There is no particular class of wounds, injuries, or diseases, for which pensions are granted. It depends not so much upon the wound, injury, or disease itself, as upon the disabled condition arising therefrom. A soldier may have been sunstruck and now be troubled with vertigo, heart disease, or nervous debility, or contracted rheumatism, lumbago, neuralgia, camp diarrhea or a cold which has developed into a serious throat or lung trouble; his confinement as a prisoner-of-war may have developed scurvy with its attendant horrors; indeed, his army service may have been the direct or indirect cause of almost any known disease. He may have become ruptured (or "breached") from overstraining; or incurred varicose veins from long and rapid marches; or become partially or entirely deaf; or he may have been wounded, or lost a finger or other member, or received other injuries, either external or internal. In short, it may be said that anything in the nature of a wound, injury, or disease, which impairs a man's usefulness as a member of society, or materially disables him for the performance of manual labor, entitles him to a pension under the law. The disability arising therefrom may be slight, and yet a rating can be had.]]> Harvard Medical Library Rare Books Collection (P.5619). View the online catalog record.

]]> View the online catalog record for the Zabdiel Boylston Adams papers.

]]> View the online catalog record.

]]> ]]> Late in life, he published a memoir of his experiences with particular attention to medical care and diseases of soldiers during the Civil War. Johnson himself was troubled with chronic diarrhea over a six-year period and here describes some of the similar afflictions suffered by his comrades.]]> View the online catalog record.

]]> View the online catalog record.

]]> View a digitized version of another edition of this work.

]]> View the online catalog record.

]]> View the online catalog record for the author's papers.

]]> View the online catalog record.

]]> ]]> "As we were standing there, a shell came through one man and then exploded, taking my right arm off, and killing four of my comrades, making five lives destroyed and one wounded. I never expected to get home or even off the field, but I was bound to do all I could... I was at this time one mile from any surgical assistance, and walked that distance, while the blood was fast leaving me, notwithstanding I had bandaged the arm as tight as possible.... I was so weak as to be unable to walk, or hardly stand.... I had not long to wait before the surgeon came along, and at my earnest request, I was taken to the amputating room and placed on the table. This is the last that I remember until my arm was amputated. After I had fully come to my senses, I was conducted back to my bed on the ground, and there I remained during the night with my bloody clothes on."]]>
The cover of this poem states, "The author of this book lost his arm in the discharge of his duties as Machinist on board the Demaly while conveying troops from Galloup's Island to City Point, Va."]]> View the online catalog record.

]]> ]]> View the online catalog record.

View the complete work online at the Internet Archive.

]]> View the online catalog record.

]]>
"Your committee, therefore, are constrained to say that they can hardly avoid the conclusion, expressed by so many of our released soldiers, that the inhuman practices herein referred to are the result of a determination on the part of the rebel authorities to reduce our soldiers in their power, by privation of food and clothing, and by exposure, to such a condition that those who may survive shall never recover so as to be able to render any effective service in the field."]]> View the online catalog record.

]]> Phrenology, or the Doctrine of the Mental Phenomena (Boston: Marsh, Capen and Lyon, 1834) and was issued for his popular course of lectures at the Boston Athenaeum during the fall of 1832. The Boston Medical and Surgical Journal reported, “Among the constant attendants on this course are our most distinguished physicians, lawyers and divines … and although we cannot say how many of these are convinced of the correctness of Dr. Spurzheim’s peculiar science, most are persuaded that there is more truth in it than they had before suspected, and none can fail to be forcibly and favorably impressed with his ideas of education and of intellectual philosophy.” A subsequent course of lectures in Cambridge was never completed due to Spurzheim’s death on November 11th. Samuel Wells presented this ticket to the Boston Society of Natural History. The seal on the ticket reads “Res non verba quaero” [I seek deeds, not words.]]]> catalog record]]> The Illustrated Self-Instructor as both a popular handbook to phrenology and an advertising tool—the opening pages of each volume were used to record character assessments, such as this one for G. A. Hook, given by O. S. Fowler in 1854. Individual faculties were rated on a scale of 1 to 7; traits on the lower end were ripe for development while those on the higher end could be repressed. The Illustrated Self-Instructor went through over twenty editions, the last appearing in 1918. In 1895, L. N. Fowler stated that over 100,000 copies of the work had been sold.]]> The Illustrated Self-Instructor written by Orson Squire Fowler and Lorenzo Niles Fowler, including indication of a character assessment of G. A. Hook by O. S. Fowler]]> “That is, with questions bearing on what is termed in Greek, eugenes, namely, good in stock, hereditarily endowed with noble qualities. This, and the allied words, eugeneia, etc., are equally applicable to men, brutes, and plants. We greatly want a brief word to express the science of improving stock, which is by no means confined to questions of judicious mating, but which, especially in the case of man, takes cognisance of all influences that tend in however remote a degree to give to the more suitable races or strains of blood a better chance of prevailing speedily over the less suitable than they otherwise would have had. The word eugenics would sufficiently express the idea.”]]> Inquiries into human faculty and its development]]> ]]> ]]> ]]> here through the Medical Heritage Library]]> ]]> ]]> “if the laws of heredity that are known to hold in the case of animals also apply to man, the intermarriage of congenital deaf-mutes through a number of successive generations should result in the formation of a deaf-mute variety of the human race…. The indications are that the congenital deaf-mutes of the country are increasing at a greater rate than the population at large; and the deaf-mute children of deaf-mutes at a greater rate than the congenital deaf-mute population.”Bell went on the speculate about the possibility of legislation to forbid the intermarriage of deaf-mutes but favored determining the causes of intermarriage and discouraging or removing them.

Bell presented his findings to the National Academy of Sciences on November 13, 1883, and his work was subsequently printed as part of the Academy’s Memoirs series. This copy of Bell’s Memoir formerly belonged to Dr. Henry Pickering Bowditch.

]]> Memoir upon the formation of a deaf variety of the human race]]> here through the Medical Heritage Library]]> Eugenical news started in 1916 and was, at various times, the official organ of the Eugenics Research Association and then the American Eugenics Society. Appearing monthly, the Eugenical newswas published by the Eugenics Record Office at this period and includes articles on the heredity of historical figures as well as items of news related to the eugenics movement, birth control and birth rate, and immigration and sterilization laws and other legislation.

The Eugenical news later became the Eugenics quarterly and appears now as the journal Biodemography and social biology.

]]> Eugenical News, volume 3, number 5 (May, 1918)]]> here through the Medical Heritage Library]]> The eugenics review first appeared in 1909 and was published continuously until this, its final volume under that title. In 1969, the publication was reformulated as the Journal of biosocial science and continues today. As part of the change, the Society encapsulated the rise and fall of the eugenics movement by stating that “the initial drive behind it, as behind the Society, came from those concerned with social evils, rather than with human biology. This orientation was understandable in the context of 1909 when social evils were obvious to all but knowledge of human genetics was rudimentary and human cytogenetics was unknown. The overall result was that in those early days the eugenic ideals of the few vastly outran knowledge and both outran the motivation of the many.”]]> The Eugenics Review]]> here]]> the Reactivation of the Dight Institute 1947-1949, in the Dight Institute Bulletin, no. 6 (1949)]]> Bulletin : Dight Institute of the University of Minnesota 1942-1951, no. 6, 1949]]> Bulletin no. 1 of the Dight Institute]]> Bulletin : Dight Institute of the University of Minnesota 1942-1951, no. 1, 1943]]> Ballou’s pictorial for June 20th and depicts the finish of a race of club boats on the Charles at Western Avenue a few days earlier. Holmes “who is very partial to this manly exercise” is shown rowing in the lower left-hand corner.]]> Ballou's pictorial showing a boat race on the Charles]]> here. Ballou's pictorial, 1857 June 20]]> “My three months’ experience of the Health Lift has been entirely satisfactory. It furnishes a concentrated form of exercise which I have found salutary, agreeable and exhilarating. It calls the blood into the muscles and leaves them ready for further action, so that I have found myself more disposed to take a long walk after four or five lifts than before. I may add that the particular apparatus used at your rooms, ‘The Reactionary Lifter,’ is a most ingenious, convenient, compact and serviceable arrangement, by which the lifter’s own weight is made to do service, and by an easy and simple adjustment of leverage, to furnish a resistance to be overcome, all the way from 20 to 1000 pounds and more.”]]> ]]> “skilled to dissect with both.” Dr. Fordyce Barker, president of the New York Academy of Medicine, was the honorary chairman of the event, and notable figures among the two hundred guests included Drs. Alonzo Clark, S. Weir Mitchell, Austin Flint, John Shaw Billings, Henry Jacob Bigelow, Samuel D. Gross, and William Pepper. In response to the toasts and speeches, Holmes delivered a 2,000 word poem.]]> “The transitions from the grave to gay were very happy, and kept the audience in a state of alternate gravity and mirth. The imagery and descriptive portions of the poem—particularly those relating to rural scenes—were exceedingly beautiful and poetical, and I am confident, if it should be given to the public, that it will be pronounced one of the most beautiful metrical performances that has ever emanated from the pen of an American writer.”]]> “The bedside is always the true center of medical teaching. Certain branches must be taught in the lecture-room, and will necessarily involve a good deal that is not directly useful to the future practitioner. But the over ambitious and active student must not be led away by the seduction of knowledge for its own sake from his principal pursuit. The humble beginner, who is alarmed at the vast fields of knowledge opened to him, may be encouraged by the assurance that with a very slender provision of science, in distinction from practical skill, he may be a useful and acceptable member of the profession to which the health of the community is entrusted.”]]> Teaching from the chair and at the bedside : an introductory lecture delivered before the Medical Class of Harvard University, November 6, 1867]]> “I have more fully learned at least three principles since I have been in Paris: not to take authority when I can have facts; not to guess when I can know; not to think a man must take physic because he is sick …. Many a long and wearying hour I have passed on the stone floor of the autopsy-room at La Pitié, wasting my time over little points which, a few years later, would have been easily settled by the microscope …. As for the science of England and France, or rather Paris and London—to judge by their books and their students, and the reports of the intelligent young men who have seen both, the Frenchmen have half a century in advance.”]]> to the Library of Harvard Medical School, 1956
]]> Memoranda of patients and cases treated]]> to the Library of Harvard Medical School, 1956
]]> “He can tell you much that is interesting. Do not mind his apparent frivolity and you will soon find that he is intelligent and well-informed. He has the true zeal."

Two volumes of Holmes’ notes on Jackson’s lectures have survived. Here, on November 15, 1832, Jackson comments on the fever and death of phrenologist Johann Gaspar Spurzheim, who had been lecturing in Boston and died five days earlier. Jackson had attended Spurzheim at his death, and John Collins Warren performed the autopsy.

]]> Lectures on the theory and practice of medicine ]]> to the Library of Harvard Medical School, 1956
]]> "not by ridicule, but by argument; perhaps with great freedom, but with good temper and in peaceable language; with very little hope of reclaiming converts, with no desire of making enemies, but with a firm belief that its pretensions and assertions cannot stand before a single hour of calm investigation," the lecture ignited a war of words in newspapers and pamphlets.]]> Homœópathy, and its kindred delusions by Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-1894)]]> ]]> “Whatever we may think of Dr. Stafford’s practice, it is not certain that his patients would all have done better under the treatment of the present day. Some differences there would certainly be in our favor…. But slight cases of disease would commonly get well under his treatment, and severe ones often die under ours…. Though some of his prescriptions may cause us to smile or shudder, it would be well if a physician of our time, whose prescriptions should be exhumed in the year 2080, were able to stand the examination of posterity as creditably as the very respectable Dr. Stafford.”]]> Medical directions written for Governor Winthrop by Edward Stafford, of London, in 1643, with notes by Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-1894)]]> ]]> “How far are the external means of exploring the condition of internal organs to be considered useful and important in medical practice?”The essay makes frequent reference to the lectures and clinical demonstrations of P. C. A. Louis which Holmes had recently attended in Paris. This copy was presented by Holmes to his mentor, Dr. James Jackson (1777-1867).

Holmes was also awarded two Boylston Prizes in 1837 for separate essays on neuralgia and intermittent fever in New England.

]]> to the Library of Harvard Medical School, 1956]]> “skilled to dissect with both.” Dr. Fordyce Barker, president of the New York Academy of Medicine, was the honorary chairman of the event, and notable figures among the two hundred guests included Drs. Alonzo Clark, S. Weir Mitchell, Austin Flint, John Shaw Billings, Henry Jacob Bigelow, Samuel D. Gross, and William Pepper. In response to the toasts and speeches, Holmes delivered a 2,000 word poem.]]> Hay Fever]]> ]]> ]]> Breathing machine (Experiments conducted), 26 September 1927 to 16 December 1928]]> ]]> catalog record]]> catalog record]]> catalog record.]]> and deposited with the Harvard Medical Library, 1941]]> The Mirror, describing the Dental Museum]]> "He must also deposit with the Dean, to be placed in the Museum of the college, a specimen of mechanical Dentistry or of practical and pathological anatomy, prepared during his course of instruction." This qualification remained in effect through the 1901-02 academic year.]]> Here among the entries for items of mechanical dentistry are specimens 1562 and 1565]]> ]]> The Mirror.]]> "solatium afflictis" translates as "relief to the distressed."]]> A Treatise on the Management of the Teeth]]> The Mirror, the yearbook of the Dental School, and Richard Locke Hapgood's published History of the Harvard Dental School (1930). This photograph is from the 1928 edition of The Mirror.

Just visible in the foreground in the right-hand photograph is the student piece of Dr. Frederic Augustus Merrill of the Class of 1874.

]]> to the Harvard Dental School, 1894
]]> to the Harvard Dental School, 1894]]> A Discourse upon the Institution of Medical Schools in America]]> After summarizing the history of his subject, Dr. Warren then justifies dissection as an essential component to anatomical study: “At the first view of dissections, the stomach is apt to turn, but custom wears off such impressions. It is anatomy that directs the knife in the hand of a skilful surgeon, & shews him where he may perform any necessary operation with safety to the patient. It is this which enables the physician to form an accurate knowledge of diseases & open dead bodies with grace, to discover the cause or seat of the disease, & the alteration it may have made in the several parts.”

]]> View the complete work online through the Harvard University Library.

]]> Mémoires, although written at the end of his life and not published until 1873, contains the earliest account of a student’s experiences at Harvard Medical School and remains a seminal historical document of the institution during its first years.]]> Mémoires]]> Act to Protect the Sepulchres of the Dead by the Massachusetts Legislature and so legalized dissection of human bodies for anatomical study. Dr. John Collins Warren, stressing the essential importance of dissection, stated, “Some may perhaps believe that books, and plates, and wax figures convey adequate notions of the human structure. This is an opinion natural enough, but entirely erroneous…. It is probable that a single square inch of the human body contains more parts distinctly organized, than could be represented by all the wax figures which ingenuity has ever contrived.” This copy belonged to Dr. John Collins Warren.]]> Text Book of a Course of Lectures on the Theory and Practice of Physicin 1825.

This copy of the Syllabus is interleaved with the manuscript notes of Sumner Cummings (1800-1848), who studied medicine at Harvard during the winter of 1821.

]]> A Syllabus of the Lectures Delivered at the Massachusetts Medical College to the Medical Students of Harvard University with an adjacent interleaved page of manuscript notes by student Sumner Cummings]]> The issue of admitting women to Harvard Medical School continued to provoke controversy until June 5, 1944, when the Harvard Corporation voted to admit women to the Medical School in the fall of 1945.

]]> “… if [a student] could pass a ridiculously easy examination … he got his degree of Doctor of Medicine. With this necessarily general groundwork of knowledge, and without any proper clinical or special training, he went out into the world, either to make himself by observation, reading and natural shrewdness the really excellent, practical family physician, such as nearly every village in America may boast of, or to remain through life a very ignorant and cheap doctor.”

White called for a general full year of medical instruction, an array of examinations, and an increase in the number of faculty members. Harvard, by incorporating the summer courses of the Tremont Street Medical School in 1858, had already provided for an increase in the length of the curriculum, had instituted more rigorous exams during the Civil War, and, as White announces in this article, had just created a chair in comparative anatomy and made assistant and adjunct appointments in physiology and surgery.

]]> The Boston Medical and Surgical Journal, v. 74 (1866)]]> “An analysis of the list of those who attended lectures last year shows that of 276 students but 62 had received a previous collegiate education… We may conclude then that such a reform would inevitably be followed by the immediate loss of two thirds of its present number of students, by an equivalent crippling of its material resources, and the sacrifice of the prestige of a large school.”]]> The Boston Medical and Surgical Journal, v. 83 (1870)]]> This schedule from the 1881-1882 academic session outlines a student’s typical week as well as the curriculum and course of instruction.

]]>

]]> "…of ample dimensions, and well warmed and ventilated throughout. It contains, on the second floor, two large Lecture rooms, the Chemical Laboratory, and the Library. On the floor above are the Theatre, in which the Lectures on Anatomy, Surgery and Pathological Anatomy, are delivered, the Professors' and Demonstrators' rooms…. The ground floor is occupied by the Janitor's apartments, rooms attached to the laboratory, etc. The Dissecting Room is a separate hall attached to the main building."

The North Grove Street building also provided accommodation for the institution's newest educational asset—the Warren Anatomical Museum.

]]> Harvard & its surroundings by Moses King, 1878.]]> This trial transcript with drawings of the facility give some idea of the small size of Harvard Medical School at this time. The plan of Dr. Webster’s laboratory shows the locations of the tea-chest, furnace, and privy where the remains of George Parkman were discovered.

]]> The Parkman Murder : Trial of Prof. John W. Webster for the Murder of Dr. George Parkman]]> ]]> “… intended to serve primarily as a laboratory of research, and secondarily as an adjunct to the lectures on physiology in the preparation of suitable apparatus and experiments”) was one of five new laboratory spaces for students in the facility. This description of the Physiological Laboratory and its equipment was originally published in Science.]]>

]]> This trial transcript with drawings of the facility give some idea of the small size of Harvard Medical School at this time. The plan of Dr. Webster’s laboratory shows the locations of the tea-chest, furnace, and privy where the remains of George Parkman were discovered.

]]> Trial of Professor John W. Webster for the Murder of Doctor George Parkman]]> The title-page of this copy of An Inquiry bears a presentation inscription by Edward Jenner to the Reverend John Clinch.

]]> An Inquiry into the Causes and Effects of the Variolae Vaccinae]]> Medical Repository, volume 2, number 2, 1798]]> ]]> In this letter, addressed to Massachusetts Congressman Edward Everett (1794-1865), Waterhouse outlines his experience with vaccination and concludes with this: "Whereas you have a very expensive dept. for destroying human life, would it not be for the honour of the New World to have a little national establishment for the preservation of human life; more especially as the devouring monster, small pox, has a lready destroyed many millions (some say 40) more lives than there are people now on the face of the earth."

]]> In the footnote on page 16, Waterhouse describes the procedure he has developed for vaccination.

]]> A Prospect of Exterminating the Small Pox, Part II, describing the procedure for vaccination]]> Benjamin Waterhouse contributed this statement on his work to the publication.

]]> and transferred to the Harvard Medical Library
]]> The Origin of the Vaccine Inoculation (London : printed by D. N. Shury, 1801). The Origin was Edward Jenner's attempt to prove his claim to the priority of cowpox inoculation. He concludes the treatise with the words "An hundred thousand persons, upon the smallest computation, have been inoculated in these realms. The numbers who have partaken of its benefits throughout Europe and other parts of the Globe are incalculable: and it now becomes too manifest to admit of controversy, that the annihilation of the Small Pox, the most dreadful scourge of the human species, must be the final result of this practice."]]> The Origin of the Vaccine Inoculation by Edward Jenner]]> Radcliffe Quarterly]]> Radcliffe Quarterly, June 1972. Available online here.]]> Harvard Gazette, January 18, 2001]]> Harvard University Gazette, 2001 January 18, found here]]> Materia Materia medica Americana potissimum regni vegetabilis by Johann David Schopf]]>