Objects of Our Affliction
Jeffrey Reznick safeguards the nation's collection of rare (and strange) medical memorabilia
Civil war surgical cards (1860s), Army Medical Museum, Surgeon General's Office. These mounted photographs document Union army doctors' most interesting cases, and give a short description of the patient's case history: where he was wounded, course of treatment, results. The cards became medical records, used to determine the wounded men's pensions, as well as teaching and research aids. (Illustration, previous page) A hand-drawn arrow shows the trajectory of the bullet that passed through Private Ludwig Kohn.
Disease warning signs (1890-1960), US Public Health Departments. The history of public health can be found in handbills, public notices, warning signs, circulars, and pamphlets-relics of infectious-disease prevention campaigns that public health agencies used to encourage physicians to report cases, isolate the sick, and educate the healthy.
Hitler's X-ray (ca. 1945), Military Intelligence Service Center. Compiled by American military intelligence in the months after the German surrender, a report containing all of Hitler's available medical records (plus interrogations of several physicians who cared for the Führer) contained this x-ray of Hitler's nasal passages and teeth. The report was declassified by 1958; it supported the fact that Hitler was a hypochondriac who took dozens of "medications," including vitamins, stimulants, and hormones.
Malaria pinup Calendar (1945), Frank Mack, for the US Army. For American GIs in the South Pacific, malaria posed as dire a threat as enemy forces. Tens of thousands of men died, due in part to shortages of quinine, the only available treatment. But when a new antimalarial agent, Atabrine, was developed, soldiers were resistant to taking the pill, which had side effects. These calendars were part of a campaign by artist Frank Mack to reach homesick, bored soldiers, sailors, and marines, and convince them to take the bitter pill.
Laxative tablets card (ca. 1910), Elkhart, Indiana. These movable, die-cut novelty cards advertising Dr. Miles' Laxative Tablets were among many medical cards engraved with slogans and used by physicians, apothecaries, pharmacists, and dentists. The cards usually had attention-grabbing images on one side and the "hard sell" on the other.
White's manikin (1886), James T. White & Co. This life-sized physiological manikin, which cost $35, hung from a hook as a quick reference wall chart in a doctor's office or in a classroom as a teacher's aid to lectures on respiration, first aid, or nutrition. In full color, he showcased a healthy body's organs, nervous and circulatory systems, cross-sections of muscles and lungs. Some of the multiple flap openings showed diseases or deformations, such as "the effects of alcohol and narcotics on the human stomach," and "deformations of the female rib cage caused by corsetry." And although male, the manikin contained illustrations of both male and female reproductive organs.
Health and Hygiene puzzle blocks (1960-1966), Shanghai Toy Factory. The National Library of Medicine acquired more than 1,500 Chinese public health materials, mainly from the Communist era, including a set of eight-block puzzles. When put together, the pictures on the sides of each block make six scenes aimed at teaching hygienic behavior through the cycle of a day-a boy brushing his teeth and washing his face in a basin as the sun rises through a window; the boy and his siblings walking along a country road for exercise; the boy marching with friends, holding up a banner that says "exterminate" with drawings of a mosquito, fly, rat, and louse.
Conjoined twins drawings (1820—1840), The Museum of G. W. Klinkenberg. Two bodies, four arms, one head; two heads, one torso, four arms and legs. Such is the odd arithmetic of conjoined twins. In these drawings of cephalothoracopagus twins (above) and bicephalus twins (below), the nearly dance-like partnership of the twins is evident. "If only," comments writer Rosamond Purcell, "they had been able to pull away from each other, to become unstuck before birth."
Military hospital magazines (1918-1919), Camp Grant, Illinois; Camp Merritt, New Jersey. Between 1918 and 1919, at least fifty military hospitals produced official in-house magazines, written and illustrated by wounded soldiers and military staff who contributed articles, jokes, poems, cartoons, ward gossip, and other original materials. "Magazine work served to distract from bullet, shell, and bayonet wounds; influenza and other infectious diseases; gas exposure; gangrene; and shell shock," says Reznick.
The comprehensive book on medicine (ca. 11th century), Abu Bakr Muhammad ibn Zakariya' al-Razi. Known to Europeans as Rhazes, Abu Bakr Muhammad ibn Zakariya' al-Razi was among the most important and influential of all medieval Islamic physicians. His voluminous working files of readings and personal observations were assembled posthumously by his students in The Comprehensive Book on Medicine. The National Library of Medicine (NLM) has the oldest recorded copy of this treatise—or rather, part of the treatise, for the NLM manuscript contains only the section on gastrointestinal complaints.
Jeffrey Reznick 99PhD
Troy Pfister
Visiting the National Institutes of Health (NIH) headquarters in Bethesda, Maryland, ten miles north of downtown Washington, D. C., is a lot like walking across the grounds of an elite research university, albeit with upgraded security.
Red brick buildings open onto rolling lawns. Small groups of people wander by, intent on conversation—about the human genome project, one imagines. A brightly lit cafeteria serves strong black coffee.
Although the campus is bursting with labs and research space, it is anchored by a massive library with a stately facade and a fascinating history. The US National Library of Medicine began in 1836 as a shelf of books in the Office of the Surgeon General and evolved to become the largest biomedical library in the world, concurrently housing millions of physical items and serving electronic data to millions of online users around the world.
“My fantasy holiday,” writer Mary Roach, author of the books Stiff, Spoof, and Bonk, has said, “is a week spent locked in the archives of the National Library of Medicine.”
Located in Ford’s Theater during the decades after Lincoln’s assassination, then occupying a spot on the National Mall, the library’s historic holdings were moved to Cleveland, Ohio, for a time during World War II to protect them from a potential attack by Hitler’s Third Reich. Moving to the NIH campus in the 1960s, the National Library of Medicine now stores its rare and valuable holdings in two intersecting worlds: analog and digital.
National Library of Medicine
Much of its paper collection is being digitized, with an increasing portion of its current acquisitions “born digital”—from online journals to researchers’ blogs. The library is perhaps best known for its free PubMed database, which contains more than 22 million citations and abstracts of articles from the fields of biomedicine and health, with half a million more added each year.
Today, however, promises a tour of the tangible—from palmistry guides to Civil War surgical cards to the first published illustration of Watson and Crick’s double helix.
Jeff Reznick 99PhD, chief of the library’s History of Medicine division, serves as a steward of some of the medical library’s rarest, oldest, and yes, quirkiest items. As a social and cultural historian of medicine and war and the author of two books, John Galsworthy and Disabled Soldiers of the Great War (2009) and Healing the Nation: Soldiers and the Culture of Caregiving in Britain during the Great War (2005), Reznick is right at home.
“Welcome to the most beautiful building on campus,” announces Reznick, as he enters the spacious lobby of the library and heads to his book-lined office. “We’re not a lending library in the traditional sense, but a contemporary research institution that is home to an amazing historical collection as well as an extensive exhibition program.”
The collections contain medieval manuscripts, rare first editions, silent films, paintings, photographs, postcards, lantern slides, original drawings, hospital records, and laboratory notebooks—seventeen million artifacts that range from the famous to the obscure, the sublime to the repulsive.
Holdings date in era from ancient medical manuscripts to the proceedings of the latest AIDS conference, and the staff is constantly thinking about what will become historically significant in the future, which Reznick calls “prospective collecting.”
“We are always looking forward, even though people tend to think of libraries as retrospective,” says Reznick. “We are fortunate to have a modest budget that allows us to purchase rare and out-of-print materials. We also occasionally receive generous donations from individuals and other institutions, especially libraries that are downsizing and rethinking their collections and their physical spaces in the digital age.”
A selection of the library’s most captivating artifacts is highlighted in the newly published Hidden Treasure, edited by Reznick’s colleague and library historian Michael Sappol. The coffee-table book is filled with 450 vivid illustrations and essays. Within its pages are sketches of conjoined twins, Hitler’s x-rays, autopsy illustrations, midwife dolls, Darwin’s sketches, a grand atlas of skin diseases, public health warning cards, and malaria pinup calendars. Hidden Treasure (Blast Books, 2012) is available free as a downloadable e-copy, or as a hardbound book.
A review in The Lancet reads, “Each selection is truly intriguing and informative, reminding us that medicine is inherently connected to the human experience and all of its attendant complexities. As the images show, there are few, if any, areas of life that medicine does not affect.”
The book’s introduction, cowritten by Reznick, notes that “the occasion of the library’s 175th anniversary has provided us with an excuse to troll the collection, . . . which ranges in time from the eleventh century to the present and comes from nearly every region of the globe.
“These are things that are not entirely reducible to ‘information,’ that are only partly susceptible to digitization. They have a feel and texture and smell and color; they are strong or brittle, clean or dusty; they have been taken from place to place, bought or sold or bartered or stolen or issued or given away as gifts. They have been treasured or neglected, defaced or mended, added to or pruned back. Each object has lived a ‘social life,’ sometimes several lives.”
Emory Professor of English Benjamin Reiss, author of Theaters of Madness: Insane Asylums and Nineteenth-Century American Culture, says the library contains “an extraordinary collection and is underused as a scholarly resource.”
Reiss was invited to contribute an essay for Hidden Treasure on a set of magic lantern slides that were exhibited to mental patients in a nineteenth-century insane asylum. “The assignment led me on a really interesting historical detective mission, trying to figure out who made the slides, what the exhibits were like, and what role the exhibits played in the treatment of patients,” he says.
He found that many of the slides were part of patients’ “moral treatment,” meant to impress rational, orderly imagery—such as snowflakes—upon their minds, while others, such as a giant flea attacking a man in a chair, were for entertainment. “Given that many patients were delusional and/or medicated with dream-inducing opiates, one wonders about the wisdom of serving up these ready-made hallucinations, magnified to terrifying proportions,” Reiss writes.
Most of the items featured in the book—as well as thousands of other interesting, unusual, and irreplaceable curiosities—fall under the care of the History of Medicine Division, with its trained staff of historians, cataloguers, curators, librarians, and conservators.
The rarest and most fragile materials are kept in the Incunabula Room near Reznick’s office. It is that climate-controlled room—a bit chilly, smelling faintly of ancient parchment and old newspaper clippings—to which Reznick, and we, welcome you in our slideshow.
