a diuretic) for centuries. It was Withering’s careful documentation and analysis of his many cases together with his instructions for preparation and dosage that introduced digitalis as a safe drug for a specific purpose. The book was written not only as a directive but as warning against the over-use of the drug which, of course, remains in use today. The exquisite hand-colored illustration of the foxglove plant included in this copy is in near mint condition.

Click here for a larger view of image

The Gravid Uterus

William Hunter (1718-1783). Anatomia uteri humani gravidi tabulis illustrate. . . the anatomy of the human gravid uterus exhibited in figures. John Baskerville, Birmingham, 1774.

William Hunter, born in Scotland, was a London physician and obstetrician whose principal interest was in anatomy. Upon becoming professor of anatomy of the Society of Navy Surgeons in 1746, Hunter initiated a series of lectures on anatomy, surgery, and obstetrics which became quite popular and well-attended. In 1768, he constructed an anatomical theater and museum on Great Windmill Street where many of the foremost surgeons and anatomists of the day, including his brother John, were trained. This stunning atlas, containing life-sized steel engravings of the gravid uterus is one of the most elegant and accurate anatomical works in existence. Hunter spent more than twenty-five years preparing the atlas, employed artists to prepare the engravings an enormous expense to himself, and entrusted the printing of the work to John Baskerville, the greatest English printer of the eighteenth century. Portions of the cadavers on which the dissection was made and upon which the engravings were based remain at the University of Glasgow Anatomy Museum where they may be viewed by the public. This important work may be viewed by visiting the John Martin Rare Book Room. In addition to the images displayed here, high resolution scans of all of the plates from this work can be found by consulting Historical Anatomies on the Web, from the History of Medicine Division of the National Library of Medicine.

[Above summary adopted from Heirs of Hippocrates]

For more information about the John Martin Rare Book Room please visit the Web site at http://www.lib.uiowa.edu/hardin/rbr/ or contact Ed Holtum, Assistant Director for Administrative Services and Special Collections, at 319/335-9154 or edwin-holtum@uiowa.edu.