HIDDEN 

TREASURE

The National Library of Medicine

“My fantasy holiday is a week spent locked in the archives of the National Library of Medicine, 

so you can imagine how excited I am about this book. It’s an incomparable treasure trove. 

I hugged it to my chest like a four-year-old with a new pair of shoes.” 

—Mary Roach, author of Stiff and Packing for Mars

“Opening this volume is like lifting up the lid of a treasure chest. The images and artifacts 

from the NLM’s historical coffers are intriguing, sometimes startling, unfailingly fascinating, 

and made all the more evocative by the authoritative, playful short reflections, many written 

by leading scholars in the history of medicine. Brilliantly conceived and beautifully produced, 

this is an amazing exploration of the visual and material cultures of health, medicine, and 

the body in their widest and most imaginative reaches.” 

—John Harley Warner, Chair of History of Medicine 

at the Yale University School of Medicine

Medicine / History

ISBN: 978-0-922233-42-7 

U.S. $50 Can. $54.95
Hidden Treasure

The National Library of Medicine
Hidden Treasure

The National Library of Medicine

e dit ed by

michael Sappol

d e sig ned by

laura lindgren

Photogr a phy by

Arne Svenson

national library of medicine bethesda, maryland

Blast Books  New york
CONTENTS

Foreword

Donald A. B. Lindberg, MD 7

Introduction

Michael J. North, Jeffrey S. Reznick, and Michael Sappol 8

Hidden Treasure

Commentaries on Aristotle’s De anima, Lambertus de Monte

Walton O. Schalick • 14

Epitome, Andreas Vesalius

Andrea Carlino • 18

Isagoge, Iohannitius

Luke Demaitre • 22

Artificial Teledioptric Eye, Johann Zahn

Paula Findlen • 26

Langenburg Manuscript, Walter von Nitzschwitz and others

Pia F. Cuneo • 30

Rare Plants of the Amsterdam Medical Garden, 

Jan Commelin and Caspar Commelin, with 

Frans Kiggelaer and Frederick Ruysch

Harold J. Cook • 34

Anatomy of the Human Body, Mans.u�r ibn Muh. ammad ibn Ah.mad ibn 

Yu�suf ibn Ilya�s

Emilie Savage-Smith • 36

Examples of Chinese Medicine, Andreas Cleyer

Bridie Andrews • 38

Anatomical Charts for the New Acupuncture, Tang Xuezheng

Bridie Andrews • 40

First: Science—Anatomy, “Clorion”

Michael Sappol and Eva Åhrén • 42

Complete Study of Human Anatomy, Jean-Baptiste Marc Bourgery

Melissa Lo • 44

Obstetric Tables, George Spratt

Marcia D. Nichols • 50

Nurse Postcards Collection

Anne Marie Rafferty • 52

International Nurse Uniform Photograph Collection, Helene Fuld 

Health Foundation

Anne Marie Rafferty • 54

Midwife Dolls

Sheena M. Morrison • 56

White’s Physiological Manikin, James T. White & Co.

Michael Sappol • 58

Sinhala Palm-Leaf Medical Manuscripts

Charles Hallisey • 60

China Illustrated, Athanasius Kircher

Timothy Billings • 64 

Charles Darwin Collection

Jonathan Smith • 68

Manners, Customs and Dresses of the Hindoos, Balthazar Solvyns

Sita Reddy • 72

Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa, Mungo Park

Charles W. J. Withers • 74

Su ̄tra of Great Liberation

Olaf Czaja • 76

Marvels of Things Created, Al-Qazwini

Sheila S. Blair and Jonathan M. Bloom • 78

Complete Notes on the Dissection of Cadavers, Shinnin Kawaguchi

Mami Hirose • 80

New Book on Anatomy, Johann Adam Kulmus and others

Shigehisa Kuriyama • 84

Anatomical Essay on the Movement of Blood, William Harvey

Jonathan Sawday • 86

Drawings of Arteries, Charles Bell

Ludmilla Jordanova • 88

Atlas of Topographic Anatomy, Eugène-Louis Doyen

Lisa O’Sullivan • 90

Palmistry Entertainment of Praetorius, Johann Praetorius with works 

by Robert Fludd, Nicolaus Pompeius, and Caspar Schott

Lauren Kassell • 94

On Human Conception and Generation, Jakob Rueff

Jennifer Spinks • 96

Monstra, G. W. Klinkenberg

Rosamond Purcell • 98

On the United Siamese Twins

James Taylor • 104

Facts Connected with James Carey, James Akin

Elizabeth Reis • 108

Symptoms in Schizophrenia, James D. Page

Mark S. Micale • 110

Clinical Collection on Dermatology and Syphilology,

Nikolai Porfir’evich Mansurov

Nikolai Krementsov • 112

One Hundred Case Histories of Falcadina Disease, Giuseppe Vallenzasca

Antony Shugaar • 116

Inquiry into Causes and Effects of Variolæ Vaccinæ, Edward Jenner

Ron Broglio • 120

Atlas of Skin Diseases, Ferdinand Hebra

Mechthild Fend • 122

Stereoscopic Skin Clinic, Selden Irwin Rainforth

Susan E. Lederer • 128

Stereoscopic Pictures for Cross-Eyed Children, Carl Hubert Sattler

Hannah Landecker • 130

Biomicroscopy of the Eye, Milton Lionel Berliner

Hannah Landecker • 132

Life and Education of Laura Dewey Bridgman, Mary Swift Lamson

Elisabeth Gitter • 134

Mayerle’s Lithographed International Test Chart, George Mayerle

Stephen P. Rice • 136

Experimental Surgery Drawings, William P. Didusch

Mark Kessell • 138

Atlas of Colored Plates, Elias Smith

Mary Cappello • 140

Mesmerism Scrapbooks, Theodosius Purland

Marianne Noble • 142

Dental Cartoons, Otto Elkan

Alyssa Picard • 146

Dental Hand Silhouette Gift Album, W. H. Whitslar

Mark Dery • 148

Marshall W. Nirenberg Papers

Paul Theerman • 152

Mechanics of the Human Walking Apparatus, Wilhelm Eduard Weber 

and Eduard Weber

Allison Muri • 154

Man and Sunlight, Hans Surén

Maren Möhring • 156

Rodney, Lucifer Guarnier

Kathy High and Michael Sappol • 158

Wonder in Us, Hanns Günther

Michael Sappol • 160

Health and Hygiene Puzzle Blocks, Number 10 Shanghai Toy Factory

Marta Hanson • 162

Huber the Tuber and Corky the Killer, Harry A. Wilmer

Steven Heller • 164

Chinese Anti-T B F lyers, National Anti-Tuberculosis Association 

of China

Liping Bu • 166

Chinese Public Health Slides

Marta Hanson • 168

Elementary Hygiene for the Tropics, Azel Ames

Elizabeth Fee • 170

Malaria Pinup Calendars, Frank Mack

Sport Murphy • 172

Commandments for Health, Hugh Harman Productions

Michael Rhode • 174

St. Elizabeths Magic Lantern Slide Collection

Benjamin Reiss • 176

Disease Warning Sign Collection

Charles Rosenberg • 178

Easy to Get, Army Pictorial Service

Mikita Brottman • 180

Civil War Surgical Card Collection

Shauna Devine • 182

Florence Nightingale Collection

Charles Rosenberg • 184

First Aid on the Battlefield, Johann Friedrich August von Esmarch

Mark Harrison • 186

Plastic Reconstruction of the Face

Zoe Beloff • 188

Mess Kit and Silver Chev’

Jeffrey S. Reznick • 190

Russo-Japanese War Photo Album

Alexander Bay • 192

Hitler as Seen by His Doctors, Military Intelligence Service Center

Barron H. Lerner • 194

Medical Report of Atomic Bombing in Hiroshima, Imperial Army 

Medical College and First Tokyo Military Hospital

Paul Theerman • 196

Anti–Germ Warfare Campaign Posters, Second People’s 

Cultural Institute

Liping Bu • 198

Selected Dictation of Curious Records, Ken Matsuzawa

Hiroo Yamagata • 200

Catalogue of Educational Material, American Society for the 

Control of Cancer

David Cantor • 202

Materia Medica Animalia, Peter P. Good

Harriet Ritvo • 204

Book of Receipts of All Sorts, Elizabeth Strachey

Mary E. Fissell • 206

Medical Trade Card Collection

William H. Helfand • 208

Scope Magazine, Will Burtin and Lester Beall

R. Roger Remington 210

Studies in the Nervous System, Axel Key and Gustaf Retzius

Eva Åhrén • 214

“Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids,” James D. Watson and 

Francis H. C. Crick

Nathaniel Comfort • 218

The X Ray, William J. Morton

Tal Golan • 220

The Doctors: A Satire in Four Seizures, Elbert Hubbard

Sander L. Gilman • 224

Dance of Death, Jacques-Antony Chovin

Claudia Stein • 226

Acknowledgments 228

Contributors 229

Index 236
7

The National Library of Medicine is now 175 years old. In 1836 it was a small collection of 

medical books on a single shelf in the Office of the Surgeon General of the Army. Today it is 

the world’s largest biomedical library, with over 17 million items in more than 150 languages. 

For the past fifty years—since NLM created the Medline computer-based system for online 

retrieval of medical writings—we have increasingly become known for our automated 

Internet services to millions of users worldwide. In addition to writings, the Library now 

holds and distributes toxicologic, chemical, and genomic facts and teachings, and now even 

clinical trials records! We are proud of all this.

In contrast, this volume takes us closer to the beginnings of librarianship. Here in 

the History of Medicine Division of NLM, books, manuscripts, pamphlets, and prints of all 

sorts reside happily but somewhat anonymously within quiet, dark underground shelves. 

My friend and colleague the computer scientist Ed Feigenbaum once playfully described 

the Old Times as the period “when the books in the library could not talk to each other.” In 

spite of all our efforts in artificial intelligence and computational linguistics, the books still 

need the help of a scholarly curator if they are to speak together—or to us. I am delighted 

that Dr. Michael Sappol has undertaken this effort and has recruited so talented a group of 

scholars for this task.

Lastly I take pleasure in echoing the enthusiasm for true, original, real books within our 

grasp, as Robert Darnton has said so well in The Case for Books. Here he notes that examination 

of multiple copies of the Shakespeare Folios is necessary because no two are alike. In science, 

too, speedy computer access to information is truly wonderful. Yet there are times —especially 

when we ask why or how a discovery or a belief arose—when we need to see and hold original 

intellectual works.

Dear Reader, please enjoy seeing and thinking about the Library’s hidden treasures!

Donald A. B. Lindberg, MD

Director, National Library of Medicine

foreword: T he National Library of Medicine at 175

The Army Medical Library (soon to be renamed the National Library of Medicine) as the tree of medical 

knowledge, with branches representing the major fields collected by the Library, ca. 1945. At the 

time, the Library was housed in a redbrick building on the National Mall, between the Capitol and the 

Washington Monument. 
introduction 9

In the past few decades libraries have been undergoing a transformation. According to Robert 

Darnton, the distinguished historian of print culture, in the 1950s, before the computer age, 

“knowledge came packaged between hard covers, and a great library seemed to contain all of 

it. To climb the steps of the New York Public Library, past the stone lions guarding its entrance 

and into the monumental reading room on the third floor, was to enter a world that included 

everything known. The knowledge came ordered into standard categories which could be 

pursued through a card catalog and into the pages of the books.” 

At the center of the university stood the library, Darnton continues, “the most important 

building, a temple set off by classical columns,” where students congregated and read in 

silence, “no noise, no food, no disturbances.” That is no longer the case today: “Reading 

rooms are nearly empty on some campuses. . . . To entice the students back, some librarians 

offer them armchairs for lounging and chatting, even drinks and snacks, never mind about 

the crumbs. Modern or postmodern students do most of their research at computers in 

their rooms.”

It’s no secret that nowadays we look for libraries on the Internet — without moving from 

our desks or laptops or mobile phones. And we find what we’re looking for through search 

engines, which can execute near-instantaneous computerized word searches within both 

catalogues and texts, more and more of which have been digitized and posted on the Web. 

We read more and more on computers or Kindles or paper printouts. If we write an article 

or student paper or make a PowerPoint presentation, it in turn is often enough posted on the 

Web, where it can be added to the “universal library,” which is not the collection of any one 

obsessed individual or any noble institution, but instead an aggregate, a library of libraries. 

Books, articles, paintings, sculptures—anything and everything seems to be reducible to 

digitized “information” that can be searched and packaged and repackaged and shared. 

We’re in a new and miraculous age. But there are still great libraries, in cities and on 

campuses, made of brick, sandstone, marble, and glass, containing physical objects, and 

especially enshrining the book: the Library of Congress, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, the 

British Library, the New York Public Library, the Wellcome Library, the great university libraries 

at Oxford, Harvard, Yale, Johns Hopkins, and elsewhere. And among them is the National 

Library of Medicine in Bethesda, the world’s largest medical library, with its collection of over 

17 million books, journals, manuscripts, prints, photographs, posters, motion pictures, sound 

recordings, and “ephemera” (pamphlets, matchbook covers, stereograph cards, etc.). 

The NLM was established, with only a shelf of books, in 1836 as the Library of the Surgeon 

General’s Office. In the late 1860s and ’70s director John Shaw Billings, in the aftermath of 

the carnage of the American Civil War, took on the immensely ambitious task of collecting 

all of the world’s medical knowledge in one place, and of collecting monuments and relics 

8

above, top: A handwritten subject card from the Library’s 

old card catalogue recalls the precomputer days when 

information had to be created, classified, and sorted by hand. 

above: The Library’s bindery, ca. 1960s.

above, top: “Medical men use the library reading room” is the 

caption on this unidentified photograph, ca. 1940, when the 

Army Medical Library was on the National Mall. 

above: View from behind a cataloging desk, ca. 1955.

of the history of medicine and the health professions from antiquity to the present. Billings 

and his colleagues and successors built the library (later renamed the Army Medical Library, 

the Armed Forces Medical Library, and then the National Library of Medicine) into a great 

collection—and expected that in doing so it would play a vital role in the treatment of patients 

and the understanding and cure of disease. 

The year 2011 marks the 175th anniversary of the National Library of Medicine. Today the 

Library is a global leader in information technology and distribution. It digitizes and digitally 

catalogues books and journals, develops databases and Internet “products,” funds and implements vitally important telemedicine and bioinformatics projects, such as the Visible Human 

Project, and provides health information to the public and the health professions through 

MedlinePlus, PubMed, and ClinicalTrials.Gov. Its electronic services deliver trillions of bytes 

of vitally important data, every day, to millions of people. Scientists, scholars, educators, health 

professionals, and the general public in the United States and around the world search the 

Library’s online resources, more than a billion times each year. 

What is less known is that the Library also has a rich and various collection of handwritten, printed, and manufactured “things”—material objects—which originated in 

particular times and places, made by particular persons, and which have multiple meanings 

and histories of their own. The Library’s mission has always been medical; it has always 

collected items of medical importance. But over the years, through happenstance or design, 

nonmedical items have also made their way into the collection. And some of what used to 

be vital medical material, even the cutting edge of medical knowledge, now seems more like 

precious evidence of something else, a resource for scholars tracing the history of medicine 

and health, but also the history of cities, race, factory production, sexuality, print technology, 

photography, feminism, motion pictures, the railroad, colonization, war, aesthetics, etc. 

So even though the Library, in its inception, was developed to be of use to the medical 

professions—and, in the last three decades or so, opened up to provide medical information 

to the global public—its collections pertain to nearly every aspect of human existence. They 

belong properly to everybody, not just those with particular medical interests.

In other words, the Library today—and its History of Medicine Division with its specially 

trained staff of historians, cataloguers, curators, and conservators—is the steward of a rich 

(and still growing) patrimony of historical objects. Primarily (but not exclusively), these are 

books and journals printed with ink on paper, with covers, bindings, illustrations, annotations, 

and marginalia, marked by former readers and by the Library staff itself. 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” (to use Arjun Appadurai’s memorable phrase), sometimes several lives.

As in any vast collection, the individual objects are buried in the sheer mass of things, 

even if they glow with a particular wisdom or beauty or oddness or grotesquery or wit or 

sadness or horror. Despite more than a century and a half of classification and cataloguing 

and interpretation, they are largely obscure to the public and may even be obscure to the 

Library’s cataloguers, librarians, curators, historians, and administrators. If we excavate them 

(and can figure out what to do with them), they once again speak to us, charm us, repulse us, 

amaze us, inform us, pleasure us. And teach us: even the most seemingly trivial or haphazard 

introduction: The National Library of Medicine as Hidden Treasure
10 introduction introduction 11

item in the Library’s holdings is in some way connected to important issues, has played a key 

or symptomatic role in some important historical event or development. 

The occasion of the Library’s 175th anniversary has provided us with an excuse to troll 

the collection. We found items that are unique or rare, some of them unknown even to highly 

specialized scholars, and items that are known to the cognoscenti and which (in different 

copies) may also be buried in the collections of other libraries. Either way, they are hidden 

treasures. And here, in this volume, is a small selection of them.

There is one other hidden treasure: the Library itself. Its collection ranges in time from the 

eleventh century to the present and comes from nearly every region of the globe. The Library 

holds medieval manuscripts, rare first editions, silent films, paintings, photographs, lantern 

slides, original drawings, hospital records, and laboratory notebooks. 

The Library is also something less tangible than its artifacts: its history. It is made up 

of the buildings where it has been housed—including Ford’s Theatre (in the decades 

after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln) and from 1887 to 1962 a beautiful brick building on the Mall (in the spot the Smithsonian’s Hirschhorn Museum presently occupies). 

And it is made up of the people who have staffed it and who diligently attended to the 

Herculean task of operating a great library: the people who guided it through key transitions; the people who acquired, shelved, catalogued, and described its holdings; the people 

who assisted patrons in finding a special article, monograph, print, or chapter and who 

reproduced the materials and sent them on their way through interlibrary loan and document delivery; and the people who cleaned the Library and guarded it from harm. It is also 

made up of a long and overlapping succession of technologies: the printing press and the 

computer, but also the pencil, microfilm, photostats, pneumatic tubes, typewriters, carbon 

paper, the Dictaphone, mimeograph machines, card catalogues, telephones, interoffice fax, 

and so on.

And the Library was shaped by a larger history. In the 1820s when Army Surgeon 

General Joseph Lovell (1788–1836) began collecting books, the United States was waging wars 

of expansion west and south of the Appalachian Mountains, and current medical literature 

was necessary to help keep the troops in fit condition by medical personnel. Scholarship and 

original research were not yet on the agenda; the Library served primarily as a subscription 

service, selecting a few of the best monographs and journals for military physicians and 

surgeons and sending them out to remote locations in the Republic. 

In the aftermath of the Civil War, a cadre of army surgeons breathed new life into the 

Army Medical Museum and Library (the two were conjoined twins, separated only much 

later, in the twentieth century). Back then, the Library was staffed by military personnel, 

many of them veteran medical officers of the late war. Out of this group came John Shaw 

Billings (1838–1913), an army surgeon and bibliophile who had a vision of the Library as a 

vital repository for the military, the nation, and the world. He campaigned to acquire medical 

publications, especially all back and current issues of American medical journals, mostly by 

contacting physicians around the nation and persuading them to donate their collections to 

the Library, sometimes almost literally prying the books out of their hands. He also barraged 

Americans living overseas and foreign book dealers and publishers with pleas to send the 

Library materials from areas where they were located. 

As Billings built up the collections, started the Library’s Index-Catalogue, and began 

indexing articles on a regular basis, the Library became known as a refuge—or a place of 

The glowing facade of the National Library of Medicine, 

Bethesda, 1972.

exile—for older army personnel who could no longer withstand the rigors of field duty. Its 

nickname was “Botany Bay” (the prison colony founded by the British in Australia in the late 

1700s). By 1906 only one Library staff member was under the age of forty; the average age of 

clerks was fifty-nine, most of them retirees from the Surgeon General’s Office or the army. 

The first woman known to have asked for a position at the Library, in December 1903, was 

Kate Levy, a physician trained at Northwestern University who was interested in medical 

librarianship as a specialty. Billings was unwilling to make what he saw as a drastic change 

in the Library’s culture. But labor shortages during World War I brought civilian women, 

some with training in library science, into the Library for the first time. By the late 1920s 

women and men worked in the Library in almost equal numbers. Later, women would come 

to predominate. 

In 1941, when the United States entered the world war then raging, the Library was hit 

with a crisis—the need to protect the nation’s medical knowledge from a potential attack on 

Washington by Hitler’s Third Reich. The Library moved its rare holdings west to Cleveland, 

Ohio, where the curators of the historical collections, now named the History of Medicine 

Division, began a heroic initiative to conserve old and battered books, many of which had 

suffered damage in their overcrowded, damp, and dirty quarters in downtown Washington. 

In the 1950s, upon its return from Cleveland, by authority of Congress the Library 

was detached from the Army Medical Museum, renamed the National Library of Medicine, 

and placed under the aegis of the U.S. Public Health Service. It moved to the campus of 

the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda in 1962, where it remains today as one of the 

Institutes, open and accessible to the public via Washington’s Metro and, via the Internet, to 

patrons the world over. And where it continues to acquire, catalogue, and make available works 

famous and obscure—some of them hot off the presses (or the digital equivalent) and vital 

to current medical research into the nature of the human body and the treatment of disease

and others vital to our understanding of times past, the world we have lost. 

This book celebrates the legacy of the Library in its 175th year. In doing so, it reminds 

us that materials taken in by the Library today will be part of the historical collections 

of tomorrow.

—Michael J. North, Jeffrey S. Reznick, and Michael Sappol

opposite, top: The new National Library of Medicine building, 

under construction, ca. 1960. 

opposite, middle: The gleaming new reading room of the 

History of Medicine Division, National Institutes of Health, 

Bethesda campus, beckons from the entrance near the 

service desk (ca. 1963). Division Chief John B. Blake leans 

over the desk and speaks with a librarian.

opposite, bottom: The National Library of Medicine’s main 

reading room, with a Mondrian-influenced modernist design, 

soon after the Library reopened in its new Bethesda location 

in 1962. 
Hidden Treasure
14 the national library of medicine

A “commentary” on Lambertus on Aquinas on Aristotle

Jorge of Burgos, the scholar-villain of Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, damned 

Aristotle ( 384 – 322 BCE): “Every book by that man has destroyed a part of the learning 

that Christianity has accumulated over the centuries.” With such a driving hatred Jorge 

 embarked on a series of murders to suppress the philosopher’s book on humor.

In the high and late Middle Ages the uncertainty generated by Aristotle’s thought (unlike 

Plato’s, which was more amenable to monotheism) began to undermine his status. By the 

end of the fifteenth century some scholars posed a concrete question: Should Aristotle, the 

great authority of antiquity and medieval scholasticism, be eternally damned or saved? That 

question struck Lambertus de Monte (1430/5 – 99) as specious. Lambertus was professor of arts 

and of theology, and then dean of theology, at the University of Cologne from 1455 to 1499. 

A devout Catholic, he fervently admired the works of St. Thomas Aquinas (1224/5 – 74), the great 

Parisian philosopher-theologian who “resurrected” Aristotle in the thirteenth century. So 

zealously did Aquinas favor Aristotle that Lambertus advocated his beatification. 

Lambertus was born in modern-day Holland and studied under his uncle Gerhardus de 

Monte at the University of Cologne, receiving his master of arts degree in 1454 and doctorate 

of theology in 1473. He was a member of the Schola Coloniensis, whose medieval scholastic 

arguments were among the first to appear in printed books in the fifteenth century, but also 

among the first to be overturned by the newfangled humanists of the mid-sixteenth.

Copulata super tres libros Aristotelis De anima iuxta doctrinam Thomae de Aquino, the 

National Library of Medicine’s book featured here, contains several of Lambertus’s commentaries on Aquinas’s interpretations of Aristotle’s work, including one on the soul, De anima. 

A Dominican monastery in Frankfurt owned the volume in the sixteenth century. Pierre 

Duhem, the great French historian of medieval science, owned a similar copy. Unlike Duhem’s 

copy, the NLM’s is strewn with doodles and images, mostly in one of two brown-inked hands, 

of indeterminate age.

The ad hoc illustrations defacing the volume are compelling. Folio 105b (opposite) 

displays the bust of a tonsured monk. Surrounded by a profusion of banners describing 

actions of the soul in the body, the monk’s visage also has pointers to the organs of the five 

senses. The visual trope, dating at least to the ninth century, proliferated in the thirteenth 

and beyond.

Illuminations of tongues, suggesting both the sense of taste and the organ of speech by 

which books were read aloud, humorously lick many of the tome’s pages and echo The Name 

of the Rose. To kill his victims Father Jorge coated the folios of his Aristotelian manuscript 

with a poison that a reader would ingest by licking his finger on turning a page. The 

fictional tongue in cheek ensured that indulgence in Aristotelian ribaldry brought death. 

For us, as readers of this treasure, the provocative tongues bring humor and delight. 

—Walton O. Schalick

Commentaries on the Three Books of Aristotle’s De anima 

According to the Teaching of Thomas Aquinas (ca. 1485)

Lambertus de Monte 

Copulata super tres libros Aristotelis De anima iuxta doctrinam Thomae de Aquino. Cologne, Germany. 

Printed book on paper with manuscript marginalia; 105 folios; height 81 ⁄4 x 113

⁄8 in. (21.2 x 28.5 cm) 

above and opposite: Aristotelian ideas about the senses 

provided humorous inspiration for students. A waggish 

student drawing ridicules the size of the monastic nose. 

The same student also wrote a silly bilingual syllogism 

deriding his teacher’s name, Frater Silvester Coci (“Silvester 

the Cook’s Son”). The illuminations above and doodles 

on the next page show some of the book’s many readertitillating tongues. Copulata, “De anima,” fols. 2a and 105b; 

“Phisicorum,” fols. 57b and 58a

18 the national library of medicine

The anatomical paper doll epitomized

In autumn 1543, Andreas Vesalius (1514 – 64) arrived in Mainz, Germany, with a crate of 

freshly printed copies of his brand-new anatomical works. The offspring of a family 

of loyal medical employees at the Hapsburg court, Vesalius had traveled from Basel 

to meet the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, and to present his credentials and De humani 

corporis fabrica (1543), the foundational text of modern anatomy. The anatomist offered the 

emperor a hand-colored copy (now in a private American collection), printed on vellum, 

illuminated in silver and gold. And he brought with him, also on vellum, a large, slim book, 

the Epitome, for Charles V’s son Prince Philip (possibly, the copy now held at the Library of the 

Escorial in Spain). 

Vesalius produced his “minor” anatomical book, dedicated to the young imperial heir, 

while working on De fabrica and while meticulously planning his future career. Perhaps on the 

advice of his publisher, Johannes Herbst (Oporinus), Vesalius realized that De fabrica was too 

long even for learned physicians, and too expensive for the general public he hoped to reach. 

But he had qualms about reducing his masterpiece: “Everybody knows the damages” that 

summaries and compendia “provoke in all sciences.” So instead he conceived the Epitome as “a 

pathway or appendix” to De fabrica, “a more succinct and effective way” to present the richness 

and complexity of his anatomical studies. 

The Epitome compresses every single part of the human body, according to Vesalius, 

“without any omission,” into only a few pages of text and pictures. After the title page, twelve 

large in-folio leaves, printed on both sides, contain six pages of discussion (divided into six 

chapters, displayed on two columns) and six pages occupied by large anatomical woodcuts. 

Two unnumbered leaves, printed on only one side, follow. They present illustrations of organs, 

vessels, and bits and pieces of human anatomy as well as instructions on how to cut them out 

and paste them together. The reader, or rather the user, of the book is told to build with his 

own hands a multilayered anatomical paper doll and then glue it to one of the muscle figures 

represented in the lettered pages of the book. 

Surprisingly, Vesalius—the ambitious and self-conscious founder of the new anatomy—

found inspiration for this typographical artifice in the production of lowbrow, modest novelty 

prints that then circulated all over western Europe: anatomical “fugitive sheets” with superimposed flaps. His invitation to mutilate the Epitome, his pedagogical gimmick, was designed to 

aid the reader’s memorization and understanding of the composition and spatial arrangement 

of the anatomical parts. It was a playful operation for his sixteenth-century readership, but 

unsettling for later bibliophiles, who venerated Vesalius and his monumental printed works.

There are three extant vellum copies of the Epitome. The National Library of Medicine’s 

copy is not one of them. It is printed on paper and noteworthy because it is one of the few 

1543 paper copies that have survived the spoiling effects of time—and the scissors of readers 

and owners.

—Andrea Carlino

The Epitome (1543)

Andreas Vesalius

Andreae Vesalii Bruxellensis . . . suorum de humani corporis fabrica librorum epitome. Basel, Switzerland. 

Bound printed book, illustrated with woodcuts, 18 pp.; 133

⁄4 x 20 in. (35 x 50.8 cm) 

Above: Before cutting out the figures on this page, Vesalius 

suggests that readers glue the page onto parchment and 

gives instructions on how to assemble the pieces and paste 

the resultant multilayered figure onto a base “muscle man” 

illustration. Epitome, fol. 14a

Opposite: The woodcuts are arranged as if going through 

a dissection, from the outer parts to the inner muscles, 

bones, vessels, and organs. Naked “Adam” and “Eve” figures 

introduce the series. Epitome, fol. 10b and 11a

Overleaf: The fourth and fifth “figure of the muscles” 

conclude the illustrated/typographical dissection, showing 

more bone than muscle. They also present the anatomy of 

the head and brain. Epitome, fol. 7b and 8a

2 2 the national library of medicine

The “Little Art” of reading signs

In the deluge of digital data and ephemera, and amid changes that challenge the “book” 

as a concept, this unique volume may appear as a quaint relic from thirteenth-century 

Paris. It is much more: a testament to the vital role of the written page; a product of 

the confluence of Greco-Latin and Judeo-Arabic legacies; and a witness to the emergence of 

the medical university and profession. The manuscript was created in a secular workshop 

rather than in a monastic scriptorium, but with an intense devotion that is evident in the fine 

vellum, steady hand, and exquisitely illuminated initials. Books are featured prominently in 

most of the illuminations, with a reverence normally reserved for the Bible. Reverence did not 

preclude use, however: the margins contain numerous though discreet annotations.

We do not know the original owner, but the volume was more likely intended for the 

classroom lectern than for the collection of an aristocrat or prosperous practitioner. The only 

subject outshining books in the illuminations is the magister (teacher), who is often depicted in 

the cathedra, or seat of authority—and who was on his way to appropriating the title of doctor

originally held by the teacher of theology. The physicians and his students, like the teacher, 

belonged to the literate class, or clergy, marked by the tonsure, or shaven crown. As members 

of the faculty of medicine, on the other hand, they were dedicated to health rather than 

salvation, and to their Art rather than to the Church.

“The Healing Art” (techne� iatrike�), as celebrated in the Hippocratic tradition, followed the 

age-old conviction that writing gave medicine the foundation and constancy that were lacking 

in the cultivation of individual talent and transmission by apprenticeship. Recording allowed 

knowledge to accumulate and be passed on with relative uniformity in lectures and elucidating commentaries, although these were far less homogeneous than is commonly assumed. 

This volume contains the “Little Art,” or Articella, the writings that formed the core of the 

medical curriculum. The Isagoge, or introduction, to the basic definitions and parts of medicine is followed by the seminal Aphorisms and Prognostics of Hippocrates and two influential, 

though less historic, treatises on diagnosis by urines and pulses. The capstone of the collection is the Tegni, as Galen’s key work on the Art was known.

These texts, and the methods of teaching them, aimed chiefly at replacing vague and 

deceptive impressions with precise and orderly reasoning. The preoccupation with distinctions and divisions led one master to schematize the treatises in elaborate diagrams that 

occupy almost one-eighth of the manuscript. Learned practitioners stood out by their ability 

to define and understand diseases, to recognize the symptoms, and to foresee the outcome, 

even when the cure was elusive. The illuminations do not show the physician as treating the 

sick but as identifying dropsy, explaining the diagnostic significance of urine, and pronouncing the prognosis of a bedridden patient’s illness.

—Luke Demaitre

The Isagoge and Five Other Texts of the Articella (1210 – 30?)

Iohannitius (Hunayn ibn Ishaq al-Ibadi) and others

Paris. Bound vellum manuscript; 114 leaves; 6 x 83⁄8 in. (15.3 x 21.3 cm)

Above: Master in cathedra expounding on the Aphorisms of 

Hippocrates. Initial V (rendered as a U)of “Vita brevis, ars 

vero longa,” “Life is short, but the Art is long.” Isagoge, 

fol. 15b

Opposite: Left-hand folio: Master on bench pointing at 

a raised flask while lecturing on the Book on Urines of 

Theophilus. Initial D of “De urinarum differencia 

negocium” (The matter of the differences of urines). 

Isagoge, fol. 42b. Right-hand folio: Bearded master holding 

up a flask while explaining the diagnostic significance of 

urine to a student (or patient). Initial U of “Urina ergo est 

colamentum sanguinis” (Urine is the filtrate of the blood). 

Isagoge, fol. 43a
Distinctiones, diagrammatic commentaries by Magister 

Ri[cardus] on the Aphorisms (“Expliciunt”) and Prognostics

(“Incipiunt”) of Hippocrates. Note the sutured tear on folio 

110v. Isagoge, fols. 110b–111a
26 the national library of medicine

Visionary optics

The Artificial Teledioptric Eye, or Telescope (1685–86)

Johann Zahn

Oculus artificialis teledioptricus sive Telescopium. Würzburg, Germany. 

Printed book, 3 vols. in 1; 770 pp.; 8 x 121

⁄2 in. (20.5 x 31.5 cm)

Installments of this lavishly illustrated encyclopedia of the anatomy, physiology, physics, 

mathematics, and instruments of sight—770 dense folio pages—began appearing in the 

city of Würzburg in northern Bavaria in 1685. Influential in its own time, the Artificial 

Teledioptric Eye (“Derived through a New and Lasting Method from Hidden Principles of 

Natural and Artificial Things, and Explained and Summarized from a Physical Foundation of a 

Threefold Nature, whether Mathematical-Optical, Mechanical, or Established through Practice”) 

continues to fascinate historians interested in the invention of the “magic lantern” and the uses 

of the camera obscura, in the era before the invention of photography and cinematography.

Its author, Johann Zahn (1631–1707), was a German canon in the austere Premonstratensian 

monastic order. He was also a disciple of the Jesuit Caspar Schott (1608–66) and, via Schott, 

the Jesuit polymath Athanasius Kircher (1602–80). When Schott returned to Würzburg in 1655 

to teach mathematics and physics, he earned his reputation assisting Kircher, whose dazzling 

array of writings on virtually every aspect of human knowledge included the Ars magna lucis 

et umbrae (Great Art of Light and Shadow), published in 1646 but revised in 1671 to include an 

image of a magic lantern. This treatise, along with Schott’s works on curious technologies, 

inspired Zahn to produce his Artificial Eye. 

Zahn crafted his publication to compete with the most lavish baroque encyclopedias of 

science, advertising it as a “curious theoretico-practical work embellished with a great variety of 

things” and including every new and useful art that a philosopher or practitioner of mathematics would want to know. Well-informed readers would have surmised his indebtedness to 

Kircher and Schott when reading his announcement that his book contained “many new, secret, 

and curious technasms”—a phrase that captures the phantasmagoric quality of their vision of 

technology—and his promise to bring the mysteries of the telescope “from shadow into light.”

In his preface Zahn celebrates the German tradition of optics and mechanical invention. 

He had a broad understanding of the history of instrument making in the previous century 

and was well informed about the most recent developments in astronomy, including the 

debates over the rings of Saturn, Isaac Newton’s invention of the reflecting telescope, and 

Danzig astronomer Johannes Hevelius’s workshop for grinding lenses for the telescopes 

perfected in his famous rooftop observatory. It is a state-of-the-art discussion of instruments 

of vision and their utility in the progress of scientific knowledge and, at the same time, a 

great example of baroque Hermeticism: Zahn coupled his technical account of vision and the 

enhancement of the senses with a joyous celebration of the metaphysical qualities of light as 

the origin of the cosmos and a reminder of God’s continued presence in the world.

Arguing that one cannot understand the “artificial eye” without an explanation of the 

“natural eye,” Zahn begins with a discussion of the anatomy and physiology of the eye. He 

draws on the work of theorists such as Johannes Kepler, anatomists such as Thomas Willis, 

and Kircher, who provided an explanation of light and color. Zahn then builds a “material 

eye”—an experimental model—as a prelude to his critical assessment of the different kinds of 

Above: The eyes and optical nerves, removed from the body, 

stand in splendid isolation in a stylized baroque landscape 

to emphasize their singular importance. Oculus artificialis 

teledioptricus, vol. 1, p. 194

Opposite: Natural philosophers contemplate the divine 

light of the cosmos. Oculus artificialis teledioptricus, vol. 3, 

between pp. 190 and 191
2 8 the national library of medicine

Above and opposite: Zahn’s baroque diagram of the anatomy 

of vision (upper left) needs to be viewed in relation to his 

creation of a mechanical eye (upper right), the scioptric 

ball designed to project the image of the sun in a camera 

obscura. Zahn also provided different prototypes of the 

magic lantern (opposite) to delight readers with its curious 

possibilities, in this instance the projection of time on a wall. 

Oculus artificialis teledioptricus, vol. 1, p. 32; vol. 3, between 

pp. 190–91; vol. 3, between pp. 256–57

telescopes then available, and preliminary to his discussion of distorting (catoptrical) devices, 

binoculars, burning mirrors, and the camera obscura (which was used to view sunspots). He 

describes lens-grinding machines, the “English microscope” pioneered by Robert Hooke, and 

Newton’s telescope. The book concludes with an account of the first device capable of projecting an image with artificial light—the magic lantern—whose basic principles Zahn credited 

to Kircher while offering concrete examples of how to build and use a projector. A virtuoso of 

the lens, Zahn experimented with combinations of lenses, built machines to focus and project 

images with light, and fostered the spread of the magic lantern. 

We remember Zahn today as the man who almost invented the camera, but he did far 

more than that. Consider his telescope mounted in a scioptric ball with a steering rod to 

track the sun’s movements and project its image into a darkened room. Zahn helps us to 

understand why the age of Kepler, Descartes, and Newton was also the era of the artificial eye. 

He allows us to envision this new age of instruments as an era of wonder, curiosities, and 

paradoxes animated in the shadows of his science.

—Paula Findlen
3 0 the national library of medicine

Powders and salves to treat horses

The Langenburg Manuscript (ca. 1580)

Walter von Nitzschwitz and others 

Rossarzneibuch, Langenburger Handschrift. Southeastern Germany. 

Bound manuscript on paper; 2 vols.; 358 folios + loose quire; 61

⁄8 x 75⁄8 in. (15.5 x 19.5 cm)

J ust as there are many different kinds of people, so there are many different kinds of 

horses, each appropriate to an individual person’s social standing and his way of life. 

God has ordained it to be thus.” So wrote the Augsburg financier, humanist, and 

 horseman Marx Fugger (d. 1597) in his 1584 treatise on horse breeding. Fugger’s book is 

 almost exactly contemporaneous with Walter von Nitzschwitz’s treatise on the cure and treatment of equine ailments written in 1580 and revised in 1583. Several decades later Nitzschwitz’s 

treatise, along with three other texts by different authors but dealing with similar subject 

matter, was copied and compiled into the two-volume Langenburg Manuscript now owned 

by the National Library of Medicine. The manuscript gets its name from the noble German 

family that originally owned the volumes in the seventeenth century.

As a compilation of texts focused on equines, the Langenburg Manuscript belongs to 

the pan-European culture of the horse that developed between 1400 and 1800. The horse, like 

the car in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, proved essential to almost all members of 

society: for agricultural and commercial production, transport, warfare, entertainment, sport, 

and recreation. A person’s very identity was bound up with the kind of horse he or she owned 

and the uses that the animal served. As Fugger’s remark indicates, this linkage between horse 

and social status was not only recognized and appreciated but also regarded as part of the 

divine ordering of human society.

Because a horse was such a valuable asset, for labor or leisure, an owner would be 

concerned with keeping the animal in good health, no matter what illnesses or injuries might 

befall it. This was as true for humble farmers and tradesmen as it was for members of the 

nobility. Remedies and treatments for horses were passed down orally, written down in notebooks, diaries, and manuscripts, and eventually also printed in a variety of forms ranging from 

modest and easily affordable pamphlets to deluxe, densely illustrated tomes. The Langenburg 

Manuscript, written by and for members of the nobility, documents the concern of elites for 

the health and maintenance of their horses. By the select breeding of these animals, and by 

the artful manner of riding and performing on them, social and political preeminence was 

manifested and demonstrated. Fugger tells us that finely bred and well-trained horses fetched 

prices anywhere between 1,000 and 2,000 ducats. In comparison, Michelangelo was paid 3,000 

ducats for painting the Sistine Chapel ceiling, a task that took him four years to complete. 

The manuscript prescribes various methods of palliative and curative treatment. Some 

are unhelpfully vague. For example, for an animal experiencing “respiratory difficulties” it 

recommends that the reader “take some uncooked roots and give this to the horse mixed in 

with his feed.” A favorite ingredient in many of the recipes is garlic.

Notable for its lively illustrations, the Langenburg Manuscript documents ways of 

knowing, visualizing, and interacting with animals that the Enlightenment and the Industrial 

Revolution would irrevocably change.

—Pia F. Cuneo 

Above: “When a horse is suffering from worms” (colic?). 

Rossarzneibuch, vol. 1, p. 40b

Opposite: “When a horse’s body is pierced by arrows, blades, 

or thorns” (puncture wounds, lacerations). Rossarzneibuch, 

vol. 1, p. 56a
hidde

n tre a sure 3 3

above: “When a horse has scratches” (fungal/bacterial 

dermatitis of the pasterns). Rossarzneibuch, vol. 1, p. 58a opposite: “When a horse is unable to defecate” (constipation, 

intestinal blockage). Rossarzneibuch, vol. 1, p. 33a
3 4 the national library of medicine

Commelin’s worldwide botanical web

Rare Plants of the Medical Garden of Amsterdam (1697–1701)

Jan Commelin and Caspar Commelin, with Frans Kiggelaer and Frederick Ruysch 

Horti medici Amstelodamensis rariorum tam Orientalis, quam Occidentalis Indiae, 

aliarumque peregrinarum plantarum magno studio ac labore, sumptibus civitatis Amstelodamensis . . .

Amsterdam. Printed book, 2 vols.; hand-colored copper-plate engravings; 93

⁄4 x 155⁄8 in. (25 x 40 cm)

Description and Images. . . of the Rare Plants of the East and West Indies in the Medical 

Garden of Amsterdam, and of Other Exotic Plants Collected with Zeal and Effort in the 

Residences of Amsterdam, usually ascribed to Jan Commelin (1629–92) and Caspar 

Commelin (1667–1731), is one of several beautiful botanical atlases published in the Dutch 

Republic in the years prior to the work of taxonomist Carolus Linnaeus (1707–78). The atlas is 

based on the collections of the botanical garden in Amsterdam, a garden (or hortus) that had 

become one of the most important nodes in a network of collectors that stretched around the 

globe. Some collectors were academics (mostly professors who taught about the uses of plants 

in medicine), but most were enthusiasts, including some leading citizens of Amsterdam, who 

took a keen interest in growing unusual specimens in their own gardens and keeping up-todate with descriptions of the latest findings. 

Gardens like Amsterdam’s were simultaneously sites for study; centers for the collection, 

acclimatization, and distribution of living plants; civic institutions for people seeking both 

pleasure and edification about God’s creation; and displays of the ingenuity, power, luxury, 

and world-embracing connections of the city’s patricians. Dutch printers, in turn, were adept 

in catering to the market of enthusiasts and academics through publications that ranged from 

simple lists to gorgeous atlases with lengthy descriptions and copper-plate engravings that 

could be hand-colored (for an extra fee). Possessing such an atlas allowed plant collectors elsewhere to experience vicariously the exotic riches cultivated in one of Europe’s major entrepôts. 

The publication of a grand display piece required coordination among botanical experts, 

artists, engravers, and printers. Jan Commelin thus might be considered more the initiator of 

the enterprise than simply its “author”—indeed, he died in 1692, five years before publication 

of the first volume. Having become wealthy in the pharmaceutical trade, and having published 

a book in 1672 about his methods of raising citrus fruits in heated greenhouses at his private 

gardens near Haarlem, he was chosen to be a governor of the city’s hortus in 1682 when it was 

reestablished outside the city walls. He and Joan Huydecoper (1625–1704) used their connections to acquire exotic plants from both the East and West Indies. They also commissioned 

excellent artists to make accurate watercolors of rare plants (the Moninckx Atlas). 

Commelin himself wrote careful descriptions in Dutch of each exotic’s appearance and 

time of blossoming, provenance, and names given in other publications. After his death, 

the governors of the garden, Huydecoper and Commelin’s successor, Franciscus de Vroede 

(1641–1706), saw the first volume through the press. Working chiefly with the printing firm 

of Blaeu, they commissioned the celebrated physician Frederick Ruysch (1638–1731) and 

Frans Kiggelaer (1648–1722), a pharmacist from The Hague, to edit and annotate Commelin’s 

descriptions and translate them into Latin, had the accompanying watercolors turned into 

engravings, and added a dedication and preface. Jan’s nephew Caspar Commelin, a physician 

and his successor as garden botanist, brought out the second volume in 1701. The resultant 

masterwork delighted botanical enthusiasts of the day. 

—Harold J. Cook

Above: “Flos Clytorius Breynii” (the clitoris-shaped flower 

described by Jacobus Breyn in his 1678 Exoticarum Plantarum 

Centuria Prima). Horti medici Amstelodamensis, vol. 1, facing p. 47

Opposite: “Euphorbium Cerei,” from the North African coast. 

The “euphorbium” of antiquity was reputed to be a powerful 

purgative; Commelin discusses whether this is that same 

plant. Horti medici Amstelodamensis, vol. 1, facing p. 21
3 6 the national library of medicine

Squatting anatomies

The Anatomy of the Human Body (1386; copied mid-1400s)

Mans. ̄ur ibn Muh.ammad ibn Ah.mad ibn Y ̄usuf ibn Ilya ̄s

Tashr ̄ıh. -i badan-i ins ̄an. Iran? Bound manuscript with illustrations on paper; 24 leaves; 7 x 101⁄4 in. (18 x 26 cm)

No anatomical illustrations of the entire human body are preserved from the Islamic 

world before the series of watercolor diagrams that usually accompany a Persian 

treatise composed in 1386 for the ruler of the Persian province of Fars and grandson of Tı�mu�r (the conqueror of Central Asia known to Europeans as Tamerlane). The author, 

Mans.u�r ibn Muh. ammad ibn Ah.mad ibn Yu�suf ibn Ilya�s, was a physician from Shiraz. His 

treatise, The Anatomy of the Human Body (Tashrıh� .-i badan-i insa�n), was later referred to as 

Mans.u�r’s Anatomy (Tashrıh� .-i Mans.u�rı�). 

The work consists of seven sections: an introduction; five chapters covering the skeletal, 

nervous, muscular, venous, and arterial systems; and an appendix on the fetus. Each chapter 

is illustrated with an annotated full-page diagram depicting the “system” under discussion. 

The skeleton is viewed from behind, with head hyperextended, so that the mouth is at the top 

of the page. On the head, jagged lines make a triangle and two bands, representing cranial 

sutures. The hands of the skeleton are drawn with the palms toward the viewer, again indicating that the figure is being viewed from the back. The nerve figure is also viewed from the 

back, head hyperextended, with the nerve pairs indicated by inks of contrasting color.

The placement of these figures, stomach down with the head drawn back, suggests 

a dissection table was used when the original was drawn. There is, however, no reference 

to dissection in the text. The only reference to an illustration comes in the chapter on the 

nervous system, where the different nerves discussed in the text are cross-referenced with 

those in a diagram, by the color in which they are drawn. 

The muscle, venous, and arterial figures are shown frontally. Captions describe the muscles, 

while in the venous and arterial figures the internal organs are indicated in opaque watercolors 

with labels identifying the structures. The figures are all gender neutral and lack genitalia. 

In the late nineteenth century similarities were noted between the five figures and 

twelfth-century European anatomical illustrations. The obvious element uniting the two sets 

is the curious squatting posture of the figures. The legs are spread apart and arms turned 

down, with elbows slightly bent. Three European diagrams present the skeleton viewed 

from behind with the head hyperextended and depict the bones and sutures of the skull in a 

manner identical to ibn Ilya�s’s skeletons. The origin of the European series remains a puzzle, 

but it clearly predates the Persian anatomy by at least 180 years. 

Mans.u�r’s Anatomy concludes with the formation of the fetus, usually illustrated with a 

sixth diagram showing a pregnant figure—which, like the other figures, is gender neutral. The 

fetus, always in a breech or transverse position, is typically shown as a mature male. Unlike the 

treatise’s other figures, the sixth has no labels. It is possibly the only contribution that ibn Ilya�s 

himself made to anatomical illustration, all other elements deriving from earlier sources. 

These squatting schematic figures remained the dominant model for anatomical 

illustration in the Islamic world until the introduction of European models in the genre of 

Vesalian anatomy.

—Emilie Savage-Smith

Above and opposite: A skeleton and the nerve figure, both 

viewed from the back, with the head hyperextended so that 

the mouth is at the top of the page—a posture suggestive of a 

dissection table. Tashr ̄ıh. -i badan-i ins ̄an, fols. 17b and 14a 
3 8 the national library of medicine

Latin versions of Japanese versions of Chinese classics 

In 1669 Andreas Cleyer (1634–98), a German physician working for the Dutch East India 

Company at Batavia (present-day Jakarta), wrote to Philippe Couplet (1623–93), a French 

Jesuit missionary in China, asking about Chinese medicine. Couplet was a confrère 

of Michael Boym (ca. 1612–59), another Jesuit who spent many years in China and translated 

several Chinese medical classics into Latin. Couplet sent Boym’s manuscripts to Batavia, where 

Cleyer read them. Cleyer also consulted the famous Dutch physician and natural historian 

Willem Ten Rhijne (1647–1700), who had investigated Chinese and Japanese therapies while in 

Japan. Although Cleyer listed himself as editor rather than author when his book was published in 1682, Ten Rhijne complained to the Royal Society of London that his work had been 

plagiarized. In response the Society paid for the publication of Ten Rhijne’s own introduction 

to acupuncture in 1683.

Cleyer’s compendium, Examples of Chinese Medicine, or Medical Essays According to Chinese 

Thinking, contains an overview of Chinese medical theories, descriptions of materia medica and 

their uses, and translated excerpts from commentaries of Wang Shuhe’s third-century Mai 

Jing, the Pulse Classic. Each pulse description combines diagrams from three different commentaries. Cleyer (or his sources) compared editions and diligently attempted to explain the tactile 

qualities of the pulse. Because the Chinese classics related pulse qualities to the conditions of 

internal organs as transmitted through channels (the “acupuncture channels” or “meridians”), 

Cleyer reproduced charts of the channels, shown here. He did not explain what the diagrams 

meant, however, leading many readers to conclude that they showed Chinese anatomical 

ignorance. Proper explication was provided in Ten Rhijne’s book the following year.

Traditional Chinese diagrams of the major blood vessels are drawn with double lines. In 

their history of acupuncture Lu Gwei-Djen and Joseph Needham note that before the seventeenth century, diagrams of acupuncture channels had been drawn with single lines. It may 

be that in the seventeenth century Chinese and Japanese authors were starting to use double 

lines to represent the channels as physical vessels. Was this change provoked by Japanese 

interest in Western anatomy? A few Japanese doctors had been studying “Dutch learning” 

since the mid-1600s, some with Cleyer, who had been chief commissioner of the Dutch East 

India Company’s trading post on Dejima Island in Nagasaki Bay in 1682–83 and 1685–86.

Cleyer’s book blends his understanding of Galenic humoral medicine with Chinese 

ideas: yin and yang are rendered as humidum radical (“radical moisture”) and calor primigenius

(“original heat”). It also incorporates recent developments in Chinese medicine. The section 

on tongue diagnosis, for example, comes from a book written by a Christian convert and 

official physician. Tongue diagnosis was a mid-seventeenth-century innovation, which helps 

explain the Latin author’s surprised note that his source disregarded other forms of diagnosis 

in favor of consulting only the tongue to indicate the cause of fevers. Cleyer’s anthology of 

purloined translations is thus a snapshot of changing understandings of medicine, health, and 

disease in both Europe and East Asia. 

—Bridie Andrews

Examples of Chinese Medicine (1682)

Andreas Cleyer, editor 

Specimen medicinae Sinicae, sive, Opuscula medica ad mentem Sinensium . . . Frankfurt-am-Main. 

Printed book with woodcuts, copper-plate engravings, charts, and plates, 226 pp.; 61

⁄8 x 8 in. (15.6 x 20.3 cm)

above and opposite: Double lines indicating the channels 

of qi/ki flow in the body—sometimes called acupuncture 

meridians—were misinterpreted in the West as evidence 

of East Asian ignorance of anatomy. Specimen medicinae 

Sinicae, pls. 4, 1, and 2
4 0 the national library of medicine

Building socialism with anatomical acupuncture

T his small accordion-style atlas documents a stage in the acceptance of acupuncture 

into the official medicine of the People’s Republic of China. Literally a manifold, it is 

designed to display one of three different full-length views of the body and a cut-open 

view of the inner organs of the torso. In each view acupuncture points are located in relation 

to anatomy. The anatomical charts are not particularly detailed: rather the point is to map 

acupuncture and anatomy together, suggesting that acupuncture is scientific and modern.

This new role for acupuncture is signified by the title’s use of the term “New Acupuncture,” a phrase coined in the Communist revolutionary base areas during the civil war of 

1945–49 by a woman doctor, Zhu Lian. Following Communist leader Mao Zedong’s 1944 

speech calling for a “United Front in Cultural Work,” medical workers developed the policy 

of “scientizing Chinese medicine and popularizing Western medicine.” Zhu Lian, who 

held several leadership posts within the wartime medical services, noticed that when acupuncturists accompanied mobile medical teams they needed far fewer drugs. She reasoned 

that a scientific acupuncture would discourage uneducated villagers from resorting to the 

superstitious or shamanic healing methods that the Communist Party was trying to eradicate. 

Zhu’s New Acupuncture discarded the acupuncture channels and the concepts of qi (vital 

force) and yin and yang, as contrived and unscientific, instead organizing acupuncture points 

in military formations such as bu (“sections”: head, upper limbs, etc.), qu (“divisions”: eye, 

shoulder), and xian (“lines,” as in battle lines or front lines).

The New Acupuncture was a response to the civil war period. The author of these 

Anatomical Charts, Tang Xuezheng (b. 1921), wrote during the Korean War (1950–53), when 

enthusiasm for Western models had cooled. This helps explain Tang’s tentative rehabilitation 

of the idea that qi circulated along fixed pathways. The channels are not depicted, but the two 

pages of text visible near the bottom of the middle column describe the traditional fourteen 

channels and the order in which qi flows around them. The tables of acupoints on the back 

of the charts list points by channel and “line,” and in relation to muscles, nerves, and blood 

vessels, and also describe how to use them. By the late 1950s nearly all acupuncture charts were 

once again depicting channels, and in the 1960s the government began sponsoring research 

to investigate their anatomical and physiological characteristics—a project that continues in 

China and in the West today.

Tang Xuezheng continued to explore the relationship between acupuncture and 

science. In 2000, aged seventy-nine, he was granted a patent for an ultra–high temperature 

electro-thermic needle for use in treating tumors.

—Bridie Andrews

Anatomical Charts of Channel Acupoints for the New Acupuncture (1952)

Tang Xuezheng 

Xin Zhenjiu Jingxue Jiepou Tu. Beijing. Printed accordion foldout book; 27⁄8 x 73⁄4 in. (7.4 x 19.7 cm) folded, 771⁄2 x 71⁄2 in. (196.8 x 19.1 cm) unfolded

Above and opposite: Small circles locate acupuncture points 

in relation to anatomical structure, while the text suggests 

the imminent rehabilitation of acupuncture channels in 

“scientific” Chinese medicine. Xin Zhenjiu Jingxue Jiepou Tu, 

cover and foldout
4 2 the national library of medicine

The culture of the copy

Once upon a time, before originality was prized, copying was a very good thing. Pupils 

copied out passages from literature and long-division exercises. Art students copied 

masterworks or prints or casts (which were themselves copies). Medical students copied 

illustrations from anatomical atlases. And even when artists drew from human models in poses, 

and medical men drew from specimens and cadavers, such drawings were regarded as a kind 

of copy, an imitative representation of the observer’s view. The act of drawing was a “heuristic 

device,” a way to develop skill at rendering and powers of observation. There was a culture of 

copying, far removed from today’s preoccupation with exclusive copyright and patent law.

In 1927 the Army Medical Library (now the National Library of Medicine) acquired a 

relic of that culture, some folded pages of drawings and notes from the hand of “Clorion,” a 

resident of New Harmony, Indiana (the utopian community founded in 1824 by the socialist 

reformer Robert Owen). 

Clorion’s twenty-three faithfully rendered anatomical illustrations (in pencil, ink, and 

watercolor) were copied from a London weekly, The Medical Adviser and Complete Guide to 

Health and Long Life (1825), which claimed to offer “plain and easy directions for the treatment 

of every disorder incidental to the Human Frame,” and was devoted to discussions of diseases 

(“Bilious Colic”), odd cases (“The Living Skeleton”), and healthy living (“Early Rising”). Every 

issue featured an anatomy lesson with captioned engravings. At the time, a knowledge of 

anatomy was a mark of refinement. Anatomical education enabled one to appreciate works of 

art, attain insight into God’s design (“natural theology”), and contemplate human mortality 

(through images of skeletons and skulls). Anatomy was a subject where art, medicine, and 

philosophy converged.

Clorion’s identity is unknown. Was he or she an aspiring medical student or artist or just 

studying anatomy and draftsmanship as an intellectual and moral exercise? The notebook 

consists entirely of copied material. Clorion offers no explanation but was almost certainly 

motivated by a desire for self-improvement. Acute observation improves drawing ability; 

drawing helps develop the ability to observe acutely. And both help the student to memorize 

information and reflect on its meaning. The Romantic pedagogical reformer Johann Heinrich 

Pestalozzi (1746–1827) preached that learning through doing, using the senses, was superior to 

methods that relied solely on the word. New Harmony had a Pestalozzian school.

Clorion’s manuscript was a link in a chain of copies. The Medical Adviser’s engravings were 

themselves copied, without attribution, from illustrations that Gerard Vandergucht made for 

William Cheselden’s Anatomy of the Human Body (1740) and from other sources. It’s unlikely 

this was accounted as plagiarism. By 1825 Cheselden’s engravings may have been so well known 

as not to require attribution. Or perhaps anatomy was a knowledge category that implicitly made 

a truth claim: here is the reality of humanity. If so, even derivatively, anatomical illustration 

could be taken as a report from nature, a transcription—and author and artist were irrelevant.

—Michael Sappol and Eva Åhrén

First: Science—Anatomy (1829–30)

“Clorion”

New Harmony, Indiana. Unbound manuscript; ink and pencil drawings with watercolor highlights; 28 leaves; 85 ⁄8 x 111 ⁄8 in. (22.5 x 28 cm)

above: “The names of the bones forming the skeleton, viewed 

in front,” copied from The Medical Adviser, n.s., 2 (1825), pl. 5, 

which in turn was copied from another unknown source. 

(The few originals printed in The Medical Adviser are all 

attributed.) Clorion’s text is also copied from the weekly 

journal. Clorion, fol. 27a

opposite: The figure of the naked man tied to a dead tree, 

with fourteen numbered muscle groups, was designed to 

help artists develop mastery of the male form. Muscle men 

were traditionally featured in the art curriculum, where they 

potentially carried a (homo)erotic charge. Clorion, fol. 2a, 

copied from the frontispiece of The Medical Adviser, n.s., 1 

(1825), from William Cheselden (1688–1752), The Anatomy of 

the Human Body, 5th ed. (London, 1740), pl. 19; artist Gerard 

Vandergucht (1696–1776).
4 4 the national library of medicine

The wounded ideal goes anatomical

Complete Study of Human Anatomy (1831–54)

Jean-Baptiste Marc Bourgery, illustrations by Nicolas-Henri Jacob

Traité complet de l’anatomie de l’homme, comprenant la medicine operatoire, avec planches lithographiées 

d’après nature. Paris. 8 vols. with 8 atlases; hand-colored lithographs; 123

⁄8 x 163⁄4 in. (31.6 x 42.8 cm)

During the early decades of the nineteenth century the neoclassical ideal body—an 

aesthetic most forcefully delineated by Enlightenment antiquarian Johann Joachim 

Winckelmann (1717–68) and seized upon in canvas after canvas by history painter 

par excellence Jacques-Louis David (1748–1825)—was subject to an erosion as much literal as 

symbolic. This was especially true in France, where Romanticism’s painters had knocked it 

from its pedestal: Antoine-Jean Gros laid it low in the Battle of Eylau (1808); Théodore Géricault 

had subjected it to cannibalization on the Raft of the Medusa (1818). Some, like aesthetic theorist Antoine Chrysostome Quatremère de Quincy, attempted to reinstate the ideal as the carrier 

of patriotic duty and cultural triumph. But in the early years of the century, as Xavier Bichat’s 

teachings on pathology spread, Parisian medicine began to couple disease with expired organs. 

The balance of the four humors, to which the aesthetic ideal had been anchored, became history. And the result was irreversible. The ideal body’s fragments were remnants of a lost world. 

This wounded ideal appears throughout the Traité complet de l’anatomie de l’homme of 

anatomist J.-B.M. Bourgery (1797–1849). Initially a didactic set of pamphlets for the physicianin-training (volume 1 appeared in 1831), the Traité became a lavish, sixteen-volume masterwork, 

whose ideal bodies, Bourgery declared, would correct the physician’s or surgeon’s erroneous 

mental pictures of the body. But while the anatomist prided himself on the careful, cadaverbased empiricism he had learned at the École de Santé of Paris, the images in his atlas 

are bloodless and beautified. Over the twenty-three years of its publication, Bourgery and 

lithographer Nicolas-Henri Jacob (1782–1871), a student of J.-L. David, stressed the composition and reparation of ideally proportioned men and women. Picturing every inch of flesh in 

muscular, skeletal, and nervous anatomies with descriptions of surgeries of all stripes, they 

tamed their encyclopedic ambitions with soft chiaroscuro, pastel skin, and classical lines. 

Even Bourgery’s depiction of a gruesome mastectomy (p. 48) was dictated by an insistence on 

upholding the ideal. In a variation on a theme found throughout the atlas, expert, disembodied hands extract a cancerous tumor from a stoic woman who remains as still as a statue, with 

perfectly coiffed hair, and who betrays no hint of pain, sweat, or fear. 

The power of such images was recognized by Bourgery and Jacob’s medical and artistic 

contemporaries, for whom visuality and surgery, spectacle and knowledge were closely bound. 

In 1845, after only five volumes had been published, the Académie des Sciences awarded the 

anatomist and artist a 5,000-franc prize for their contributions to the field of anatomy. A 

decade earlier, in a front-page review for the widely read Journal des débats, art critic ÉtienneJean Delécleuze had declared the Traité an “époque” in the history of anatomical atlases—a 

true collaboration between two men who felt a keen responsibility to each other’s profession. 

But for Delécleuze, even Bourgery and Jacob’s astonishing anatomical ideal had its limits. 

Made of stillness and silence, it could not cope with that most delicate principle of life, barely 

detectable by the senses—the inexplicable force separating the living from the dead. 

—Melissa Lo

above: Top of page, a fastidious combination of straps and 

bandages compresses the patient’s facial arteries. Bottom 

of page, three different angles of an instrument made to 

exert pressure on the carotid. Traité, vol. 6, pl. 18

opposite: At left, glass tubes and accompanying pumps 

(invented by V.-T. Junod) designed to constrict the circulation 

of the arms and legs—essentially a form of cupping—to cure 

rheumatism. At right, five methods for operating on crossed 

eyes and excessive squinting. Traité, vol. 6, pl. 28, vol. 7, pl. D
opposite: A transverse cut 

exposes an intricate view 

of the organs of the spinal 

column. Traité, vol. 3, pl. 3

right: The surgical repair 

of the bronchus (figs. 1–3); 

the Mayor technique for 

removing a cancerous 

goiter (fig. 4); and steps for 

cutting into the esophagus 

(figs. 7–8). Traité, vol. 7, 

pl. 26 
opposite: Mastectomy, 

from deep incision to a 

stratigraphic peek into the 

breast (featuring layers 

of skin, mammary glands, 

lymphatic ganglia, and 

portions of the pectoral 

muscle) and finally the postoperative bandaging of the 

skin. Traité, vol. 7, pl. 27

right: Three different 

caesarean methods: (1) a 

vertical cut up and down the 

belly and into the uterus; 

(2) from the side; and (3) 

an old technique called 

sympthysèotomie, in which the 

surgeon creates an incision 

closer to the pubis, carving 

a flap that provides easier 

access to the lower part of the 

uterus. Traité, vol. 7, pl. 77
5 0 the national library of medicine

“Midwifery demystified”

T his curious book, “intended to illustrate . . .midwifery, elucidating particularly the 

application of the forceps, and other important practical points in obstetric science,” 

went through four editions in Britain and one in the United States. Its brilliantly 

colored lithographic plates consist largely of a series of flaps—small sections that can be lifted 

to “dissect” the figure. To construct the plates George Spratt (ca. 1784–1840) modified images 

he borrowed from other anatomical atlases and obstetric manuals. Most of the plates are 

spatial dissections, revealing ever deeper views into the body’s interior. But Spratt also offers 

temporal “dissections” of the stages of pregnancy, difficult labors such as forceps delivery, and, 

in the American reprint, a caesarean section. 

Flap books have a long history. They were first used in fifteenth-century astronomy and 

mathematics. In the sixteenth century, anatomical “fugitive sheets” depicted Adam and Eve 

with cutaway torsos, and Vesalius printed pieces to be cut out and assembled into flaps in his 

Epitome (1543) (see pp. 18–21). The flaps were intended to facilitate interactive learning in much 

the same way as virtual dissecting programs do today. (Readers had to open the plate overlays 

to see the sequence and, in a way, participate in the dissection or delivery.) The preface to 

Spratt’s American edition raved, “The superiority of the present work over any other series of 

Obstetrical illustrations, is universally admitted. It is a happy combination of the Picture and 

the Model. . . . To the busy practitioner, who wants something to refresh his memory, it obviates 

the necessity for continual post mortem examination. . . . To the student it is equivalent to a 

whole series of practical demonstrations, with the advantage that it can be carried about with 

him and studied wherever he may desire.” Reviews in contemporary medical journals were 

equally enthusiastic. 

Spratt promoted his Tables as a way to help students who had insufficient opportunities 

for clinical training in obstetrics and anatomical dissection. Clinical training was expensive 

and time-consuming: obstetrical courses charged extra fees for clinical training, and physical 

contact with patients occurred only when students took the course a second time. The need to 

supplement dissection stemmed from a shortage of cadavers. Notwithstanding the passage in 

Britain and Massachusetts of “anatomy acts” designed to provide the bodies of “unclaimed” 

indigents to medical colleges and private anatomy schools, many anatomists faced chronic 

shortages and disruptions and struggled to obtain a legal supply of bodies. Spratt’s work 

claimed to fill this need cheaply and efficiently.

Little is known about the author. Credited on the title page as “Surgeon-Accoucheur,” 

Spratt worked as an illustrator as well as a medical practitioner. He published several lavishly 

illustrated botanical books, including Flora Medica (1829–30), along with wall charts and pocket 

books on poisonous plants, and collaborated with George Madeley, one of the lithographers of 

the Tables, on a popular series of composite caricature prints.

—Marcia D. Nichols

Obstetric Tables; Comprising Graphic Illustrations (1835)

George Spratt 

London, 2d ed. Printed book, with anatomical flaps; 2 parts; 81⁄2 x 101⁄2 in. (21.6 x 26.7 cm)

above: A temporal “dissection” showing progressive changes 

during pregnancy, including views of the “virgin” state and 

the end of each trimester of pregnancy. Lifting the final flap 

reveals a full-term fetus. Obstetric Tables, part 1, table 4

opposite: A combination of temporal and spatial dissection 

depicting a forceps delivery. The first two flaps show 

placement of the left and right forceps blades respectively; 

the third demonstrates the correct placement of the forceps 

prior to delivery. The final flap depicts the fetal head 

partially born. Obstetric Tables, part 2, table 8
52 the national library of medicine

Nurse mail

Icollect nursing postcards. My latest postcard, which some friends sent as a birthday 

present, shows a nurse advertising a girdle: “Brodies’ tight fit corset”—“tight as can be.” 

The production of postcards on an industrial scale around the turn of the nineteenth century brought the figure of the nurse into millions of households across the globe. 

This was a time when nursing was expanding from the hospital into the home, school, and 

workplace. Postcards bearing images of nurses were used to mark hospital visits, celebrate 

graduation from nursing school, raise funds for philanthropic, medical, and religious activities that employed nurses, propagandize for war efforts and health campaigns, or just entertain. The rise of the postcard came with the expansion of working-class literacy. The postcard 

made only modest demands on the reading skills of sender and recipient and was cheap to 

buy and mail. It provided a speedy way for people to connect: a striking image that went with a 

brief handwritten message. Postcards and nursing were made for each other. 

The more than one thousand postcards at the National Library of Medicine feature 

photographs, cartoons, chromolithographs, and paintings, populated by a prolific pantheon 

of nurses. The nurse is associated with the idealization of womanhood and motherhood (male 

nurses are rarely represented). She embodies heroic virtues, a valorous glamour that arises out 

of religious or quasi-religious devotion, a healing vocation. 

There are also postcards that portray the nurse as seductress or object of seduction: busty, 

sexy innocents who unwittingly arouse bedridden male patients or wittingly fend off their 

advances. In some postcards the nurses wantonly tease and flirt. Most of these smutty nurse 

postcards were drawn in cartoon styles familiar to readers of men’s magazines, but some were 

staged as a photographic tableau.

Most nursing postcards, however, have a documentary purpose. They show nurses at work 

or posing in a clinic, classroom, or field hospital, in a particular place and time. They usually 

feature white women, but some show nurses of color in colonial settings. Such postcards fit 

into the larger genre of travel postcards; they served as a souvenir of a trip or posting that a 

tourist, colonial administrator, settler, or missionary might send back home. 

The two world wars provided the subject matter for many postcards. Wartime postcards 

typically show the nurse as the embodiment of patriotic self-sacrifice. Some postcards cast 

nurse and wounded soldier as lovers, the uniform acting as a reference point for both, a little 

melodrama. Other postcards sought to boost morale, recruit nurses, and build public support 

for the war effort. The Red Cross national nursing societies were prolific postcard makers, 

often adapting posters by well-known artists. But there was no uniformity: different countries 

adopted different styles.

My personal collection is small; as I look over the much larger collection of postcards at 

the National Library of Medicine I’m struck by the rich and contradictory figure of the nurse, 

who embodied authority and deference, professionalism and personal sacrifice, regionalism 

and empire, purity and eros, religion and science.

—Anne Marie Rafferty

Nurse Postcards Collection (late 1800s–mid-1900s)

Various manufacturers

Printed postcards, with handwritten messages and canceled postage stamps

above: Two nurses pose before a skeleton and female 

anatomical manikin. Paris, early twentieth century.

opposite, left to right, top to bottom: Nurses giving women 

mud baths, Russia, early twentieth century. Nurses in gas 

masks at the trenches, France, ca. 1917 (U.S. postcard).

White nurse with native nurses at the Red Cross SchoolHospital, Pawa, Belgian Congo, 1939. Nurses with babies, 

U.S., twentieth century. Nurse giving woman an X-ray, 

La Cigogne, France, early twentieth century. Female nurses 

holding diplomas, behind two men on a dais, Albuquerque, 

New Mexico, early twentieth century. 
5 4 the national library of medicine

A universal code: Nurse uniforms of all nations

T he nurse’s uniform is a universal code for professionalism, decorum, efficiency, esprit 

de corps, and commitment to humanitarian values. Originally introduced to distinguish the untrained traditional nurse, who dressed in the everyday women’s wear of 

her class, from the trained and licensed modern nurse, clad in a neat, clean, and well-fitting 

uniform, it was a synthesis of various influences—the parlor maid, the religious sister, and 

military apparel. It varied in time and place, but in every case it helped forge a common 

occupational and gender identity. Functioning as a sign of authority and institutional discipline for patients and lower-ranking employees, the nurse’s uniform also signified service and 

subordination to doctors, who were usually men and not required to wear uniforms. 

In the 1940s and ’50s, the Helene Fuld Health Foundation, dedicated to the “relief of 

poverty, suffering, sickness and distress,” focused many of its activities on nursing and produced this set of glossy photographs of nurse uniforms, each representing a nation or region, 

from Afghanistan to Zanzibar. The costumes differ in detail—the cuffs, capes, hats, aprons, 

and collars vary—yet all are recognizable as nurses’ outfits. The starched whiteness signifies 

commitment to hygienic cleanliness, the apron a commitment to service, and so on. Noble 

traits, universal values. In 1950 the United Nations and World Health Organization were new 

and hopeful institutions; internationalism was rising. After the terrible war that had just been 

fought, a new global order seemed to be emerging. The Fuld Foundation surely intended these 

photographs to contribute to that order, to promote a utopian ideal of global harmony. 

At the same time the photos have the look of advertisements. In the mid-twentieth 

century companies began manufacturing more smartly tailored uniforms, and they used 

women with modern hairdos and makeup who projected a sense of female independence and 

self-assurance to model them. Fussy styling and accessorizing was avoided; uniform design 

was meant only to echo the latest fashions while maintaining the modesty of the nurse. 

Today the occupations of health care providers are not clearly signified by the informal 

clothing they wear, and some see the relaxation of dress codes as symptomatic of a decline 

in standards of care. But the transformation of the nurse’s uniform came, in part, from a 

desire to democratize the medical workplace. Mental health nurses abandoned the uniform 

in the 1970s in an attempt to reduce the social barriers between nurses and patients. Around 

the same time, nurses began adopting a feminist view. The hierarchical distinction between 

doctor and nurse, and the requirement that nurses wear feminine (and sometimes hampering) uniforms, came under attack. The final blow to the formal uniform was the adoption of 

minimalism in dress in the interest of infection control. Today, in some settings, nurses and 

doctors are scarcely distinguishable: both don scrubs. But the nurse’s uniform still represents 

authority over the patient and continues to be an iconic symbol.

—Anne Marie Rafferty

International Nurse Uniform Photograph Collection (ca. 1950)

Helene Fuld Health Foundation

Jersey City, New Jersey. 93 color photographs, glossy; 8 x 10 in. (20.3 x 25.4 cm)

above: Nurse’s uniform from Germany

opposite, left to right, top to bottom: Philippines, Denmark, 

British Honduras; Hong Kong, Madeira, Kenya; Nepal, 

Dominican Republic, Colombia
5 6 the national library of medicine

From “grannies” to nurse midwives

T here are forty-one cardboard boxes in the American College of Nurse-Midwives 

collection at the National Library of Medicine. In box number 10 I found the dolls. 

The commercially manufactured plastic doll had become brittle and cracked and 

needed repair from a conservator. The handmade cloth doll, a bit worn, was perfectly intact. 

Together with the collection’s letters, pamphlets, teaching manuals, and photographs, the dolls 

helped me piece together the story of “granny” midwives and the state and local programs that 

trained them as well as later generations of midwives.

For more than three centuries African American midwives, often referred to as “granny” 

midwives because of their advanced age and revered status in black communities, delivered 

babies and practiced folk medicine in the rural South. Without formal training, but much 

practical experience, the “granny” treated pregnant women, families, and other members of 

her community, in slavery and freedom and very often in dire poverty, under the most difficult 

sanitary conditions.

Before the 1920s, African American women became midwives through apprenticeship 

(usually a familial connection) or because they believed God had called on them to do so. After 

the 1920s, only women who had been recruited by a public health nurse to a state-sponsored 

midwifery training program could become midwives. 

The sea change was fostered by the 1921 Sheppard-Towner Maternity and Infancy 

Protection Act. From 1921 to 1929 the act provided federal aid to state health departments for 

midwife training and regulatory programs. The programs were designed to be a temporary 

solution, to help fill the need for maternal and child health care services in rural areas, 

where hospitals and physician services were scarce, until trained physicians could take over 

obstetrical care. But in the rural South racial segregation and a weak regional economy made 

it difficult to attract enough doctors and build adequate new hospital facilities. Southern 

reformers compensated by seeking to expand and strengthen the role of midwives in maternal 

and infant care, even though elsewhere they sought to eliminate midwifery. 

Instruction in the new midwife training programs was carried out through teacher 

demonstrations, role playing, and songs because most midwives had little formal education 

and many were illiterate. A nurse-midwife or public health nurse presented lessons and 

demonstrations using an anatomically correct life-size doll. The class curriculum covered 

pre- and postnatal care and potential complications. The dolls that I stumbled upon in 

the American College of Nurse-Midwives Collection were used in South Carolina training 

programs, not for birthing demonstrations, as one would expect, but to show the contrast 

between the traditional charming, but unsanitary, “self-made” granny-midwife and the 

modern hygienic, scientifically educated midwife.

—Sheena M. Morrison

Midwife Dolls (mid-twentieth century)

American College of Nurse-Midwives Collection (1946–76)

Two dolls: handmade (fabric), height 125⁄8 in. (32 cm); manufactured (plastic and fabric), 131⁄8 in. (33.5 cm)

above: Photo accompanying a newspaper article that was 

part of a series on South Carolina midwives. The State

(Columbia, SC), November 22, 1968 

opposite: Laura Blackburn (1891–1955) made and used 

the doll on the right to depict the old granny-type midwife. 

Blackburn, midwife supervisor for the state of South 

Carolina, worked in counties that lacked an organized health 

department. The store-bought, factory-made doll (on the 

left) was dressed up in a clean, sterilized white uniform to 

epitomize the modern, formally educated midwife. Trainers 

at the Lee County Health Department, Bishopville, SC, used 

the dolls during summer midwife institutes.
5 8 the national library of medicine

The phantom of the anatomy lecture

White’s Physiological Manikin (1886)

James T. White & Co.

New York. Chromolithograph flaps sewn onto varnished cardboard; die-cut leaves; 235⁄8 x 681⁄2 in. (60 x 174 cm)

T here he sits in retirement, still bearing the legend “Examined and Approved by Frank 

H. Hamilton, M.D.” (a prominent surgeon and one of the four physicians who attended 

President Garfield). But during his career, the life-size manikin worked standing up, 

or, more precisely, hanging from a hook. Then he sustained a wound: the stress of suspending his 8.2 pounds wore out the cardboard and he fell. It might have happened front stage 

at a medicine show, where a pitchman of nostrums was getting the suckers worked up by 

enumerating the “thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to.” Or in a doctor’s office, where 

the manikin served as a 100-in-1 quick reference wall chart. Or in a classroom, where he bore 

witness to lectures on the respiratory system, first aid, or nutrition. 

He was stiff and sharply delineated, contained. Yet he came equipped with extravagant 

foliage—layers, sublayers, and openings—like some tropical plant that just can’t stop growing. 

On the right half of his torso alone there sprouted seventeen flaps, printed on both sides. He 

was a gadget that does too much: a Swiss Army knife with a thousand blades. 

A reviewer described him: “Besides exhibiting the form, position, color, and relation 

of the organs of a healthy body . . .the manikin is accompanied by a series of microscopical 

plates showing sections of lung, vein, valve, bone, hair, finger-end, skin, wall of stomach, 

cross-section of muscle, etc. The cranial, spinal, and sympathetic nerve systems, and their 

connections are also illustrated.” Another writer raved about the many “surgical operations” 

presented in the manikin: “Ligations of Arteries, Amputations in the Seven Surgical Divisions 

of the Arm and Leg . . ., Lines of Exsections of Joints,” etc. 

Some openings were morally instructive. Colored plates demonstrated “the effects of 

alcohol and narcotics on the human stomach,” deformations of the female rib cage caused by 

corsetry, and “microscopical sections representing pathological changes occurring in several 

maladies,” including venereal diseases. The manikin—obviously masculine, but an effigy of 

the universal human—also contained both male and female organs of “generation.”

At an 1887 educational exposition in Chicago it was showered with “special praise.” At 

the time reformers claimed that every civilized person should have a basic knowledge of the 

human body and the laws of health. Twenty-five states required the teaching of physiology in 

public schools. But, for this task, books and lectures were insufficient. Visual and tactile aids 

were needed, argued Dr. Roger S. Tracy of the New York City Health Department. “Human 

dissection being out of the question,” schools should buy three-dimensional “dissectable” 

manikins to “afford the pupil a vivid and exact conception” of the organs “in their situations, 

connections, and relative dimensions.” But such papier-mâché manikins, imported from 

France, cost from $250 to $1,500—too expensive for financially pressed school systems. White’s 

Manikin, in contrast, went for $35. The school superintendent of Woonsocket, Rhode Island, 

ordered four for his grammar school classrooms. It was marketed for at least twenty years. 

A deluxe edition was repackaged in Germany as Dr. Franke’s Phantom (1891), clairvoyantly 

anticipating its current status: a ghostly relic of late-nineteenth-century anatomical pedagogy.

—Michael Sappol

above: The head of White’s Physiological Manikin

opposite: The manikin’s flaps correspond to lecture topics 

such as the circulatory system, the brain and nervous 

system, the skeleton and muscles, venereal disease and the 

physiology of reproduction (male and female), first aid, and 

the dangers of corseting (visible in the far right). Dr. Franke’s 

Phantom (1891), a deluxe edition of White’s Physiological 

Manikin, also contains flaps showing the stages of gestation 

and possible positions of fetuses and twins—a pregnant 

hermaphrodite. The German “Dr. Franke” is probably a 

corruption of “Dr. Frank Hamilton,” whose endorsement 

was featured in American versions and who wrote an 

accompanying booklet. 
6 0 the national library of medicine

Reading and writing the leaves of the talipot palm

Sinhala Palm-Leaf Medical Manuscripts (1700s–1800s)

Author unknown

Sri Lanka. Untitled manuscripts, palm leaves with painted wooden covers; rope bound;

MS S6, 44 folios, 2 x 8 in. (5 x 20.3 cm); MS S1, 4 parts, each 11

⁄2 x 453⁄4 in. (3.8 x 114.6 cm)

T hroughout recorded history the island of Sri Lanka has been home to a variety of 

cultural and ethnic groups, with Buddhist Sinhala people the majority community in 

the south of the island and Hindu Tamils and Tamil-speaking Muslims prominent in 

the north and east of the island. At the same time, a variety of cultural, economic, and political 

networks connected Sri Lanka to other parts of the world, especially to South Asia. It is thus 

not surprising that the medical heritage of Sri Lanka is a composite, drawn from different 

medical traditions in India (Ayurveda and Siddha), Greek medicine (Unani) introduced by Arabs, 

and an indigenous medical heritage particular to the island. For many centuries medical 

practice in Sri Lanka was also a composite, with scholarly elements that looked to Ayurveda 

(which were transmitted in Sanskrit) bearing more prestige than the traditional local medical 

knowledge and practices.

The Sri Lankan medical manuscripts in the National Library of Medicine’s collection 

originally belonged to Sinhalese physicians and are products of the lower-status Sinhalese 

local tradition. Even so, the physicians (called veda mahattayas in Sinhala) who owned these 

“books” deployed them as signs of their medical learning and prestige. Ownership of 

above and opposite: Palm-leaf manuscripts are composed 

entirely in prose, verse, lists, or some combination thereof. 

Some also have illustrations and diagrams, as in this 

manuscript. 

right: Two decorated wooden covers and a single cord hold 

together forty-four rectangular-cropped palm leaves—now 

quite brittle—containing handwritten medical charms. 
62 the national library of medicine

manuscripts signified and enhanced a healer’s authority because of the painstaking effort 

it took to make a manuscript from the leaves of the talipot palm tree—the production of 

palm-leaf books largely stopped in the nineteenth century because it was so very labor 

intensive—and because of their aesthetic appeal, whether this took the form of a beautiful 

painted cover, artfully wrought text, or elegant handwriting. This is especially the case with the 

unusual folded manuscript pictured above. (Typically, manuscripts are held together by strings 

between wooden covers.) Its graceful and expressive handwriting, and the fact that some of 

its contents are in verse, connects it to the aesthetic contours of Sinhala literary culture, even 

though the verses were for ritual use. Beautiful books were among the accoutrements of a 

physician. The beauty of a manuscript suggested the kind of healing abilities its owner was 

possessed of—while the book’s contents informed the actual medical practice. A Sinhala 

saying, “If you can’t be a king, then practice medicine,” reminds us that the lives of physicians, 

as well as kings, add something important and admirable to life in this world. 

Traditionally, the practice of the healing arts in Sri Lanka went beyond medicine per se 

to include what we might consider to be religious practices, including exorcisms. The contents 

of the manuscripts are often brief; the books most likely served as an aide-mémoire for a 

healer. Some include recipes of remedies; others contain formulas for use in healing rituals. 

The diagrams, text, and verses in these manuscripts were not part of a public system of 

medical knowledge: they were secret knowledge that belonged to individual healers. Much of 

the contents therefore were not meant to be intelligible to accidental readers.

—Charles Hallisey

above: A rare folded Sinhalese palm-leaf manuscript 

astrological calendar (ca. 1800). The leaves have been 

shaped into small articulated panels, each about 13

⁄8 x 31⁄2 in. 

(3.5 x 9 cm).

opposite, below: The calendar resides in a small wooden 

box painted with flowers. Pasted on the inside of the box is a 

typewritten note describing the calendar and identifying its 

donor, Dr. Casey Wood (1856–1942) of Chicago, a prominent 

Canadian ophthalmologist and collector.
6 4 the national library of medicine

Spectacles of Chinese nature, civilization, and rhubarb

China Illustrated (1670)

Athanasius Kircher, trans. François-Savinien d’Alquié 

La Chine . . . illustrée de plusieurs monuments tant sacrés que profanes, et de quantité de recherchés de la nature & de l’art. . . Amsterdam. 

Printed book, copper-plate engravings, 367 pp.; 91

⁄2 x 141⁄2 in. (24 x 36.5 cm)

T his lavishly illustrated French volume was originally written in Latin by the Jesuit 

polymath Athanasius Kircher (1602–80), who was famous throughout Europe for 

writing more than three dozen books on a staggering variety of topics: medicine, 

magnetism, optics, musicology, geology, astronomy, history, and linguistics. For his research 

into the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, Kircher had himself lowered into its smoking crater, but 

his book on China was composed without firsthand knowledge of any kind, relying instead 

on the published and unpublished writings of fellow Jesuit missionaries in the field, which he 

gathered together and embellished after his own fashion. That Kircher knew no Chinese at all, 

for example, did not prevent him from speculating at length that the “hieroglyphic” Chinese 

script was derived from the ancient Egyptians and must therefore contain Hermetic secrets 

and cosmic truths. 

The best Dutch engravers were commissioned for the project, which took nearly five 

years to produce, at enormous expense. When the eagerly awaited volume was finally printed 

in 1667 by Johann Jansson van Waesberge, it was immediately pirated by a rival Amsterdam 

printer whose inferior copies found their way into many book collections. The authorized and 

widely read French translation that soon followed, however, was published with the original 

engraving plates and included a short Chinese-French “dictionary,” the first of its kind ever 

circulated in Europe — even if it was only an eclectic word list.

Kircher’s thinly veiled motives in writing the book were not only to illustrate the dazzling 

“spectacles” of China but also to showcase the work of Jesuit missionaries there and to plead 

for support of their mission. Thus the frontispiece (opposite) gives more prominence to 

the Jesuits illustrating China than to the China illustrated, and more than half the book is 

devoted to the progress of Christianity in China and to the indigenous religious beliefs that 

missionaries were trying to overcome. 

Pride of place is given to the explication of a unique Tang Dynasty stone monument 

inscribed by Nestorian Christians a thousand years earlier in the city of Chang’an (modernday Xi’an). Kircher provides a stunning double-page foldout of the 1,800-character inscription, including a few lines of Syriac, plus a verbatim translation, a pronunciation table for 

all the characters, and a second interpretive translation along with a detailed commentary. 

Modern readers are likely to skip over this section, which comprises almost the first quarter 

of the volume, in favor of the natural and cultural “spectacles” to follow — from dragonshaped mountains to the Dalai Lama — but it contains the first bilingual critical edition 

of a Chinese text printed for European readers. Kircher argued that the discovery of the 

monument was a providential sign of favor for Catholicism in general and for the Jesuits 

in particular.

After describing the religions, government, and customs of China and adjoining 

regions, Kircher examines a number of Chinese spectacles from the standpoint of natural 

philosophy. He refutes reports of flying tortoises and wool-bearing hens as patently contrary 

above: A Chinese beauty with tiny feet and European 

features. Half of a diptych reading “elegant and refined” 

(yaotiao), a learned allusion to the two-thousand-year-old 

Shijing (Classic of Poetry). The object wrapped in silk on the 

table is a qin, a zitherlike instrument sometimes called the 

Chinese lute. La Chine, between pp. 154 and 155

opposite: The frontispiece showing (clockwise from top left) 

Saints Francis Xavier and Ignatius Loyola, the co-founders of 

the Society of Jesuits; Matteo Ricci, leader of the China mission, 

with cartographic and astronomical tools; and Adam Schall, 

chief astronomer to the Qing court, wearing the Mandarin 

square of highest rank with a crane. La Chine, frontispiece
to nature (but well worth depicting anyway). Yet he credits reports of a stone found in the 

head of a serpent that can draw out poison on the basis of “sympathetic” virtue when 

applied to a bite wound, and he enthusiastically describes a yellow fish in the China Sea that 

metamorphoses into a feathered bird in the spring and then back again into a fish in the 

autumn, as a result of temperature changes and the “spermatic” influence of the birds’ eggs 

it ingests. 

As an authority on the plague Kircher was also interested in medicaments. He tells 

of a man-shaped root called ginseng that can warm the body, increase vital respiration, and 

even restore health to those near death, but he insists that it cannot bestow immortality as 

some believe. And he raves about a strong herb called cha, whose dried leaves are steeped 

in hot water to create a bitter broth that the Chinese drink at all times of the day. It is the 

reason they never suffer from gout or stones. It expels superfluous vapors and cures hangovers. It prevents drowsiness and wonderfully focuses the mind: it is Nature’s noble gift to 

the Literati. 

But the most precious substances were rhubarb and musk. Both had been memorably 

described by Marco Polo and were already in medical use in Europe, but the possibility of 

acquiring the purest and most potent varieties at their source was reason enough to support 

missionary work in China. Rhubarb, prescribed in both Europe and China as a purgative, 

could also be deadly in certain preparations. Kircher gives its Chinese name (da huang) and 

provides a half-page illustration of the “true” rhubarb plant—not particularly spectacular now 

but of undoubted interest to Kircher’s readers. Musk from the wild Chinese musk deer was 

valued like gold, as a pharmaceutical and a perfume. It was prescribed against seizures and to 

improve circulation and was sometimes added to medicines as a catalyst. Kircher provides a 

full-page illustration of the strange creature, which nobody in Europe had ever seen before 

(including the illustrator). But it is also the one and only truly Chinese thing on the frontispiece (p. 65): that little animal grazing peacefully in the distance of an exotic landscape, just 

waiting for Europeans to come take him.

—Timothy Billings

left, top to bottom: Spectacles of nature and art: a “flying 

cat,” probably the giant flying squirrel; statues of a Tibetan 

Buddha and the many-headed Avalokiteshvara (confusingly 

called “Menipe,” after the chant Om mani padme hum); the 

jackfruit (puoluomi), the largest tree-borne fruit in the 

world; and an exotic pet not recognized as a domesticated 

common squirrel (song shu). La Chine, pp. 113, 177, 251, 262

opposite: The proper brush grip for Chinese calligraphy, with 

an inkstone (enlarged) on the floor. The stylized characters 

on the wall, shangfang (Celestial Realm), along with the 

Ape of Nature, below, depict Kircher’s belief that Chinese 

script is hieroglyphic in nature and thus contains secrets of 

creation. La Chine, p. 310
6 8 the national library of medicine

The image of Darwinian evolution

An elderly gentleman with white beard and whiskers, swaddled in black cape and hat, 

leaning against a pillar entwined with a leafless vine. His eyes, bathed in shadow, 

convey an indeterminate expression. Is it tranquillity? Sorrow? Resignation? 

This picture (opposite) may be the last formal photograph of Charles Darwin (1809 – 82). 

Although undated, it must have been taken in the final year or two of Darwin’s life. His last 

book would appear in October 1881, just two months after the death of his beloved elder 

brother, Erasmus, and six months prior to his own death in April of 1882. He posed on the 

veranda of Down House, his home in the Kentish countryside about fifteen miles south of 

central London, probably for Clarence Fry, the senior photographic partner of the London 

firm Elliott & Fry. 

Darwin had posed for photo portraits almost from the development of photographic 

processes in the late 1830s. A daguerreotype of him with his oldest boy, William, dates to 1842. 

Over the next four decades, Darwin had his portrait taken regularly—by his sons, who were 

keen amateur photographers, and by professionals. Initially, these were for family and friends. 

But Darwin’s fame after the publication of On the Origin of Species in 1859 coincided with the 

explosive commercialization of the carte de visite. These 31

⁄2 by 21⁄4–inch photographs, printed 

on card stock, were less calling cards or even snapshots than the equivalent of trading cards. 

Photographers sold cartes of the rich and famous, politicians, actors, writers, scientists, and the 

like, to the general public, often in sets or albums. Darwin himself participated in this fashion, 

granting approval for the sale of his likeness and its inclusion in commercial albums, and he 

eagerly exchanged his photograph with other scientists. Such photographs, and the engravings 

made from them, contributed to the wide circulation of Darwin’s image in Victorian culture. 

Photography, and visual illustrations generally, also played an important role in Darwin’s 

professional work. Because the Origin is, as Darwin famously described it, “one long argument,” it uses words rather than pictures. Its single illustration, the famous “branching” 

diagram, was brilliant and important, but the lack of other illustrations in the book has tended 

to make us think of Darwin as a nonvisual thinker. Yet the Origin was unusual among Darwin’s 

works, the rest of which were well illustrated—often copiously and sometimes innovatively. 

The Zoology of the Voyage of the H.M.S. Beagle (1838–43) featured colored lithographic plates of 

birds by John and Elizabeth Gould. The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872) 

was among the first scientific books in English to be illustrated with photographs. Nearly two 

hundred zigzagging diagrams in The Power of Movement in Plants (1880) attempted to represent 

the movement of climbing plants. These images were never merely illustrative; rather, they 

worked with Darwin’s words to advance the arguments of his books. In The Expression of the 

Emotions, for example, Darwin contended that human emotions, and our means for expressing 

them, are not unique to us but inherited from animals. The engravings of snarling dogs and 

affectionate cats in the book’s earlier chapters thus prepared the way for the photographs of 

sneering, indignant, smiling humans in the later chapters.

Darwin Collection (1859–1903)

Charles Darwin

London, New York, and other locations. Books, pamphlets, letters, photographs, engravings, lithographs

Above: A comparison of a human and dog embryo at 

comparable stages of development. Descent of Man (1871), 

vol. 1, p. 15

Opposite: More Letters of Charles Darwin (1903), vol. 2, 

frontispiece
7 0 the national library of medicine

Photographs of the elderly Darwin helped to shape a benign and reverential image of 

him in the final decade of his life and in the years after his death. Here was not the wild-eyed, 

radical firebrand but the respectable paterfamilias, the learned philosopher, the wise lawgiver. 

He had begun his beard—an emblem of masculine authority for gentlemen of the period—to 

soothe his facial eczema but quickly recognized that it gave him a sage, even biblical, appearance. “Do I not look reverent?” he archly asked his relatives. His good friend the botanist 

Joseph Hooker joked that Darwin must have been the model for the fresco of Moses’ Descent 

from Mount Sinai (1864) in the House of Lords. A well-known and widely respected naturalist 

when the Origin appeared, Darwin worried about his reputation, and his family, friends, and 

allies worked strenuously to protect it, a task made more difficult by Darwin’s provocative 

arguments in The Descent of Man (1871) that not just the physical body of humans but our 

mental abilities, moral sense, and appreciation of beauty were part of our evolutionary 

inheritance from animals. And yet this giver of natural laws, the man whose views had raised 

such a stir among the orthodox in religion and science alike, would be buried in Westminster 

Abbey, the national church, in a public funeral. 

This particular photograph, however, did not appear publicly until 1903, when Darwin’s 

son Francis reproduced it as the frontispiece to the second volume of More Letters of Charles 

Darwin. An engraving made from one of the other photographs taken that day had been used 

by Francis as the frontispiece to the third volume of his Life and Letters of Charles Darwin in 

1887. Francis’s account of his father’s life, and his presentation of his father’s letters, played a 

major role in shaping the public’s understanding of Darwin the man. So it is fitting that this 

photograph, like earlier ones of Darwin, contains no signs of his profession—no microscope 

or scientific tomes or animal bones. Except, ever so subtly, for that vine entwining the pillar. 

Down House was covered with ivy and Virginia creeper, both of which had figured in 

Darwin’s Movements and Habits of Climbing Plants (1875). This was a book in which Darwin, ever 

the boundary blurrer, had shown that plants were capable of movement and suggested that 

natural selection was responsible for preserving and developing it. Darwin had recounted 

observing the slow, sweeping motion of the Virginia creeper’s tendrils, and he marveled at 

their adhesive power after attaching to a flat surface. “There are tendrils now adhering to 

my house,” he wrote in Climbing Plants, “which are still strong, and have been exposed to the 

weather in a dead state for fourteen or fifteen years.” Ill for much of his adult life, Darwin had 

doubted he would live very long. When, in 1844, he completed an essay laying out his theory 

of natural selection, the thirty-five-year-old Darwin left instructions for his wife, as his “most 

solemn & last request,” to secure its publication in the event of his sudden death. Many years 

later the septuagenarian Darwin posed for one of his final photographic portraits with that 

tenacious plant, still strong many years after its death, a fitting companion.

—Jonathan Smith

above, top: Monkey with a “curious crest” of hair to attract 

mates. Descent of Man (1871), vol. 2, p. 292

above: Tropical birds with brilliant plumage. Descent of Man

(1871), vol. 2, p. 74

The expression of emotions in cats and dogs. The Expression of the 

Emotions in Man and Animals (London, 1872), clockwise from top 

left: pp. 118, 128, 59, 55
7 2 the national library of medicine

A Flemish artist’s para-ethnography of colonial India

Manners, Customs and Dresses of the Hindoos (1799)

Balthazar Solvyns

Calcutta. Bound prints; 24 pp.; 251 plates, hand-colored etchings; 145⁄8 x 201⁄2 in. (37 x 52 cm)

By the late 1700s European printed images of India were beginning to shift from 

wonder-of-travel accounts by foreign artists, missionaries, and adventurers (“the 

picturesque”) to more orderly “objective,” “scientific” depictions by anthropological 

and colonial authorities (“the museological”). No single work better embodies this shift 

than Flemish artist Balthazar Solvyns’s Collection of Two Hundred and Fifty Coloured Etchings: 

Descriptive of the Manners, Customs and Dresses of the Hindoos.

First published in Calcutta in 1796, this extraordinary volume features large, full-page 

etchings, based on original drawings, of the “residents of Hindoostan,” divided into twelve 

sections including “Hindoo Casts [sic],” “Servants,” “Faquirs,” “Musical Instruments,” “Festivals,” 

and “Funerals.” Together, they comprise a compelling social portrait of late-eighteenth-century 

Bengal. In the vein of other contemporary encyclopedic intellectual projects, Solvyns sought 

systematically to represent both the unfamiliar, such as costumes of foreign lands, and the 

familiar, such as typologies of peasants, craftsmen, and street vendors. Indeed, his collection 

of etchings was a prototype for the “Company School” paintings of occupational castes done 

by Indian artists for the British in the early nineteenth century. But, as the historian Richard 

Hardgrave suggests, it was also an ethnographic survey: the first European visual attempt to 

systematically portray the hierarchical ranking of Hindu castes. Other scholars have called it 

one of colonial India’s first “para-ethnographies,” predating by almost a century the photographic surveys of castes and tribes organized by British authorities. 

The two plates shown here are typical of Solvyns’s approach: portraits that present 

social types. A Bauluk represents the category of Bengali dancing boy but also portrays a 

specific dancer observed during the feast of Jhulan Yatra, where boys often performed along 

with dancing girls in nautch performances. The Ooddoobahoo print, based on observations of 

spectacular self-mortification practices at temples around Calcutta, is even more interesting. 

An urdhbahu, “one with upraised arm,” is an ascetic who vows to keep an arm raised for twelve 

years or longer. Because fakirs had already become figures of fascination for Westerners, the 

Ooddoobahoo quickly became an iconic image of Indian asceticism.

Solvyns was not the first European artist to represent Calcutta life, but Manners far 

exceeds its predecessors in scope, scale, and ambition (by way of comparison, Thomas and 

William Daniells’s Views of Calcutta offered only twenty aquatints). A marginal Flemish painter 

of ships and seascapes, Solvyns had fled turmoil in Europe to seek his fortune in India, where 

he produced Manners at tremendous personal expense. But the project failed. By contemporary European standards the etchings were adjudged crude and unfashionable. In 1803 

Solvyns left India for France, where he redid the etchings for an exquisite folio of 288 plates, 

Les Hindous (Paris, 1808), which also failed owing to the Napoleonic Wars and the sheer cost of 

publication. But Manners, regarded then as a failure, succeeds brilliantly today as a tale of two 

cities: the colonial city, where British residents lived in their mansions, and Black Town, where 

migrants and Indian workers plied their trades. 

—Sita Reddy

above: In Les Hindous (Paris, 1808) Solvyns describes three 

similar dancing boys dressed as Krishna (with painted faces, 

peacock feathers, metal breast plate inscribed with names 

of gods, feet adorned with little bells) and remarks that their 

“costume and danse take their origine from the remotest 

antiquity.” Manners, sec. 3, pl. 5

opposite: According to Solvyns “an Ooddoobahoo is one who 

inflicts himself with pain and intolerable austerities, under 

the idea of its being acceptable to the Deity.” Some keep an 

arm raised until it becomes “immoveable,” others “sleep 

on a bed of pointed spikes and subject themselves to other 

incredible torments.” The ocher shawl suggests that the 

figure shown is a Shivaite. Manners, sec. 7, pl. 10
74 the national library of medicine

“A plain unvarnished tale”

Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa (1799)

Mungo Park 

London, 2d ed. Printed book; copper-plate engravings, 377 pp. plus appendices; 81⁄4 x 103⁄8 in. (20.5 x 26 cm)

T he Scotsman Mungo Park (1771–1806) was, by education and training, a physician 

and botanist. Prior to his voyage to Africa, he had worked in Sumatra as an assistant 

surgeon to the English East India Company. His account of his African travels “under 

the Direction and Patronage of the African Association in the Years 1795, 1796, and 1797” was 

sold through the London firm G. & W. Nicol. Sir Joseph Banks, the prominent English voyager 

and naturalist, and the broadly pro-slavery African Association were Park’s patrons. They 

were motivated by geographical and commercial interests in West Africa (which included raw 

materials, minerals, and the medicinal properties of native plants) and by a concern with the 

then two-thousand-year-old, two-part “Niger problem”: Which way did the river run (east-west 

or west-east) and where did it empty or reach the sea? Park solved the first part of the problem, 

establishing from direct observation that the “majestic Niger . . . [flows] slowly to the eastward.” 

Effectively, he confirmed others’ claims to this end but achieved fame by being the first 

European to see it and return safely. 

Travels is a mixture of personal adventure (Park was beaten and stripped naked by 

bandits, his notes surviving only in his hatband), commentaries upon the trading networks of 

the interior, observations upon natural history, and ethnographic descriptions of indigenous 

peoples (Park described the Mandingo as “a very gentle race”). It has a sympathetic tone 

consistent with Scottish Enlightenment moral commentary. Park condemned Moorish slavers 

for their effect upon local peoples, but in the eyes of some later critics he was insufficiently 

critical of slavery itself. 

Travels is not wholly Park’s work. Upon his return to London he was assisted by Bryan 

Edwards of the African Association, who helped with the narrative, and eminent geographer 

James Rennell, who helped revise the maps and provided a lengthy “Geographical Appendix” 

on the Niger problem as well as a map of his own showing (erroneously) the course of the river. 

Park presented his Travels as “a plain unvarnished tale, without pretensions of any kind, 

except that it claims to enlarge, in some degree, the circle of African geography.” Generally, 

the book was well received and praised for its contributions to geographical knowledge. It 

provided significant new details on peoples, customs, and trade in a continent little known to 

Europeans. Given its success and later reception as a work of Enlightenment adventuresome 

travel, it is noteworthy that Park later admitted, in conversation with Sir Walter Scott, Dugald 

Stewart, and Adam Ferguson, that he had omitted “many real incidents and adventures” for 

fear that his public might think his narrative incredible. 

That Park’s 1799 Travels is still in print is testimony to its enduring importance as a work 

of late Enlightenment geographical exploration and to its sympathetic depiction of West 

African peoples and cultures. Park never solved the second part of the Niger problem: he 

drowned at Boussa Falls on the Niger, at age thirty-five, on a second expedition to determine 

where the river reached the sea.

—Charles W. J. Withers

above: Detail from “A View of Kamalia.” Park arrived there 

on September 16, 1796. In the foreground are the huts of 

the Kafirs, as Park termed them; in the distance are the 

huts of the Bushreen. Travels, facing p. 252; illustration 

by J. C. Barrow “from a sketch by Mr. Park.”

opposite: “A View of a Bridge over the Ba-Fing or Black 

River.” This river, which Park crossed in April 1797 on his 

return journey, is a principal tributary of the Senegal River. 

Park (shown seated and with sketchbook in the lower righthand corner) reported that “the bridge is carried away every 

year by the swelling of the river in the rainy season.” Travels, 

facing p. 338; illustration by J. C. Barrow “from a sketch by 

Mr. Park.”
76 the national library of medicine

How to purify karmic obstructions of the dead

The Sutra of Great Liberation  ̄ (ca. 1880–1920)

Thar pa chen po’i mdo . . . Mongolia. Unbound manuscript on paper; 102 leaves, 

wrapped in silk with illuminated wooden boards; 31

⁄2 x 133⁄4 in. (9 x 35 cm)

A su ̄tra is a text ascribed to the Buddha himself. This scripture bears the full title 

Su ̄tra on Eliminating Misconduct by Means of Confession and Contrition Increasing 

toward Great Liberation, an Array to Attain Buddhahood. It corresponds to a still 

extant apocryphal Chinese work and is one of a group of Buddhist texts translated from 

Chinese into Tibetan. It sets out a method of purifying bad karma and defilements through 

rituals of confession and repentance and by chanting the names of different Buddhas. 

The earliest known Tibetan version is a fragment discovered in Dunhuang, which was 

a major stop on the ancient Silk Road. Tibetan catalogues of Buddhist collections prepared 

in the ninth century list this work, and it was included in several Kanjur editions of later 

centuries. (The Kanjur is a collection of mainly Buddhist works translated from Sanskrit, 

other Indian languages, and Chinese; the texts in the Kanjur, although predominantly of 

Indian origin, were compiled in Tibet.) In the late sixteenth century it was translated into 

Mongolian as the Yekede tonilγaγc

ˇi sudur (Great Liberator Su ̄tra) and, in revised form, was part of 

the Mongolian Kanjur edition prepared in the first half of the seventeenth century under the 

Mongol ruler Ligdan Khan (1588–1634). 

The worship of su ̄tras gained enormous popularity among the Mongols and also among 

the Tibetans of eastern Tibet. Soon a liturgy developed. Blo bzang nor bu shes rab (b. 1677 or 

1737), a Mongolian native and Gelugpa monk, composed and propagated a meditation ritual 

based largely on the “Means of Accomplishment” of Buddha and the sixteen Arhats (saintly 

predecessors or disciples of Buddha) and on the recitation ceremony to uphold the eight 

Maha ̄ya ̄na precepts of “abandoning” worldly pleasures and sins. This and other liturgical 

developments encountered vehement resistance from the monastic establishment. The eminent scholar Blo bzang chos kyi nyi ma (1737–1802) denounced these new practices in a brief 

work entitled Removing Mistakes in the Recitation Method of the Great Liberation Su ̄tra, Sealing the 

Mouths of Fools, but scholastic opposition could not stop its spread. 

Read aloud, or copied by commission in Mongolian or Tibetan writing, the su ̄tra enabled 

believers to accumulate religious merit and extinguish sins, and it was especially featured in 

funeral ceremonies to purify negative karmic obstructions of the deceased. In this copy the 

text is written in seven lines on black paper with an ink made of precious substances known as 

the “Seven Jewels” that can contain gold, silver, copper, coral, lazurite, malachite, and motherof-pearl. The long-leafed, unbound sheets are kept between two wooden boards covered with 

light blue brocade. Both boards possess sunken compartments with illuminations of the Eight 

Medicine Buddhas—Dharmakı ̄rtisa ̄gara, Abhijñara ̄ja, Bhaisajyaguru, and Buddha S�a ̄kyamuni 

(on the upper book cover) and Suna ̄man, Svaraghosa, Suvarn, abhadravimala, and As�okottama 

(on the lower). This beautifully embellished manuscript offers its reader the possibility of a 

long and healthy life and, freed from the consequences of moral wrongdoing, a good rebirth 

or even the “Great Liberation” from the cycle of rebirths: nirva ̄na.

—Olaf Czaja

above and opposite: The text of Thar pa chen po’i mdo is 

written on black paper with an ink that can contain gold, 

silver, copper, coral, lazurite, malachite, and motherof-pearl. The unbound sheets are kept between two 

wooden boards covered with brocade, each with sunken 

compartments containing illuminations of the Eight 

Medicine Buddhas.
7 8 the national library of medicine

Natural and supernatural wonders of creation 

Marvels of Things Created and Miraculous 

Aspects of Existing Things (mid-1200s)

Al-Qazwini 

Aj ̄a’ib al-makhl ̄uq ̄at wa ghar ̄a’ib al-mawj ̄ud ̄at. Western India; Persian translation, nineteenth century. 

Bound manuscript on paper; 210 leaves; 53

⁄4 x 81⁄2 in. (14.5 x 22 cm)

Al-Qazwini, an astronomer, geographer, geologist, mineralogist, botanist, zoologist, 

and ethnographer as well as cosmographer is best remembered as a compiler 

and synthesizer who raised cosmography to a literary genre. His Marvels of Things 

Created and Miraculous Aspects of Existing Things, often known as the Wonders of Creation, is the 

best-known Islamic cosmography. Abu Yahya Zakariya ibn Muhammad ibn Mahmud was born 

in 1203 in the city of Qazwin in northwest Iran, hence his sobriquet “al-Qazwini.” He spent 

much of his life in Baghdad until his death in 1283.

Al-Qazwini’s long text is divided into two discourses. In the first, on supraterrestrial 

things, he describes the heavenly bodies—the moon, sun, planets, and fixed stars—and the 

inhabitants of heaven, the angels. He ends with a consideration of the various calendars of the 

Arabs, Greeks, and Persians. The second discourse, four times as long as the first, treats terrestrial matters. It opens with a disquisition on the elements, the winds, and heavenly phenomena 

such as rainbows, thunder, and lightning. It then moves to the division of the earth into 

seven climes, describing all known seas, rivers, and islands, the causes of earthquakes, and the 

formation of mountains and wells. The author continues with a review of the three kingdoms 

of nature: mineral, vegetable (trees, plants, fruits, vegetables), and animal. The discussion of 

the animal kingdom, which forms half of the discourse, also considers man, his character and 

anatomy, and the characteristics of human tribes, and then moves to jinns and demons, animals, birds, and creeping things. A concluding section covers remarkable monsters and angels.

Al-Qazwini’s impact can be seen in the many copies of this work, which enjoyed widespread popularity in several languages. There are not only four different Arabic versions, but 

also numerous Persian and Turkish translations and revisions. Its subject matter lent itself to 

illustration, and many manuscripts have hundreds of paintings of astronomical tables as well 

as plants, animals, and various beings. 

The earliest copies in Arabic were produced in Iraq in the late thirteenth century during 

the author’s lifetime. Many others were made in later centuries for a wide range of patrons. 

The Ottoman prince S ̧ehzade Mustafa, son of Suleyman the Magnificent, transcribed one 

in Turkish, which was left unfinished at his execution in 1553. In the late sixteenth century, 

several fine Arabic copies were produced at the court of the ‘Adilshah sultans in the Deccan 

plateau in India; they imitated those made several centuries earlier. Persian translations were 

particularly fashionable in Iran and India. 

Manuscripts such as this Persian translation, copied in nineteenth-century India, were 

made for a popular audience, probably for sale on the open market. This copy, unsigned and 

undated, is illustrated with many full-page depictions of animals and other beings (opposite). 

The images were drawn in ink and then colored with wash to bring the text to life. It is 

no surprise, therefore, that al-Qazwini’s text was one of the most widely read books in the 

Islamic lands.

—Sheila S. Blair and Jonathan M. Bloom

above and opposite: Al-Qazwini’s narrative of exotic 

places, peoples, and creatures—monkey men, mermaids, 

animal-headed demons, and dragons—drew on a tradition 

stretching back to antiquity. The neckless humans (above, 

fol. 59a) and centaur (opposite, fol. 24b) would have been 

familiar to Herodotus (fifth century BCE).
8 0 the national library of medicine

Japan goes anatomical

Japan’s first book on human anatomy was published in 1759 by Toyo Yamawaki (1705–62), 

a court physician. In April 1754 Yamawaki dissected an executed criminal with permission from Tadamochi Sakai, the governor-general of the Kyoto region. Yamawaki’s 

 studies were published five years later as Zoshi. Despite deficiencies, such as not distin-

 guishing between large and small intestine, and the absence of the head (unavailable owing 

to the execution procedure), Zoshi became one of the foundations of modern medicine in Japan.

The second anatomical text produced in Japan, Kaishi Hen (Complete Notes on the Dissection 

of Cadavers), was published in 1772 by Shinnin Kawaguchi (1736–1811). Kaishi Hen was a true 

anatomical atlas. Kawaguchi was the official physician of the Koga domain, based in what is 

now Koga, Ibaraki, in Japan. In 1770 Kawaguchi personally dissected a criminal executed at the 

Kyoto execution grounds, and the book is a record of what he found. The studies of the head, 

brain, and eye were the first such dissections recorded in Asia. Kawaguchi’s dissection was 

also a key development in that it was personally performed by an actual physician (and not a 

surrogate or assistant). In little more than a decade, Japanese medical science had made great 

progress, and the beautiful colored prints in Kaishi Hen are much more precise than those of 

Yamawaki’s Zoshi. The illustrations were produced by Shukuya Aoki (? –1789), a student of the 

renowned nanga painter Taiga Ike. 

Kaishi Hen was followed in 1774 by the publication of Kaitai Shinsho, a translation of 

Ontleedkundige Tafelen, a Dutch version of Kulmus’s anatomy (see p. 84). A group of Japanese 

physicians led by Genpaku Sugita and Ryôtaku Maeno had taken this work with them as a 

reference when they observed a dissection of an executed criminal in Edo three years earlier. 

Astounded at its accuracy, Sugita and Maeno decided to translate it into Japanese. Kaitai 

Shinsho became well known in Japan and is even referred to in elementary school textbooks. It 

surpassed Kaishi Hen, which is now mostly known only to specialists.

When these books were published, the Tokugawa Shogunate had isolated Japan, banning 

its subjects from interacting with foreigners and allowing only restricted diplomatic and trade 

contacts. The only information that Japanese physicians could get about Western medicine 

was what filtered into the country via a Dutch trading post at Dejima in Nagasaki. 

There was another obstacle to the adoption of Western medicine: the cutting open of 

a body to examine what was inside was considered unethical and treated as taboo, requiring 

special permission from the authorities. Until these anatomies were published in the second 

half of the eighteenth century, people in Japan mainly used kampo herbal medicines derived 

from traditional Chinese medicine. The Western approach of using surgical instruments 

came as a great surprise to the Japanese. When physicians were suddenly confronted with 

representations of the structure of the human body—and the opportunity to dissect—they 

began to incorporate Western medical practices and ideas into their medicine. Because the 

new medicine had reached Japan via the Dutch, it was called rampo (Dutch-method) medicine, 

in contrast with kampo (Chinese-method) medicine. 

—Mami Hirose

Complete Notes on the Dissection of Cadavers (1772)

Shinnin Kawaguchi 

Kaishi Hen. Kyoto, Japan. Printed woodblock book, color illustrations; 28 leaves; 73⁄8 x 103⁄4 in. (18.7 x 27.2 cm)

above: Brain exposed by retracting membranes. Kaishi 

Hen, 19a

opposite: Rib cage, heart, and lungs exposed by cutting open 

rib cage. Kaishi Hen, 10b
8 2 the national library of medicine

above and opposite: Large and small intestines after 

removing fat, Kaishi Hen, 21a; muscles and attachments, 14a
8 4 the national library of medicine

Japanese anatomy, Dutch style

New Book on Anatomy (1774)

Johann Adam Kulmus and others; translated by Genpaku Sugita and Ryôtaku Maeno

Kaitai Shinsho. Tobu, Japan. Printed woodblock book, 5 vols.; 7 x 101⁄2 in. (17.7 x 26.5 cm)

A 

single drop of oil that spreads to cover an entire pond.” The influence of his 

book had been like that, Genpaku Sugita (1733–1817) mused near the end of his 

life. Reflecting on how its publication had changed the whole country, he felt, 

even in his eighties, like dancing with joy. 

Kaitai Shinsho (1774), literally “Understanding Body New Text,” initiated the modern transformation of Japan. As the first published Japanese translation of a Western anatomical text, it 

revealed many structures previously unknown to Japanese doctors and transplanted the idea 

of dissection as the foundation of medicine. Even more importantly it opened the door to the 

study of Western languages and science. Other translations on other subjects soon followed.

On the fourth day of the third month of 1771, Sugita, Ryôtaku Maeno (1723–1803), and 

Jun’an Nakagawa (1739–86) attended their first ever dissection of a human cadaver. It was 

a revelation: the three men were stunned by the close match between the organs exposed 

before them and the illustrations in the anatomical guide that they had brought along—a 

Dutch version of the German-language Anatomische Tabellen (1722) of Johann Adam Kulmus 

(1689–1745). True knowledge of the body, they concluded, was found here, in Western 

texts, rather than in the revered medical classics of ancient China. Japanese doctors had 

to completely relearn their science. As the three men walked home from the dissection, 

Sugita excitedly proposed the idea of translating Kulmus’s manual. They began work the 

next morning.

It was an ambition of dizzying boldness. A translation? Sugita and Nakagawa were doctors 

but they scarcely knew even the Western alphabet; Kulmus’s text was more than two hundred 

pages long. Maeno’s Dutch vocabulary was limited to some seven hundred or eight hundred 

words; there were no dictionaries or grammars to consult. The three, along with other collaborators, would sometimes spend whole afternoons puzzling over the sense of a single phrase. 

They inevitably mistook some meanings, and a few details (“talus bone,” for example) 

stumped them to the end. The retranslation later published by Sugita’s disciple Gentaku 

Ôtsuki (1757–1827), Chôtei Kaitai Shinsho (1826), would be more exact and complete. Still, their 

achievement was impressive: in just three years they crafted a translation that got most things 

mostly right. Many of their neologisms for alien concepts such as “nerve” and “artery” remain 

basic to modern Japanese.

Pictures are key to this tale. Beyond guiding the translators in their struggles to decipher 

words, anatomical plates inspired the very idea of translation: Sugita’s immediate conviction 

in the truth of Western medicine was a response to the precise and detailed realism of the 

European copper-plate engravings. The enthusiastic reception of Kaitai Shinsho, in turn, owed 

much to Naotake Odano (1749–80), an artist recently trained in Western techniques, who made 

woodblock prints from Kulmus’s illustrations. The opening of a new world of knowledge 

turned crucially on the transfer of a style of picturing that no one had seen before.

—Shigehisa Kuriyama

above: Some of Kaitai Shinsho’s illustrations were taken from 

sources other than Kulmus—a detail that reminds us that 

the translators consulted a variety of Western texts to help 

them understand their text. The frontispiece was drawn from 

Juan Valverde de Amusco’s Vivae imagines partium corporis 

humani (1566). Kaitai Shinsho, prologue vol., frontispiece

opposite: For Genpaku Sugita, Western anatomy offered not 

only new ideas about the body but a new and more precise 

way of seeing. The figures of the floating abdomen and the 

hanging dissected cadaver derive from Andreas Vesalius, 

De humani corporis fabrica (1543), but are reversed (in 

Vesalius the cadaver is suspended by his right shoulder and 

the abdomen appears in the upper right corner of the plate). 

Kaitai Shinsho, prologue vol., 9b and 10a
8 6 the national library of medicine

The heart and monarch reign supreme

William Harvey’s De motu cordis et sanguinis in animalibus is the single most famous 

exercise in medical research to have come down to us from the premodern age. In 

just seventy-two pages of somewhat cumbersome Latin prose, Harvey (1578–1657), 

the personal physician of King Charles I, dismantled centuries of Galenic medical dogma to 

present a new image of the body. Drawing on the observation of the still beating hearts of 

vivisected frogs, fish, dogs, and pigs, together with mathematical calculation and an elegantly 

simple experiment involving ligatures tied around a human arm, Harvey showed how blood 

flowed through the arteries and veins via the lungs, propelled by the contractions of the heart 

in systole. De motu cordis thus represented the triumph of the “new science” of the seventeenth 

century, a science in which observation and experiment took precedence over classical textual 

authority, no matter how ancient. 

Except that it didn’t quite happen in that way. A conservative by nature, in setting out his 

ideas on circulation, Harvey was in some respects following well-trodden ground: the view 

that blood moved through the infamous “invisible pores” of the septum of the heart (a key 

element in the Galenic system) had been denied by the Paduan anatomist Realdo Colombo 

(1516–59) in the mid-sixteenth century; the pulmonary transit of the blood had been posited 

by Arabic authorities in the thirteenth century, and again by the Protestant heretic Michael 

Servetus (1511?–53) some seventy years before De motu cordis appeared. In fact, what Harvey 

believed he was doing was reasserting the primacy of Aristotle’s biological views. As explained 

in the crucial eighth chapter of De motu cordis, Harvey’s own Aristotelian view of the primacy 

of the heart and of the importance of circular motion rested, in the end, on a metaphorical 

view of the world, in which Nature (“who does nothing in vain”) endlessly replicates herself. 

Blood circulates in the body, Harvey claimed, in much the same way that the planetary bodies 

move in circles, or that moisture, warmed by the sun, circulates in the atmosphere. The heart 

was much more than a mere pumping mechanism. Instead, its “fiery heat” represented a “store 

of life . . .the sun of our microcosm.” 

In restoring the heart to this quasi-mystical primacy Harvey, a Royalist, was also implicitly making a political statement. De motu cordis was extravagantly dedicated to King Charles, 

whom Harvey addressed as “the sun of his microcosm, the heart of the state.” The function 

of kings, hearts, and the sun was essentially the same: to spread life and succor (“power . . . and 

grace”) throughout their respective domains. In 1628, the year in which Harvey’s treatise 

appeared, the king had already embarked upon his disastrous confrontation with Parliament, 

which would lead to the eleven years of “personal rule” in which Charles attempted to govern 

the macrocosm of the state in much the same way that Harvey believed the heart “ruled” the 

body: in splendid isolation. 

—Jonathan Sawday

An Anatomical Essay on the Movement of the Heart 

and Blood in Animals (1628 and other editions)

William Harvey

Exercitatio anatomica de motu cordis et sanguinis in animalibus. Frankfurt-am-Main, Germany. 1st ed.; 72 pp. with etchings; 

51 ⁄2 x 73

⁄16 in. (14 x 18.2 cm)

Above: A frontispiece drawing of a very botanical looking 

human circulatory system, on a table with books, vines, and 

an Asclepius staff (with snake curled around), propped up 

against a portrait of William Harvey. Anatomical Exercises of 

Dr. William Harvey . . . (London, 1673)

Opposite: In De motu cordis, chap. 13, using a ligature on the 

arm, Harvey demonstrates how the valves and arteries are 

interconnected, and how the valves in the veins allow blood 

to flow back toward the heart. Exercitatio anatomica de motu 

cordis . . . (Leiden, 1737)
8 8 the national library of medicine

Draftsman’s pen, painter’s brush, anatomist’s scalpel

Drawings of Arteries (ca. 1797)

Charles Bell 

Edinburgh. Bound manuscript; ink and watercolors; 70 pp.; 71⁄2 x 105⁄8 in. (19.2 x 27 cm)

Sir Charles Bell (1774–1842) is a complex figure in the history of medicine. His name 

is associated with a number of achievements such as diagnosing Bell’s palsy (a type 

of facial paralysis) and Bell’s spasm (a facial tic), while his extensive engagement with 

the fine arts is well known and his work as an artist admired. In addition to his writings 

on anatomy, surgery, physiology, and facial expression, Bell also authored The Hand (1833), 

a work on natural theology designed to affirm the existence of God through the study of 

His works. Thus Bell has been treated both as a medical hero, especially for his work on the 

nervous system, and as a kind of marvel by virtue of being talented in both medicine and the 

visual arts. 

His theological concerns fit less readily into conventional narratives of medical progress. 

Yet they remind us that Bell thought hard about a range of major intellectual issues—the 

nature of human will, for instance—and in examining any one of his works it is helpful to 

bear this breadth in mind. Equally vital is his background. He was born in Edinburgh during 

the Enlightenment, when the city possessed a culture of extraordinary vitality in philosophy 

and literature as well as in the visual arts and medicine. Talented as Bell undoubtedly was, 

the love he manifested for studying the human body both intellectually and aesthetically and 

the expression of it through the manual activities of dissection, drawing, printmaking, and 

painting were by no means unusual. These points help us to appreciate the exquisite work in 

this manuscript with its twelve colored plates. 

This book is only attributed to Bell, since he nowhere signed or dated it; most likely 

it was produced before 1800, and hence by a young man. Many of the basic principles of 

illustrated anatomical works were well established by the end of the eighteenth century: a 

picture of a dissection, with specific parts identified by a letter, which in turn refers to an 

accompanying explanation. Bell’s illustrations are intriguingly diverse, visually speaking. 

They range from those that show body parts severed from their context, such as plate 2 (left), 

to images where the humanity of the dissected subject is inescapable, as in plate 4 (opposite). 

The fact that all the images are colored certainly adds to their appeal, lending them an elegant 

vitality. While the palette is rich and vivid, the subject matter is distinctly somber. 

Bell’s aesthetic is difficult to define and does not fit easily into familiar style terms. No 

doubt it was driven, at least in part, by natural theology, which found visual evidence of God’s 

design in His creation. Bell’s networks included major contemporary artists such as the 

Landseer brothers, hence placing his images in such artistic contexts would be particularly 

productive. Until such scholarship is further developed, however, we can at least enjoy, honor, 

and reflect upon this unusual work by paying it careful attention.

—Ludmilla Jordanova

above: “Plan of the Aortic System.” This image works at 

two levels: it is both a map of arteries and veins and a 

recognizable human form, yet without a clear outline—an 

absence that renders it somewhat surreal, especially the 

head. Drawings, pl. 2

opposite: Bell did not give this poignant plate a title. The 

“sketch,” in Bell’s own words, is from “the head of [a] black 

[showing] the most common and regular distribution of the 

branches of the Carotid Artery.” Drawings, pl. 4
9 0 the national library of medicine

The anatomical section as provocation

Atlas of Topographic Anatomy (1911)

Eugène-Louis Doyen with J.-P. Bouchon and R. Doyen; heliotypes by E. Le Deley 

Atlas d’anatomie topographique. Paris. Printed book, 7 parts in 4 vols.; 12 x 85⁄8 in. (30.5 x 22 cm)

Issued in seven installments by the flamboyant Parisian surgeon Eugène-Louis Doyen 

(1859–1916), this atlas of 279 “heliotyped” photographic plates of cross-sectioned 

bodies was a radical departure from past practice. In the early twentieth century the 

use of photography in anatomy was rare—most anatomies featured lithographic or engraved 

drawings and paintings. Rarer still was the representation of the human body in such a starkly 

uncompromising and aggressive fashion, as if, one critic argued, it was “nothing more than 

slices of the most common tree.” But more than that, Doyen’s atlas was highly theatrical and 

provocative in its poses. Ostensibly designed to instruct students and serve as a reference for 

colleagues, it seemed deliberately to flout professional decorum. 

It was created through a process he called megatomy, similar to the way microtomes were 

used to prepare histological slides but with much larger and thicker slices. Doyen preserved 

the bodies using a technique to harden the organs while maintaining their shape and color. 

After a series of injections with preserving fluids, the cadavers were left for two to six months, 

the length of time depending on levels of fat in the body. Having undergone this “veritable 

scientific mummification,” the bodies were secured on a mobile trolley mounted on rails and 

fed through the megatome, a five-meter-long band saw running on a six-horsepower engine. 

The slices, mounted and sequentially photographed for reproduction in the Atlas, were then 

retained for use in lectures and displays. The photographic plates were heavily retouched, 

resulting in a strangely arresting hybrid of photography and painting.

During his career the enormously prolific Doyen devised many new techniques and 

inventions, including an electrical treatment for cancer. The first surgical filmmaker, he 

produced and starred in more than sixty motion pictures between 1898 and 1906 (including 

one of a surgery to separate conjoined twins). Variously described as brilliant, extravagant, and 

a charlatan, the self-promoting Doyen was politically active on the left, a philanthropist and 

controversialist celebrated across Europe and America, even as he was deplored and ostracized 

by the medical establishment. 

His first attempt to display his anatomical slices ended in tumult. On April 19, 1910, 

more than two thousand students, professors, and socialites crammed themselves into the 

grand amphitheater at the Faculty of Medicine in Paris to see the opening of Doyen’s course 

in topographic anatomy. Many came to protest. During the lecture, which was illustrated by 

colored lantern slide projections of the photographic plates, Doyen stood by as a chorus of 

boos and whistles went up; paper planes thrown from the audience gave way to stones and 

fistfights broke out. When the faculty suspended the course Doyen moved on to other venues 

and continued to give lectures featuring projections, films, and dissections performed on the 

spot for audiences of up to a thousand.

Doyen believed that photography and motion pictures would come to play a vital role in 

surgical pedagogy and research. Most of his photographs were destroyed during World War II, 

leaving copies of this fragile atlas as a rare material trace of his legacy. 

—Lisa O’Sullivan

94 the national library of medicine

Precognitive hands

Chiromancy, the art of palm reading, thrived in Renaissance Europe. It worked on 

the premise that the geography of the hand could be read. The three main lines, 

for instance, could be correlated with the principal organs: heart, brain, and liver. 

The geography of the hand—a “mountain” was formed at the base of each digit, joined by 

“plains”—could be read alongside a celestial map. Manuals of chiromancy circulated in 

manuscript from the fourteenth century and were printed in increasing numbers through 

the seventeenth century. Chiromancy was akin to astrology (divination from the stars) and 

physiognomy (the reading of the face). After around 1600, following a papal bull denouncing chiromancy and other forms of divination, some authors sought to explain chiromancy, 

like physiognomy, as wholly natural. Others, such as the English physician Robert Fludd 

(1574–1637), developed the astrological components of the art. Fludd was known for his 

elaborately illustrated tomes on occult philosophy and disputes with the French theologian 

and philosopher Marin Mersenne (1588–1648).

As more people began to practice the art its legitimacy was increasingly challenged, and 

questions about its principles and plausibility featured in debates about occult philosophies 

and the theological legitimacy of divination. Concerns about the operation of natural causes 

and the extent of free will were at the root of these debates. If the lines on the hand were 

caused by the positions of the planets at the time of one’s birth, then one’s hand could be 

read as accurately as, or more accurately than, one’s nativity. Did a chiromancer read the 

natural signs of one’s character, like a physiognomer? Or, like an astrologer, did he traffic 

with unnatural spirits and meddle in free will? Or was he simply a charlatan peddling causal 

implausibilities in the name of an ancient art? 

The Palmistry Entertainment was assembled in 1661 by Johann Praetorius (1630–80), professor of philosophy at the University of Leipzig and a devoted student of divination, especially 

through the reading of hands. The nine works in this volume provided an up-to-date compendium of the major works on chiromancy by some of Europe’s leading scholars. For instance, 

Praetorius reprinted chapters on chiromancy from Fludd’s multivolume Utriusque cosmi . . .

historia (History . . . of the Two Worlds) (1617–26), as well as an extract from a lost work of Nicolaus 

Pompeius (1591–1659), professor of elementary mathematics at the University of Wittenberg, 

where he lectured on chiromancy. Also represented in the Ludicrum chiromanticum Praetorii is the 

Jesuit scholar Caspar Schott (1608–66), who treated on chiromancy in his massive work about 

the magic of art and nature published in four volumes between 1657 and 1659. At the opposite 

end of the occult spectrum from Fludd, Schott explained chiromancy in natural terms and 

rejected any astrological associations. The longest work in the volume is by Praetorius himself. 

By the end of the seventeenth century chiromancy, like other forms of divination, had 

been discredited as an intellectual system, even if it was explained naturally. Scholars ceased 

writing systematic expositions of chiromancy, but diviners continued to specialize in palmistry as a form of fortune-telling.

—Lauren Kassell

The Palmistry Entertainment of Praetorius, or 

The Treasury of Palmistry (1661)

Johann Praetorius with works by Robert Fludd, Nicolaus Pompeius, and Caspar Schott

Ludicrum chiromanticum Praetorii; seu Thesaurus chiromantiae . . . Leipzig. Printed book, 1,026 pp.; 63⁄8 x 71⁄2 in. (16 x 19.4 cm)

above: Ludicrum chiromanticum Praetorii engraved title page 

emblematizes chiromancy’s practical and philosophical 

components. In the center of the page a pair of hands flank a 

face; planetary symbols adorn their key features. 

opposite: Pompeius’s Chiromantiae praecognita is supported 

by a foldout page listing the nota, symbols that are drawn by 

connecting the points in the hands. 
96 the national library of medicine

“Against the normal course of nature”

On Human Conception and Generation (1587)

Jakob Rueff, trans. Wolfgang Haller 

De conceptu, et generatione hominis. Frankfurt-am-Main. Printed book with woodcuts, 92 pp.; 51⁄2 x 73⁄4 in. (14 x 19.5 cm) 

Jakob Rueff (1500–58; also known as Ruf ) was a surgeon who rose to the top of Zurich’s 

 medical profession, becoming the Stadtartzt, or chief city doctor. He came from a 

modest family background and did not have a university education, but his talent as a 

 physician and humanist brought him to prominence. In addition to his interest in the 

 history of physicians and astrologers, he was an enthusiastic playwright, drawing his themes 

from the Bible and folklore. 

Rueff capitalized upon a burgeoning print culture to create and circulate medical and 

humanist knowledge in broadsheets, pamphlets, and books. His medical writing includes 

works on the eye and tumors, but his most successful publication was De conceptu, et generatione 

hominis. It was first published in 1554, in a German edition written by Rueff, and then immediately afterward in a Latin translation by Wolfgang Haller. (Dutch and English translations 

from 1591 and 1637 respectively indicate that there was a long-lived market for the work.) As 

the dual-language approach indicates, the book aimed at a wide audience and was intended 

to appeal to physicians, humanists, and also midwives. Rueff was responsible for the training 

and oversight of all midwives in Zurich and had a special interest in this group of readers. The 

book’s broad content, conveyed in visual as well as textual form, contributed to its popularity 

and usefulness for training purposes. It addressed medical instruments and ingredients, 

impediments to conception, the development of the fetus, and also—in a series of lively 

images—the positions that the fetus could take in the womb. Rueff also examined more 

esoteric topics, such as the capacity of the Devil to generate children, while another chapter 

featured “monstrous births,” the term used to describe physically deformed children. Giving 

full play to his medical and humanist interests, he described recent local births as well as 

others dating back to Roman antiquity.

The 1587 Latin edition was produced by the Feyerabend publishing house in Frankfurtam-Main. It was based on the new Feyerabend edition of 1580, which was notable for its 

updated woodcut illustrations by the prominent printmaker Jost Amman (1539–91). While 

Amman closely followed the earlier woodcuts by Jos Murer (1530–80), he rendered many of the 

new figures more elegantly, and in the chapter on monstrous births, in particular, he featured 

a sequence of more animated, cherubic children’s bodies. Amman added several new scenes, 

including one juxtaposing females assisting a woman giving birth with men pointing to the 

stars, apparently discussing the child’s natal horoscope. Another striking new image depicts 

Adam and Eve standing beside the tree of knowledge. A skeleton has replaced the tree’s trunk, 

with the serpent twisted around its shoulders. Death’s presence reminds Rueff’s readers of the 

fleeting nature of human life and closes the circle of human experience.

—Jennifer Spinks

above: The widely reported 1547 “Monster of Crackow,” a 

child apparently born with a devilish face and tail, claws 

instead of hands, eyes on his stomach, and animal heads 

growing from his elbows, knees, and chest. De conceptu, 

fol. 43 recto 

opposite: The left-hand page depicts a child born with the 

head of its unformed twin growing from its stomach; the date 

is not given. The right-hand page depicts conjoined twins 

born in Switzerland in 1543; the caption reminds the reader 

of a similar Swiss case from 1553. De conceptu, fols. 39 verso 

and 40 recto
9 8 the national library of medicine

Two beings. . . melted inward

Monstra: A Collection of Sixty-five Drawings, in Part Colored, Representing 

Monstrosities in the Museum of G. W. Klinkenberg (ca. 1820–40)

G. W. Klinkenberg

Leyden. Bound hand-drawn, colored plates; 50 sheets; 181⁄2 x 213⁄8 in. (47 x 54.3 cm)

T he word “monster” comes from the Latin monstrare, “to show,” and from the derivative 

of monare, “to warn.”

 Two boys, one head. One boy, two heads. One woman, three breasts. One sheep, two 

heads. One pig, no head. Monstra (“monsters”) is from the collection of G. W. (or G. J.) Klinkenberg, known to us only through this collection of original drawings.

(Left, opposite, and page 100, top) Cephalothoracopagus (twins conjoined at the head and 

thorax). Child or children? The caption, translated from the Dutch (by Willem Mulder), reads:

A human monster after a full-term pregnancy

There are 2 boys fused at the breast and part of the abdomen 

There are 2 umbilicals and 2 heads that make a whole.

They lived for 2 days. . .

A profile pressed against a fun-house mirror—a fictional monster. It is as if two beings, in 

turning toward each other, melted inward so that half of each intended face is now deep inside 

the skull. Is there room in the dark for inner faces and one brain? Topped by uneven brows 

and a full mop of hair, the face we see gazes downward with a scowl of worldly disdain. If these 

eyes opened at all, perhaps each glimpsed a scene neither much liked. 

On the back of the head a pair of vestigial ears has squeezed out at the base of the skull. 

Pieces of the missing features have begun to form, but there is no chance that there will be a 

second face on the backside of this skull, as in an ancient Janus.

Of the fused Heads, here one can see the 2

ears are situated close to each other

Above there is an oblong form with

a narrow little growth to be seen.

The “narrow little growth,” is it another face? I turn the drawing upside down, a face appears. 

Elongated, the extra folds and ears turn into a fleshy nose, beard and horns curl like ram 

horns. Did anyone at the time of this birth also see this devil in the nape of the neck? 

(Page 100, bottom) Bicephalus (double-headed conjoined twins). 

Two fused to another

in Normandy

Born in Havre de Grace at Honfleur

Boys.

Being of 9 months pregnancy

lived for 3 days and there

baptized

Henrij and Jaque

above and opposite: Cephalothoracopagus conjoined twins
100 the national library of medicine hidden tre a sure 101

Jasseau

(1829)

Original

Is in the museum

of G. J. van Klinkenberg

The legs, feet, arms, hands, necks, heads of these brothers seem perfect and complete. The 

center of their bodies, strained and warped: incomplete division, commingled organs. If only 

they had been able to pull away from each other, become unstuck before birth.

In a flip book of conjoined twins how anatomies change! Arms flail, embrace, legs kick, 

entwine, a dance step is executed.

(Opposite) A sequential dissection of a headless fetus. This lumpish sack with vestigial 

hooves is a pig with no head and no labels. The skin is unbroken, the dome smooth between 

the shoulders. The drawings of the crooked skeleton and sausage-like body lack charm. But 

the artist has turned the creature inside out, pulled the glistening organs out of the animal’s 

interior, hanging one of them (heart? liver? spleen?) from string pinned above, where it 

dangles, like a blood-filled medallion or badge of honor, around the headless neck. Lacy 

tissues, gelatinous sacks, beautifully coiling intestines. The boundary between artistic spectacle 

and pathological specimen is thin. Opened-up, translucent bags, views of internal perfection, 

lacking all external charm, but delicate, magical.

(Page 102) Three-breasted woman.

Picture of a woman with three 

Breasts. She let her Child suck at 

my house pictured by 

painter Banting in request of Professor Suerman

Signed in the year 1833 

G. J. Klinkenberg

this woman was married to a

bricklayer 

Consider the drawing of the woman’s torso in pastel shades, soft and haunting. We expect 

bilateral symmetry in our external parts: nostrils, eyes, ears, legs, arms, breasts—two of 

each—there must be some mistake. What did the neighbors of the bricklayer’s wife think? 

Was her condition a wonder or a curse? If she gives birth, does she nurse a litter? It is said that 

Anne Boleyn, second wife of Henry VIII, besides having six fingers on one hand also possessed 

a third breast. 

(Page 103) The sheep with two heads. Rough but lush, curling hair, furry conjoined ears, 

lolling tongues. Did it live in a sideshow, or on a farm where you could pay the farmer to take 

a look?

Centuries ago (and throughout the world today) doctors, scholars, priests, and ordinary citizens have asked simple questions about anomalies, trying to wrestle the nature and numbers 

into line. Was this kind of birth caused by human behavior? Did the mother sleep with a bear? 

Was she a witch? How do you determine the number of human beings? Is it by the number of 

legs, arms? How many souls, one or two? Mystery and much sorrow. . . 

—Rosamond Purcell

Above, top: Cephalothoracopagus conjoined twins

above: Bicephalus conjoined twins

above: Progressive dissection of a headless pig
102 the national library of medicine

above: The three-breasted woman

opposite: The sheep with two heads
104 the national library of medicine

The two and only Chang and Eng

On the United Siamese Twins (1829–31, 1874)

Compiler unknown

England. Scrapbook, unpaginated; 10 x 125⁄8 in. (25.4 x 32 cm)

One of the most notable show-business acts of the nineteenth century was the ten-year 

run of Chang and Eng Bunker, the original Siamese Twins, who shared a liver via a 

small band of tough flesh. Brought from their native Siam by an English sea captain 

in 1829, they toured the United States (for a time, under the aegis of P. T. Barnum), England, 

Europe, Canada, Cuba, and South America.

Their English tour of 1829–31 inspired an anonymous collector to make this scrapbook, 

with the words “The Siamese Twins” written in ink on the top of each page. Pasted neatly 

into the book are tickets, handbills, articles, satirical prints, news clippings—a hodgepodge 

of paper shards relating to the twins and their stay in England. Like most “prodigies” (as 

they were known in that era) Chang and Eng had to do more than simply satisfy the curiosity 

seekers. To draw a large audience of ticket-paying customers, prodigies had to put on a show, 

and the more varied the better. The brothers performed feats of strength, somersaults, and 

gymnastics and topped competing acts by playing the badminton-like game of battledore and 

shuttlecock. The scrapbook holds five illustrations of Chang and Eng with rackets in their 

hands. (Did they play singles or doubles? Their opponents are never depicted.)

Chang and Eng were relentless merchandisers. Classified ads, posters, and handbills in 

the scrapbook tout the sale of keepsakes from the twins and souvenir pamphlets. And the 

promotional material always comes with a claim: the twins have been examined and authenticated by “many scientific men.” In an era filled with humbug and hokum (no less so than now) 

the brothers were the real McCoy, and it paid constantly to remind everyone of it. You saw the 

brothers, you saw the two and only.

The medical examinations were also staged as shows. One such “performance,” at 

Egyptian Hall, a large theater in Piccadilly, is the subject of a lengthy pamphlet (also included 

in the scrapbook). The examination featured this experiment: The attending physicians, 

“on the suggestion of Doctor Roget” (he of the Thesaurus), placed “a silver teaspoon. . .on the 

tongue of one of the twins, and a disk of zinc on the tongue of his brother; when the metals 

thus placed were brought into contact, the youths both cried out ‘Sour, sour.’ ” Their bodies 

had made a complete electrical circuit.

The nineteenth century prided itself on willful individuality, on extraordinary men 

rising from the mob, but here was a stunning example of that and, well, something else: an 

“inseparability” that was single and double. And a consciousness that was private and shared. 

On the United Siamese Twins revels in the display of their conjoined twinness and follows 

them more than forty years, to their double death in 1874. A few hours after Chang died of a 

blood clot in his brain, Eng is said to have died of shock. The scrapbook is a reliquary of the 

promotional haze of entertainment, commerce, and science that surrounded the twins. Chang 

and Eng didn’t invent that cultural stew but they nearly perfected it. 

—James Taylor

above: One of the many posters, souvenir booklets, 

tickets for shows, letters, news clips, magazine articles, 

lithographs, political cartoons, and testimonials collected in 

the National Library of Medicine’s Chang and Eng scrapbook. 

On the United Siamese Twins

opposite: In grammar a “copulative conjunction” is the 

connection of linguistic units (words, clauses, or sentences, 

by words such as and, plus, or also) that have an additive 

or causal relation. A greater meaning arises, a whole 

greater than the sum of its parts, when the related ideas 

are conjoined. The print’s title indicates that the twins' 

connection was of just such a type. 

overleaf: A typical spread of pages from the scrapbook. 
Very brief headnote to describe the object
108 the national library of medicine

“A spectacle subservient to the gaze of others”

Facts Connected with the Life of James Carey (1839)

James Akin 

Philadelphia. Printed pamphlet with lithographs, 8 pp.; 51⁄4 x 73⁄4 in. (13.5 x 19.5 cm)

When James Carey died in 1838 his secret was laid bare. People had always been 

born with atypical anatomies, but in the nineteenth century a new scientific, 

medical discourse emerged. Doctors thrilled to confront unusual cases such as 

Carey’s, debating whether “true hermaphrodites” existed in the human species. Earthworms, 

snails, and some reptiles could be hermaphrodites, these experts argued, but not humans. 

The author of this pamphlet, the engraver and caricaturist James Akin (ca. 1773–1846), believed 

otherwise: he hoped that the postmortem examination of James Carey’s body would “elucidate 

if not confirm the hypothesis that hermaphroditic characters exist.”

Much more than an autopsy report, Akin’s pamphlet shows, in style and tone, the 

excitement that anomalous bodies generated. Audiences liked to read about oddities of 

various sorts, scientists were keen on collecting unusual specimens, and physicians yearned 

to dissect extraordinary cadavers. In addition to the account of Carey’s autopsy, Facts Connected 

with the Life of James Carey, Whose Eccentrick Habits Caused a Post mortem Examination by Gentlemen of the Faculty to Determine Whether He Was Hermaphroditic includes a witty poem (“Carey’s 

life, outré and strange!/Illustrates nature’s freaks in change”), lithographic illustrations, and a 

sentimental biography (“Conscious that busy intermeddlers might surprise him sleeping, and 

when in a state of nudity, discover his strange malconformation [sic], he continually girded his 

pantaloons securely about his loins”).

“Hermaphrodite” was the term most frequently used in the eighteenth and nineteenth 

centuries to designate ambiguously sexed individuals. Pejorative labels were also frequently 

applied. Though Akin’s pamphlet employs terms such as “unfortunate monstrosity,” it also 

includes an empathic narrative of Carey’s life.

Akin begins by portraying Carey as more beast than man, a stooped hunchback who 

exhibited “features of a grotesque melancholy aspect” and emitted “preternatural discharges 

from his nasal vessels” that could cause vomiting among onlookers. But later in the pamphlet 

Carey is presented as a human being, a moral creature. Whether working at a foundry or driving a stagecoach, Akin tells us, Carey maintained a “firm and manly deportment,” despite his 

“effeminate appearance,” and was honest, loyal, and punctual in attending to his duties. 

The sentimental account of Carey’s relationships with his employers and others who 

befriended him was designed to elicit sympathy. Just as readers could be titillated and horrified by the descriptions and images of Carey’s extraordinary genitalia, they might also be 

moved by his spiritual redemption: he was a human being with a soul capable of salvation. 

Upon death Carey’s body became available for observation and dissection, his secrets 

flayed open for sensationalist pamphleteering and, more than a hundred years later, historical 

scholarship. But the living Carey never confronted the surgeon’s knife. Surgical intervention 

to “normalize” bodies became standard practice later in the nineteenth century. So it remains 

today, though increasingly challenged by bioethicists and the intersex-rights movement. 

—Elizabeth Reis 

above: James Akin made this illustration at Carey’s 

postmortem examination in Philadelphia on June 5, 1838. 

It bears Akin’s attestation that attending physicians approved 

his anatomical representation of Carey’s ambiguous 

genitals. Facts, after p. 8

opposite: James Carey driving his coach. Facts, frontispiece 

and title page; lithographs by James Akin
110 the national library of medicine

Schizophrenic cinema

Schizophrenia was a new diagnosis in interwar American medicine. Invented in 1911 by 

Swiss psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler (1857–1939), after World War I the term gradually supplanted “dementia praecox,” which was associated too closely with German psychiatry. 

When Symptoms in Schizophrenia was shot, roughly twenty years later, the nature and origins of 

schizophrenia remained wholly unknown (as they still do today): the film’s intertitles declare 

the disorder “chronic” and make no reference to treatment, recovery, or cure. As a consequence 

schizophrenia could be “defined” only by observing and describing a set of diffuse psychic 

symptoms, none of which could be found in all cases. 

James Daniel Page, professor of psychology at the University of Rochester, supervised the 

filming. Shot with only a stationary camera, his silent, twelve-minute film records eighteen 

patients in scenes of fifteen to forty-five seconds. The inmates, white adults of both sexes, stand 

or sit, mostly outdoors, at a redbrick institution with porches and well-kept lawns. An opening 

sequence depicts a large gathering of men socializing on park benches on hospital grounds. 

Each patient performs a single symptom. Extravagant bodily symptoms predominate: 

gestures, tics, and postures. The longest scenes almost take the form of vaudeville skits: in 

“motor catatonia,” a staff member arranges the arms of patients in amusing poses (opposite, 

bottom center); in “echopraxia,” a patient reflexively mimics the movements of the interviewing doctor (left). Page presumably made his film to provide in-house instruction about schizophrenia and its subtypes. A few written sentences are interspersed throughout, but there is no 

narrative coherence. The hospital and suited authority figures are unidentified. No patient 

names or pseudonyms are given. Viewers learn nothing about the cases or about schizophrenia 

as a psychological process. Eerily, the faces of many inmates are obscured: in some segments 

a blindfold blocks the patient’s sight, as if he had been placed before a firing squad; in others 

holes have been cut out for the patient’s eyes. The patients perform for the camera and seem 

less crazy than comical. Their jerky, exaggerated movements are almost Chaplinesque. 

During the second quarter of the twentieth century the asylum was the preferred 

destination for those deemed insane; more than four hundred thousand people accumulated 

in mental hospitals across the country. A generation later, anti-psychiatric sentiment and the 

patients’ rights movement led to the emptying of the asylum: patients were “decarcerated” onto 

streets and into prisons and flophouses. Did Page’s subjects suffer this fate? How many underwent insulin coma therapy or were surgically sterilized for eugenic reasons, two widespread 

practices at state asylums in the 1930s? How many were given electroshock or lobotomized in 

the 1940s and 1950s? And how many of them would endure until the advent of chlorpromazine 

(1950), the first antipsychotic compound, and the era of modern psychopharmacology? 

This remarkable film, silent, mysterious, disjointed, and disturbing, doesn’t ask or answer 

these questions. Its abrupt ending—without credits, commentary, or closure—only adds to 

the feeling of psychic fragmentation it so powerfully documents. 

—Mark S. Micale

Symptoms in Schizophrenia (ca. 1930)

James D. Page 

Rochester, New York. Motion picture, black-and-white, silent, intertitles, 16mm; 12:00
112 the national library of medicine

A dermatological photo-clinic

Clinical Collection on Dermatology and Syphilology (1886–90)

Nikolai Porfir’evich Mansurov 

Klinicheski ̆ı sbornik po dermatologı ̄i i sifilologı ̄i. Moscow. Printed journal, 4 vols. in 1, with wood engravings 

and original, tipped-in albumen photographic prints, 386 pp.; 63

⁄8 x 91⁄2 in. (16.3 x 24.3 cm)

Nikolai Mansurov (1834–92) was the first dermatologist in Russia (and one of the 

first anywhere) to use photography systematically in medical illustration. “Photography,” he wrote, “provides a particular visual aid,” allowing “comprehensive and 

absolutely true” representations of skin diseases, “which could hardly be achieved in other 

fields of medicine.” Since Russia lacked specialized periodicals in dermatology, Mansurov 

began to issue (at his own expense) an annual Clinical Collection on Dermatology. Begun in 1886, 

the Collection consisted of Mansurov’s reports on new diagnostic techniques, therapeutic 

treatments, and interesting cases encountered in his practice, as well as occasional clinical 

lectures. In five years he issued four volumes. What made Mansurov’s Collection unique was the 

use of high-quality photographic illustrations of his patients, five to eight per volume. Since 

no technology yet existed that could reproduce photographs, each one had to be printed in 

numerous copies and then glued by hand to a special paper insert with handwritten captions. 

Notwithstanding the resulting high cost of the volumes, Collection enjoyed wide popularity 

among Russian dermatologists.

Mansurov had graduated with honors from Moscow University Medical School in 

1858 and joined the staff of a clinic run by Fedor Inozemtsev (1802–69), the school’s star 

professor of surgery. The next year Inozemtsev arranged for Mansurov to travel abroad for 

advanced training in dermatology, particularly syphilis. Mansurov spent almost three years 

studying with the field’s foremost authorities, including Philippe Ricord (1800–89) in Paris 

and Ferdinand Hebra (1816–80) in Vienna. Then he went to Turin, where he began work on 

“syphilization,” a controversial new treatment for syphilis invented by the French physician 

Alexander Auzias-Turenne (1812–70) and propagated by Casimiro Sperino (1812–94). Modeled 

after smallpox vaccination, the new method involved injecting patients with material from 

their own syphilitic ulcers. Mansurov conducted extensive investigations and wrote his dissertation on syphilization, which he defended upon his return to Moscow in 1862. Although 

his examiners were skeptical they could not deny the quality and intensity of his research, and 

they awarded him the doctor of medicine degree. 

The next year Mansurov opened Russia’s first systematic course on “syphilis and skin 

diseases.” It was not required in the curriculum, but given the enormous spread of syphilis and 

other skin diseases in Russia there was no shortage of students. However, teaching was difficult. 

There were no Russian textbooks on the subject and no specialized clinics where students 

could study dermatology and treat patients. Although Mansurov was not paid for teaching and 

had to earn an income through an extensive private practice that occupied much of his time, in 

1864 he published the first Russian textbook on skin diseases, compiled from the latest German 

and French manuals and monographs. At his own expense he created a large collection of 

colored wax models of various skin lesions and arranged for students to visit his private patients. 

Mansurov’s considerable efforts did not advance his career. In 1869, when the Medical 

School finally established a separate department of venereal and skin diseases, the position 

above: Clinical Collection 2 (1887) carried an article on “hairy 

people” inspired by Mansurov’s encounter with an actual 

case of polytrichia. Its cover featured a wood engraving of a 

“hairy man.”

opposite: The article on hairy people includes a photograph 

of Mansurov’s patient Adr. Evtikhiev (lower left) and a 

photograph of “the Bearded Lady” Julia Pastrana (1834–60), 

who toured Europe and North America in the 1850s (upper 

left). Pastrana died in childbirth while in Moscow in 1860. 

Anatomy professor Ivan M. Sokolov performed the autopsy 

and embalmed her body, along with that of her stillborn 

son, who was delivered by caesarean section. Apparently 

a colleague alerted Mansurov to the autopsy photographs 

preserved at the Anatomy Institute of Moscow University 

Medical School, and he included two (upper and lower right) 

in a follow-up article on differences between “acquired” and 

“hereditary” polytrichia. Clinical Collection 2 (1887), facing 

pp. 24 and 40; 3 (1889), facing pp. 12 and 14 
114 the national library of medicine hidden tre a sure 115

of professor and chairman went to his former classmate Dmitrii Naidenov (1835–84), who 

had distinguished himself only by courting Moscow’s rich and powerful. Undiscouraged, 

Mansurov continued his teaching and research, publishing regularly in Russian and foreign 

medical periodicals. In 1875 he produced a voluminous monograph on tertiary syphilis, 

focusing on brain damage and psychoses and their treatment. He maintained close contacts 

with colleagues in Europe and became a corresponding member of dermatological societies in 

Paris, Berlin, and Vienna. 

Mansurov finally obtained a professorial position at the Medical School in 1884, and the 

next year he became chairman of its department of venereal and skin diseases. His appointment coincided with important developments that enabled him to advance his specialty. In 

1884 the Russian government adopted a new university statute that made venereal and skin 

diseases a required course for medical students. Almost simultaneously Moscow University 

expanded its medical school with a new “clinical town” that consisted of several large specialized hospitals attached to corresponding departments such as pathology, surgery, and internal 

diseases. Unfortunately the university did not afford Mansurov’s department its own clinic, 

only a ward with twenty beds in an old city hospital. Determined to create a solid clinical base 

for research and teaching, Mansurov turned to private patrons and in a few years raised more 

than 200,000 rubles to build Moscow’s first hospital for skin disease. 

Mansurov’s appointment also provided him with his own laboratory and easy access to 

patients at the university’s numerous hospitals. He published “Bacteria in Syphilis” (1885), a 

lengthy paper that described new bacteriological research methods and discussed the role of 

bacteria in infectious diseases, particularly syphilis. In 1890 Mansurov issued a second edition 

of his popular Collection. But that was its last year of publication. The next year, the Moscow 

Dermatological and Venereological Society (established with Mansurov’s active involvement) 

began issuing its own journal. Late in 1892 a large building for his dermatological hospital was 

finally completed. But in November, at the peak of his career, Mansurov died from “influenza, 

complicated by pleuritis.”

—Nikolai Krementsov

above: Two patients (a grown man and nine-year-old boy) 

suffering from “malignant baldness,” alopecia areata. 

Clinical Collection 3 (1889), facing p. 20; 1 (1890), facing p. 52

above left: A patient with a very rare disorder, “skin horns” 

(cornii cutanum). Note the “collage” technique of combining, 

in one illustration, two photographs of the same patient 

taken from different angles. Clinical Collection 3 (1889), 

facing p. 8

above right: A patient with syphilis-induced loss of 

fingernails (onychia syphilitica). Clinical Collection 3 (1889), 

facing p. 24
116 the national library of medicine

Grotesque deformities in fancy presentation

One Hundred Case Histories Concerning the Origin, Course, 

Treatment, and Cure of the Falcadina Disease (1826)

Giuseppe Vallenzasca

Cenni Istorici Concernenti l’Origine, l’Andamento la Cura e la Cessazione della Malattia Falcadina. Milan, Italy. 

Bound manuscript on paper, 184 + 20 pp.; ink and watercolor illustrations; 67

⁄8 x 91⁄2 in. (17.5 x 24 cm)

In 1826 Dr. Giuseppe Vallenzasca presented an extravagantly illustrated and embellished 

manuscript—written with florid penmanship on gilt-edged paper—to His Imperial 

Highness, the Most Serene Prince and Lord Ranieri, the viceroy of Lombardy and 

Veneto. Vallenzasca was a man of many parts: physician; hospital administrator; member and 

correspondent of scientific and medical societies in Vienna, Bologna, Venice, Treviso, and 

Rovigo; recipient of the Grand Gold Medal for Civil Merit (with ribbon) from the imperial 

court in Austria; as well as a skilled artist and an adroit diplomat and courtier. The manuscript 

was an account of a mysterious and terrible disease, la Falcadina (probably a strain of syphilis), 

which had long afflicted a mining district in the Tyrolean Alps.

The magnificent lettering and embellishments came from the hand of a talented professional scribe. The illustrations, perhaps from the hand of Vallenzasca himself, and reproduced 

from an original source at half their actual size (Vallenzasca tells us), are a strange, stunning 

blend of Golden Book and DC Comics with a soupçon of Poussin. The patients—miners, 

milkmaids, humble people—display their inflammations and ulcerations in disturbing, 

brightly colored portraits, often with ghastly smiles. 

Prince Ranieri, to whom the manuscript is dedicated, was a Hapsburg archduke who 

presided over the imperial court in Milan when Stendhal lived there. He laid the first stone 

in the railroad bridge over the lagoon from terra firma to Venice. He presided over the brutal 

suppression of the 1848 uprising in northern Italy.

The town after which the disease was named, Falcade, stood midway between Milan and 

Salzburg, in the mountains northwest of Venice, not far from Trieste, the Austro-Hungarian 

empire’s seaport. Through Ranieri’s beneficence, in 1824 a hospital was set up in neighboring Agordo, under Vallenzasca’s superintendency. At that time, Falcadina (which Vallenzasca 

compares to the Hungarian skerlievo, the Scottish sibbens, and Canadian lue) had afflicted the 

region for thirty-six years. Vallenzasca vanquished it in two years, through the imposition of 

quarantines, forty days of isolation in a hospital ward. (The Italian quarantena is related to the 

Italian name for the forty days of Lent, quaresima.) The tactic was so effective that Vallenzasca 

was able to shut down the hospital in 1826. The question of whether Falcadina was a miner’s 

disease, or a sexually transmitted disease, or something else, became moot.

In the pages of the manuscript, Vallenzasca presents the lives of the lowborn to the 

potentate. Domenica Strim, daughter of a certain Matteo, lived the life of a rootless wayfarer 

for many years until, in 1790, she returned to her native Falcade from Trieste. She became 

stricken with venereal ulcerations and “condylomatous excrescences,” and through her 

“dishonest behavior” spread the disease to others. That was the first known case of Falcadina. 

The cases are told with fine-grained attention to the manifestations and causes of the 

disease. Martino Micheluzzi (opposite), a strapping young boatman working the Cordevole 

River, was hit in the face by a piece of lumber. Inflammation soon followed. He quickly lost his 

above: Della Falcadina’s title page is a swirling extravaganza 

of calligraphic ornaments and festoons. Note the whirlpool 

curlicue at the bottom of the page. Dedicated to a viceroy 

of the House of Hapsburg, the calligraphy is reminiscent 

of the diplomatic minuscule based on Carolingian 

script—appropriate for an imperial presentation text.

opposite: Martino Micheluzzi, a young boatman, was hit in 

the face by a piece of lumber. Inflammation followed and 

he lost his nose, both eyes, uvula, and hard palate. Della 

Falcadina, pl. 3. Many of the cases report that the onset of 

Falcadina was initiated by trauma to the face.
118 the national library of medicine

nose, both eyes, uvula, and hard palate. (In many cases Falcadina seems to have been induced 

by trauma.) The severe scarring that followed caused his mouth to shrink. He could eat only 

soft food, and that no larger in size than a walnut. Micheluzzi’s stay in the hospital of Noach 

cured his inflammations but couldn’t reverse the damage. Vallenzasca drily notes that he left 

the facility “less miserable than before.”

Agata Lapieruz (opposite) lost her nose, upper lip, and bottom half of eyelids after she 

was afflicted by “reddish patches covered with tiny blisters that soon dry up and flake off,” 

changing form and location with “protean” rapidity. The sores eventually formed crusts and 

attacked the soft flesh of the face.

Maria Gossuin (top left) was just fourteen when she first received treatment at the 

hospital but had ignored the steadily worsening symptoms for years. Vallenzasca notes that 

had the “beneficent Sovereign not interposed his care,” her family likely never would have 

been able to embrace her again.

The entire family of Adriana De Rocco, age fifty-five (bottom left), succumbed to Falcadina until she, last of all, contracted the disease from her grown, married daughter. By the 

time she was admitted to the hospital, a “herpetic ulceration” covered with dense purulent 

scaling had spread across her shoulders, covering both shoulder blades. The treatment 

involved mercuric oxide, decoctions of burdock root and holywood, Ethiops Mineral (black 

sulfide of mercury), and sulfur fumigations. She gradually recovered and returned home. 

The manuscript paints a grim picture of poverty and filth in the mountain villages. The 

peasants of the region are the “lowest of the low, notably shiftless.” The spread of the disease 

between male roommates or within a single family, Vallenzasca surmises, can occur through 

skin-to-skin contact or dirty sheets. The “rustic indolence” of the inhabitants of the region, 

combined with poor nutrition and insalubrious residences, along with the habit of wearing 

“greasy and unwashed” woolen clothing, results in dermatological conditions that turn into 

deeper, internal disorders. 

The book then is an odd concoction—a beautifully crafted manuscript of distressing 

case histories and shocking illustrations. It may have served Vallenzasca’s purposes. He was a 

skilled rhetorician, who looked to the imperial viceroy for patronage, advancement, and help 

for the patients under his care. But presented and read may be two different matters: when 

Lorenzo de’ Medici was presented with The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli, he barely glanced at 

it in his delight at another gift, a pair of stud dogs he received that same day.

—Antony Shugaar

top: Maria Genuin was fourteen years old when she first 

received treatment at the hospital but had ignored the 

steadily worsening symptoms for years. 

bottom: Adriana De Rocco, age fifty-five, had a “herpetic 

ulceration” across her shoulders, covered with dense 

purulent scaling. 

opposite: Agata Lapieruz lost her nose, upper lip, and bottom 

half of eyelids after being afflicted by “reddish patches 

covered with tiny blisters that soon dry up and flake off.” 

Rapidly changing form and location, the sores eventually 

formed crusts and attacked the soft flesh of the face.
120 the national library of medicine

Dairymaids and a doctor save the world from smallpox

Much was at stake when, in 1798, Edward Jenner (1749–1823) self-published his 

method for preventing smallpox. With its characteristic pustules on the skin, 

smallpox spread in waves throughout Africa and Asia in ancient times, then into 

Europe in the Middle Ages and, after European contact, to the Americas and Oceania. By the 

eighteenth century smallpox was a global pandemic, causing the death, suffering, and disfigurement of millions. Jenner, an obscure, London-educated physician who practiced medicine 

in rural Gloucestershire, saw the effects of the disease firsthand and took to studying it.

It was common knowledge among Gloucestershire residents that dairymaids who 

contracted cowpox could not get smallpox. Jenner documented some of these incidents 

and conducted his own experiments, validating and transforming folk knowledge into 

scientific discovery, through the methods and rhetoric of science. In perhaps Jenner’s earliest 

experiment (Inquiry, case 17), dairymaid Sarah Nelmes contracted cowpox from a cow named 

Blossom. Jenner applied Nelmes’s cowpox matter to the arm of eight-year-old James Phipps. 

When Jenner later exposed the boy to smallpox, Phipps showed no sign of the disease. Jenner 

applied this method to a number of children, most famously his own son (Inquiry, case 22). The 

illustration accompanying Phipps’s case (opposite) is a composite of two cowpox infections, 

from Nelmes and another dairymaid. As Jenner explained, he wanted to visualize on one arm 

the stages of cowpox from its early blistering to its later dimpled rupture. 

The Royal Society refused to publish Jenner’s findings on the grounds that the evidence 

for his claims was insufficient. But it was not simply the small number of case histories in 

his treatise on smallpox prevention that led the formidable institution to reject him, it was 

the unlikeliness and novelty of his suggested safeguard. “The Cow-pox protects the human 

constitution from the infection of the Small-pox,” Jenner claimed. How could infected fluid 

from a beast prevent disease in humans?

Before Jenner, variolation was the principal method of protecting against smallpox. With 

variolation, pus from an infected victim is transferred to a patient who—by getting a mild 

infection—gains immunity to a more severe reinfection. But introducing smallpox intentionally sometimes led to the mutilation and death of previously healthy patients. By using the 

less virulent cowpox, such results could be avoided. Jenner coined the term “vaccination” after 

“variolation,” taking as its root the Latin word for cow, vacca. He also named “cowpox” and its 

Latin term variolae vaccinae after the human smallpox (variola major or minor) to link the two 

diseases and so, by name and analogy, argue for cowpox’s power to immunize against smallpox. 

Jenner hoped his findings would become “essentially beneficial to mankind” and that 

his pamphlet would serve as a guide to help physicians identify cowpox and administer 

vaccination properly. The British government publicly recognized his work in 1802 by awarding him £10,000, and another £20,000 in 1806. It also helped him to found a National Vaccine 

Establishment. Within a decade of publication Jenner’s method began to spread worldwide.

—Ron Broglio

An Inquiry into the Causes and Effects of the Variolæ Vaccinæ, 

a Disease...Known by the Name of the Cow Pox ... (1798)

Edward Jenner

London. Printed book, with etching in colored ink, with watercolor, 80 pp.; 71⁄2 x 915⁄16 in. (19 x 25.2 cm) 

above: Title page, Edward Jenner, An Inquiry into the Causes 

and Effects of the Variolæ Vaccinæ, a disease discovered 

in some of the western counties of England, particularly 

Gloucestershire, and known by the name of the cow pox

(London, 1798). After this first edition, the book quickly went 

through many other editions and was translated into many 

languages.

Opposite: A color etching, delicately touched up with 

watercolor, of pox lesions. Inquiry (1798), facing p. 32
122 the national library of medicine

Skin portraiture “painted from nature”

T his grand atlas of skin diseases is a striking example of the richly illustrated publications 

that distinguished nineteenth-century dermatology. Beginning with Robert Willan’s 

Description and Treatment of Cutaneous Diseases, published in London between 1798 and 

1808, and Jean-Louis-Marie Alibert’s 1806 Description des maladies de la peau, based on his observations at the Hôpital Saint-Louis in Paris, modern dermatology established itself as a discipline 

intrinsically tied to the use of colored images. Unlike other branches of pathology, dermatology 

is concerned with diseases showing on the outermost organ and is thus dedicated to the visual 

scrutiny of the body’s surface. Ferdinand Hebra (1816–80) stressed the significance of the eye 

for dermatological diagnosis and teaching. Diseases of skin can be taught only if the students 

have the “objective view” of what they are being lectured about. Hebra accordingly advertised 

his atlas as a clinic in book form, with the life-size images standing in for the sick and the 

texts for the words of the teacher. His clinic on paper, Hebra claimed, has the additional 

advantage of always providing a typical example of even the most uncommon skin condition.

The folio volumes were issued by Vienna’s court printing press in ten installments, 

using the then recently developed technique of chromolithography. While the earlier atlases 

authored by Willan and Alibert had been illustrated with hand-colored engravings, this technique allowed the artist to draw directly onto the lithographic stone, and also to print in color. 

The result, according to Hebra, was hitherto unseen “truth to nature.” The mostly life-size 

illustrations in his atlas were initially produced by Anton Elfinger (1821–64) and completed 

after his death by Carl Heitzmann (1836–96), both simultaneously draftsmen and medics, and 

each lithograph is described as having been “painted from nature and chromolithographed” 

by one or both of them.

Each of the ten issues is dedicated to a group of disorders displaying symptoms on the 

human body’s surface: from lupus to eczema to various kinds of skin cancers. The images 

focus on body parts such as legs, arms, genitalia, face, and neck and not only elaborate on the 

skin lesions but also render dress or hairdo with care. Viewers accustomed to the traditions of 

modern portraiture might be tempted to regard them as empathically rendered likenesses of 

individual persons. However, these images oscillate between portraits of diseases and effigies 

of patients. The image of the two children with a pigment deficiency known as albinism, for 

instance, lacks any accompanying case description (p. 125). They are generic Austrian children, 

and the suggestion that they are siblings mainly stresses the fact that their condition is a 

hereditary one, independent of an otherwise good state of health. Another image depicts a 

father and son with hirsutism (pp. 126– 27). They are treated like medical curiosities; the text 

relates them to portraits of a seventeenth-century family with a similar condition initially 

collected for the cabinet of curiosities at Ambras castle.

An oddity within the atlas, a cultural rather than physical anomaly, is the tattooed man in 

the section on pigment anomalies (opposite and details left). Hebra says that this is a rare case 

of a man of “Caucasian race” who had an “artistically accomplished full body tattoo,” acquired 

Atlas of Skin Diseases (1856–76)

Ferdinand Hebra; drawings and lithographs by Anton Elfinger and Carl Heitzmann 

Atlas der Hautkrankheiten. Vienna. Printed book with chromolithographs, 10 parts in 2 vols.; 173⁄4 x 231⁄4 in. (45 x 59 cm)

above and opposite: “A tattooed man” with details of 

chromolithograph showing a section of the breast and 

related outline drawing. Atlas pt. 8 (1872), pls. 9–10
124 the national library of medicine

on his travels in Burma. The tattooed man, unlike the other figures presented in the atlas, 

is introduced as an individual, a “handsome and robust Albanese of forty-three years by the 

name of Georg Constantin, whose skin is, in the parts spared by the tattoo, beautiful, smooth, 

and fair despite the fact that his beard and hair are of a shiny black.” He was familiar to many 

readers as a famous circus performer who traveled through North America and Europe.

A distinctive device of Hebra’s atlas is the use of two versions of each image. As demonstrated here for the depiction of the tattooed man, each lithograph is accompanied by a print 

restricted to an outline drawing into which numbers are inserted, mapping the disease, or, in 

this case, the pictures tattooed on his body. Text and images are closely linked, and individual 

symptoms are often detailed as representing various stages of a disease. The intermediate 

prints thus bring the progression of time to the otherwise static image without destroying the 

integrity of the clinical picture established in the color lithographs.

—Mechthild Fend

above, left to right: Woman with advanced lupus vulgaris; 

man with herpes zoster (shingles) at face and pate; 

woman with bronze tan caused by intake of silver-bearing 

medicaments. Atlas pt. 1 (1856), pl. 4; pt. 6 (1866), pl. 7; 

pt. 8 (1872), pl. 7

right: Hands and forearms showing herpes iris. Atlas pt. 6 

(1866), pl. 6

opposite: Children showing a hereditary form of albinism. 

Atlas pt. 8 (1872), pl. 1

overleaf: Father and son displaying hirsutism, increased 

growth of facial hair. Atlas pt. 10 (1876), pls. 7–8

128 the national library of medicine

Dermatology in 3D

T he wooden handle of the viewer feels well worn. Grasping it with your fingers, you 

press your face against the rim of the felt-lined device and attempt to focus on the 

image. You see a patient—child, woman, or man—with three-dimensional, brightly 

colored pustules, welts, roughness, scars, birthmarks, moles, eruptions. This is New York 

physician Selden Rainforth’s early-twentieth-century effort to harness the power of threedimensional viewing technology (stereoscopy) to present a “clinic” of more than a hundred 

different kinds of skin lesions. 

Rainforth (1879–1960), who also invented the “self-threading needle and holder,” was not 

the first doctor-stereographer. In 1862 Harvard professor Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. invented a 

handheld stereographic viewer so that Americans sitting in their parlors could peer at images 

of far-off lands and natural wonders. Rainforth’s efforts were part of a craze for medical stereoscopy, which was seen as a technology of modernity that might supplant two-dimensional 

photography and make available to physicians, in their offices, clinical presentations of the 

vivid, dramatic, and disfiguring effects of skin trauma and disease. His dermatologic atlas 

contained 128 rectangular cards, each five inches wide and seven inches tall, with two photographs that, when placed in the handheld viewing device, displayed the dimensionality, texture, 

and extent of various dermatological conditions. Originally black and white, the photographs 

were hand tinted to display the range of colors in skin disease. On the back of each card Rainforth provided synonyms for the condition and a capsule summary of diagnosis and treatment.

The images are disturbing—tuberculous affections of the skin, keloids, smallpox, 

cancers, and especially syphilis in its infinite variety. (Early-twentieth-century medical schools 

typically had a Department of Dermatology and Syphilology.) In the cards shown here, 

fingertips (middle left) display the result of ringworm of the nails, the fungal distortion of the 

nailbed and its lingering effects. A woman’s face (bottom left) illustrates the effects of shingles 

(Herpes zoster), which covers her eye, the eruption of the vesicles, and the drying yellowish 

and brownish crusts that fall off after several days. A child’s face (middle right) displays 

a pigmented mole (Naevus pigmentosus), which Rainforth suggests may be removed with 

electrolysis, if small. Larger moles, he suggests, can be destroyed with solid carbon dioxide 

(dry ice). A blue-eyed man’s chest (bottom right) displays sarcoma, or, in Rainforth’s words, 

“malignant connective tissue tumors.” An older man’s face (top left) illustrates erythematous 

eczema, the redness of the skin, the thickening of the outer layer, the dryness and itching it 

produces. Although calamine lotion and zinc oxides may relieve the trouble, Rainforth advises 

doctors to instruct patients to avoid anything likely to produce facial congestion. The darkfaced man (top right) displays the stigmata of tertiary syphilis—a “gummatous infiltration” 

that eats away at the jaw and soft palate. Rainforth warns that ulceration, pain, and discomfort 

may intensify as the deformation of the mouth progresses. Unlike other skin conditions and 

diseases, he offers no treatment for this sexually transmitted disease.

—Susan E. Lederer

The Stereoscopic Skin Clinic (1910)

Selden Irwin Rainforth 

New York. Boxed set: handheld viewer (copper, wood, glass); 128 stereograph cards (colored photographs); 5 x 53⁄4 in. (12.7 x 14.8 cm)

above: Stereoscope (copper, wood, and iron hinges, with 

glass lenses and felt lining) included in the box with viewing 

cards. The device faithfully follows the design of the 

celebrated essayist and anatomy professor Oliver Wendell 

Holmes Sr. Stereoscopic Skin Clinic

top, left to right: Eczema erythematosum facei: A chronic 

rash of the face commonly seen in adults. “The excoriations 

caused by scratching and rubbing alter its appearance.” 

Cicatrices palate mollis post ulcerationes syphiliticas: “A

circumscribed or diffused gummatous infiltration of the soft 

palate” that occurs in the tertiary stage of syphilis.

middle, left to right: Trichophytosis unguium: In most 

instances, ringworm of the nails affects only three or four 

fingers. “Untreated, the malady persists for years, with no 

tendency to spontaneous recovery.” Naevus pigmentosus: 

Pigmentary moles may be “present at birth and undergo 

various development later. . . . Growths smaller than a pea 

are best removed by electrolysis”; larger growths should be 

destroyed by an “application of solid carbon dioxid.”

bottom, left to right: Zoster: Also known as “shingles,” 

Herpes zoster is “an acute, self limited, probably specific, 

infectious disease of the nervous system,” marked by 

lesions, “slight fever and neuralgic pains.” Sarcomatosis 

cutis: “Malignant connective tissue tumors . . . may have their 

origin in any organ of the body,” including the skin. “Nodes 

develop in various regions but rarely reach any considerable 

size because death soon ensues.”
130 the national library of medicine

“ What do you see?”

Most people have two eyes directed forward. In ophthalmology textbooks one is asked 

to imagine a line drawn from each eye to an object on the horizon: two parallel lines 

representing two lines of sight are blended by muscular and neural processes into 

a single image—binocular vision with depth perception. When the lines are askew, both eyes 

do not fix on the same point. It is hard to live with the ensuing double vision; the image from 

one of the eyes is suppressed by the brain, and instead of seeing double the person literally sees 

single. Thus “strabismus”: deviation of one visual axis in the normal visual act, also referred 

to as “squint” and other colloquial terms that manifest the cosmetic dismay that has always 

accompanied the condition—lazy eye, boss-eyed, cross-eyed, walleyed, cockeyed.

Pavlov’s influential work on acquired conditioned reflex suggested that the eye and 

brain could be retrained with repetitive exercises, particularly in young children. In 1927 Carl 

Hubert Sattler (1880–1953?), a Königsberg physician, produced an inexpensive set of stereoscope cards for the diagnosis and treatment of juvenile strabismus at home, subsequently 

widely translated and reprinted. This edition was published in 1942. 

The cards come in pairs that, viewed through a stereoscope, make a composite picture. 

An umbrella handle is bereft of its canopy. The strabismatic child will see only the handle or 

the canopy. Asking her what she sees will indicate which eye is fixing on an image and which 

is suppressed. Bringing the images together—seeing the umbrella whole—is the therapy. 

According to Sattler, other stereoscope cards, featuring abstract shapes, were hard for children 

to relate to or describe. Thus the sad moon, the chick following the rooster, etc., were designed 

to make these exercises fun—though generations of children struggling to put the broom 

in the snowman’s hand might testify differently. An accompanying booklet told parents and 

physicians what to ask with each pair, often beginning with the phrase “What do you see?” 

British stereoscope cards produced during World War II show airplanes with parachutists 

descending from them. Sattler’s cards, designed in the 1920s, betray no hint of the historical 

circumstances of the year of their reprinting: the duck still opens its beak, the frog still jumps 

through a hoop. Nonetheless ophthalmology was profoundly changed by National Socialist 

policies regarding Jewish doctors and scientists; by 1942 Sattler was one of the few strabismus specialists left in Germany. Debates over the causes and etiology of strabismus often 

mentioned hereditary factors and neurotic instability—the very terms “lazy eye” or “boss eye” 

suggest constitutional failure. To have such a condition was profoundly dangerous; under the 

Nazis, hereditary conditions associated with undesirable character, even eminently correctable 

ones, were grounds for sterilization or worse. 

When these charming cards were issued, German armies were occupying much of Europe, 

Hitler had convened the Wannsee Conference to coordinate the Final Solution, and trainloads 

of Jews and other “enemies” were beginning to arrive at Auschwitz and other death camps. 

“What do you see?” The question hangs in the air of historical time with quiet intensity.

—Hannah Landecker

Stereoscopic Pictures for Cross-Eyed Children (1942)

Carl Hubert Sattler 

Stereoskopische Bilder für schielende Kinder. Verlag von Ferdinand Enke, Stuttgart, Germany. 

Printed booklet, 24 pp., 61

⁄4 x 31⁄8 in. (16 x 8 cm); 108 cards, 2 x 27⁄8 in. (5 x 7.3 cm)

above: A young girl does corrective exercises for strabismus, 

using a stereoscope, ca. 1940 (place and source unknown). 

opposite: Selected pairs of strabismus diagnostic and 

exercise cards. Stereoskopische Bilder
132 the national library of medicine

Lifting the “residual veil”

An intense light that seems to shine directly into your brain, the quelling of the 

strong impulse to pull away, a professional stranger breathing so close by. Anyone 

who has gone forehead-to-forehead with an ophthalmologist will have some 

familiarity with biomicroscopy. But few of us have much sense of what might be seen in the 

depths of our own eyes with that devastating beam. 

In 1943 Milton L. Berliner (1895–1981) published the first half of a two-volume compendium of biomicroscopy in clinical practice. The first volume of Biomicroscopy of the Eye, with 512 

images—40 pages of color plates—was followed in 1949 by the lavish second installment, with 

1,233 illustrations, 503 in color. Given the lights and lenses that constitute the technique, one 

wonders why the camera is so little involved. There is no angst here about the dubious objectivity of Berliner’s hand-drawn images of the living eye versus precise photographic transcription, 

merely a matter-of-fact statement of the impossibility of attaining adequate photographs.

Consider these drawings (opposite) of changes to the aqueous humor, the watery space 

between the lens and the cornea: “A residual veil (diffuse illumination), floating like a sail, 

in the anterior chamber.” Delicate layers of tissues and their liquid ruptures are drawn in a 

sinuous style; that these are living eyes is communicated in the use of shocking color. Without 

the imprimatur of medicine this might appear a quintessential example of outsider art, an 

obsessive cataloguing of fantastic images of the diseased inner eye cut by light. Yet volume 

1 was greeted by reviewers as “one of those rare books that profoundly influence clinical 

practice.” Volume 2 was similarly welcomed for its lack of esoteric abstraction from day-to-day 

clinical practice—a hinted comparison to earlier, less-accessible compendia of such material. 

Berliner’s books were seen to present not only the technique but the difference the technique 

made in the clinic. 

Biomicroscopy couples a microscope with a focused beam of light; its history is entwined 

with that of the lightbulb. It originated in the 1910s with Allvar Gullstrand (1862–1930), 

ophthalmologist and Nobel Prize winner, who made a controllable beam of very intense light 

using a slit opening and a condensing lens (which came to be called a slit lamp), rather than 

shining a light directly on the eye. The biomicroscope works, Berliner tells us, like a searchlight in a night sky, or sunlight entering a darkened room through a crack. Objects in the path 

of the searchlight beam are illuminated, or suspended particles of dust become visible as they 

scatter the sunlight. Similarly, the transparent tissues of the cornea, lens, and aqueous, being 

gels, scatter the intense “pencil of light” projected into the eye. This evocation of the light of 

knowledge in the darkened room of the body—applying the illuminatory focus of science to 

make even the transparent visible—is here made poignant by the systematic elaboration of 

the clouding of sight. Exudations, inflammations, coal particles, lacerations, vascularization, 

sclerosis, opacities, scarring: portraits of a thousand ways in which the eye can be the seat 

of blindness.

—Hannah Landecker

Biomicroscopy of the Eye: Slit Lamp Microscopy of the Living Eye (1943–49)

Milton Lionel Berliner; illustrations by J. McGuiness Myers

New York and London: Paul B. Hoeber, Inc.; © 1943, 1949 Hoeber Medical Division, Harper & Row Publishers, Inc. 

Printed book with color illustrations by J. McGuiness Myers, 2 vols.; 1,512 pp.; 61

⁄2 x 10 in. (16 x 25.4 cm)

above: Eye examination with a Zeiss biomicroscopic 

apparatus. Biomicroscopy of the Eye, vol. 1, p. 35

opposite: Drawings of the eye’s innards as seen through the 

biomicroscope. Biomicroscopy of the Eye, vol. 1, pl. XL
134 the national library of medicine

Dr. Howe’s philosophical-theological research subject

T his biography of Laura Bridgman (1829–89), the first deaf-blind person ever to read, 

write, and converse in the finger alphabet, attracted little interest when it appeared in 

1878. Consisting largely of extracts from the journal of Bridgman’s teacher Mary Swift 

Lamson (1822–1909) and other teachers at the Perkins Institution for the Blind, Lamson’s 

narrative lacks the drama of Helen Keller’s famous autobiography, published twenty-five years 

later. Lamson’s timing was also unfortunate. In the 1840s and ’50s thousands of admirers 

had flocked to see Bridgman on “exhibition days” at Perkins, and Charles Dickens’s touching 

depiction of her in American Notes (1842) had made her an international celebrity. But as she 

aged and lost her girlish charm public attention faded. By the time The Life and Education of 

Laura Dewey Bridgman appeared, few remembered the “fair young creature” rescued, as Dickens 

said, from her “dark prison” and brought into the light of human community. 

Bridgman’s rescuer was Samuel Gridley Howe (1801–76), director of Perkins, who recognized the bright seven-year-old as the ideal subject for scientific and pedagogical experiments 

he hoped to undertake—experiments that would not only establish the educability of the deafblind but also prove the innateness of ideas, including the idea of God. If Bridgman, cut off 

from most sense data since the age of two, could learn language, develop a natural conscience, 

and ultimately reason her own way to the existence of a Divine Creator, she would stand as a 

living refutation of both Calvinistic pessimism and the Lockean view of the child’s mind as a 

blank slate, dependent for knowledge on the sensory apprehension of external objects. 

To preserve his experiment’s integrity Howe, a Unitarian, had ordered the female 

teachers who oversaw Bridgman’s daily instruction to insulate her from all religious doctrine. 

Nevertheless, when he embarked on a European tour in 1843 he gave sole charge of his prize 

pupil to Lamson, who like many Perkins teachers was an orthodox Congregationalist concerned about Bridgman’s soul. Upon his return sixteen months later, he was dismayed to find 

Bridgman throwing tantrums and parroting orthodox doctrine. Ignoring Lamson’s insistence 

that she had not violated his trust, he publicly blamed her for ruining his experiment by 

filling Bridgman’s head with frightening Calvinist notions and disciplining her too harshly. 

Lamson left Perkins shortly thereafter, married well, and devoted herself to philanthropy. 

Lamson’s memoir, published two years after Howe’s death, was her long-delayed response 

to his accusations. Howe’s daughters dismissed the book as a “dry record of facts,” but it is better 

understood as a subtle challenge to both Howe’s philosophy and his portrayal of Lamson as 

the willful, punitive teacher who force-fed Calvinist doctrine to an uncomprehending deaf-blind 

girl. With the support of eminent theologian Edwards Park, whom she enlisted to write the 

introduction, Lamson argued that Howe had misunderstood his own pupil. While Bridgman’s 

“highly nervous temperament” gave her mind its “unusual power,” it also agitated and irritated 

her. She needed the religious consolations that Howe deliberately withheld; once freed from his 

control she could overcome anger and fear and declare to Lamson: “God gives me strength.” 

—Elisabeth Gitter

The Life and Education of Laura Dewey Bridgman, 

the Deaf, Dumb, and Blind Girl (1878)

Mary Swift Lamson 

Boston. Printed book, 373 pp. with plates; 47⁄8 x 79⁄16 in. (13 x 19.5 cm)

above: Laura Bridgman in her late forties, engaged in 

crochet work that she sold to visitors for pocket money. 

Life and Education of Laura Dewey Bridgman, frontispiece

opposite: The elegantly bound volume, which includes a 

signed holograph facsimile of Bridgman’s widely circulated 

religious poem “Holy Home.” Bridgman transcribed it by 

folding paper over a tablet with grooved lines, a method 

of lettering commonly used by the blind in this period, and 

which appears in the facsimile signature on the book cover.
136 the national library of medicine

“The only chart that can be used in any part of the world”

T his multilingual eye-test chart, published in 1907, was the creation of the optometrist 

George Mayerle (ca. 1870–1929), a “Graduate German Expert Optician” who set up 

shop in San Francisco in the mid-1890s. Optometry was professionalizing at the time, 

and Mayerle was on board. A charter member of the American Optometric Association at its 

founding in 1898, a decade later (not long after the eye chart appeared) Mayerle delivered a 

lecture on “The Progress of Optical Science” at a national conference of opticians. Typically, 

professionalizers were anxious to make a distinction between certified, licensed expert 

practitioners and undiplomaed marketers of nostrums and products. But Mayerle straddled 

the line. If he saw himself as a scientific practitioner, he was also right at home in optometry’s 

peddler tradition, selling a variety of products to a national market, including “Mayerle’s 

Diamond Crystal Eye Glasses” and “Mayerle’s Eyewater,” which he pitched as “the Greatest Eye 

Tonic” and sold by mail order and in drugstores.

His eye chart, which he claimed to be “the result of many years of theoretical study 

and practical experience,” combined four subjective tests done during an eye examination. 

Running through the middle of the chart, the seven vertical panels test for acuity of vision 

with characters in the Roman alphabet (for English, German, and other European readers) and 

also in Japanese, Chinese, Russian, and Hebrew. A panel in the center replaces the alphabetic 

characters with symbols for children and adults who were illiterate or who could not read any 

of the other writing systems offered. Directly above the center panel is a version of the radiant 

dial that tests for astigmatism. On either side of that are lines that test the muscular strength 

of the eyes. Finally, across the bottom, boxes test for color vision, a feature intended especially 

(according to one advertisement) for those working on railroads and steamboats. The chart 

measures 22 by 28 inches and is printed on heavy cardboard; a positive version of it appears on 

one side, a negative version on the reverse. It sold for $3.00 or for $6.00 with a special cabinet 

designed to reveal only those parts of the chart needed at the time (“thus avoiding many 

unnecessary questions”). 

The “international” chart is an artifact of an immigrant nation—produced by a German 

optician in a polyglot city where West met East (and which was then undergoing massive 

rebuilding after the 1906 earthquake)—and of a globalizing economy. One advertisement 

promoted it as “the only chart published that can be used by people of any nationality,” such 

as might be needed by a practitioner in almost any American city. Another ad, which appeared 

around the same time, touted it as “the only chart. . .that can be used equally well in any part of 

the world.” Mayerle’s internationalism was part of a marketing strategy, but when it suited him 

he could patriotically claim that his wares contributed to the project of American imperial 

expansion. A 1902 advertisement, for instance, boasted that a pair of his eyeglasses was used 

“at Manila, during the Spanish-American War,” by none other than Admiral Dewey himself. 

—Stephen P. Rice

Mayerle’s Lithographed International Test Chart (1907)

George Mayerle 

San Francisco. Lithograph with hand-colored swatches on cardboard; 273⁄4 x 22 in. (71.1 x 55.8 cm)

above and opposite: Optometrist George Mayerle combined 

an array of eye tests on a single chart that, he boasted, was 

“accurate, artistic, ornamental, practical and reliable.” 

Marketing the chart to fellow practitioners, he promised that 

it “makes a good impression and convinces the patient of 

your professional expertness.” 
138 the national library of medicine

“ To ascertain the effects of a continuous exchange of blood”

In 1929 Warfield Monroe Firor (1896–1988), a young surgeon, commissioned William 

Didusch (1895–1981), an equally young medical illustrator, to make drawings for an 

article on his surgical experiments. Both were rising stars at Johns Hopkins Medical 

School in Baltimore. A student of the renowned medical illustrator Max Brödel (1870–1941), 

Didusch was already recognized for his accuracy and encyclopedic knowledge of anatomy. His 

illustrations, like those of his teacher, had a hyperrealistic shine, a gloss that gave his drawings 

of living tissue the luster of commercial magazine art. 

But why did Firor prefer hand-rendered illustrations for his article? Before 1930, limitations in halftone printing technology made photographic reproductions appear gray and 

muddy. By contrast reproductions of drawings were highly legible. An artist, far more selective 

than a camera, could omit well-known or superfluous anatomical features, highlight “at-risk” 

elements (like the 1929 drawings of the vagus nerve shown here at left), and include—or 

exclude—the surgeon’s hands and instruments as required. The illustrator showed what the 

surgeon wished to demonstrate. No more, no less.

Firor’s operation went like this: he sutured together two dogs, under ether, at the neck, 

connecting the jugular vein of one to the carotid artery of the other, and vice versa. Placid 

animals were best. According to Firor, “Mongrels with . . .hound ancestry are particularly 

good.” The goal was to find out “how long it is possible to cross the circulations of dogs and 

to ascertain the effects of a continuous exchange of blood between two animals.” Why Firor 

thought this might be useful remains a mystery.

The operation resulted in a massive drop in blood pressure and, later, a fatal transfusion 

reaction from mixing the blood of unrelated animals. Firor repeated the procedure on forty 

pairs of dogs. All died, he noted, but some survived, unanesthetized, for as long as six days.

A year later, in another experiment also illustrated by Didusch, he used a specially 

designed suction tube to remove the pituitary gland, an essential, hormone-producing part of 

the brain, from monkeys. The monkeys survived the procedure but without hormone replacement died shortly after.

Was Firor a monster? Far from it. He was a family man whose young son likely had a pet of 

his own. He wrote articles for theological journals in his spare time. He was the author of influential research papers, the recipient of awards, and the subject of a Time magazine profile. Ingenious, 

creative, and dedicated to his patients, he became one of the country’s most eminent surgeons. 

Today such procedures would be prohibited. Firor, however, adhered to the ethical 

values of his time: animals were legitimate “subjects,” to be freely exploited for the progress 

of medicine and the benefit of humanity. They were as disposable as candy wrappers. People 

too, if poor, black, imprisoned, disabled, or mentally ill, were used without their knowledge or 

consent for potentially lethal experiments.

I wonder if Didusch, a famously warm and gentle soul, lost any sleep over this commission. I did.

—Mark Kessell

Experimental Surgery Drawings (1929–30)

William P. Didusch 

Baltimore. Ink and pencil drawings on card stock; 1929: 7 x 83⁄4 in. (18 x 22 cm); 1930: 73⁄8 x 111⁄8 in. (18.9 x 28.5 cm)

above: William Didusch’s drawing (1929) of W. M. Firor’s 

operation to suture two dogs together at the neck, 

connecting the jugular vein of one to the carotid artery of 

the other, and vice versa.

opposite: William Didusch’s drawing (1930) of W. M. Firor’s 

procedure to remove the pituitary gland from the head of 

a monkey.
140 the national library of medicine

A macabre parade of missing thumbs

Deprived of the advantages of the dissecting room, the ideas once so thoroughly 

acquired soon begin to fade, and the images, once so distinct, become confused 

and mixed.” So argues a blurb on the title page of Dr. Elias Smith’s Atlas of Colored 

Plates Illustrating Features of Anatomy, Surgery, Deformities, Displacements, Strictures, Fistulas, Cancer, 

Syphilis, Glanders etc., etc. Yet the atlas itself is a bizarre admixture. Tracheotomy shares a page 

with disarticulated fingers. A charming series of hands applying scalpels, as though they were 

pens meeting paper rather than knives laying skin bare, gives way to horrifying illustrations 

of “operations upon the penis,” of “catheters fixed” in a urethra, gangrenous buboes, and a 

disease passed from horse to human called glanders (which today, outside veterinary medicine, is studied in connection with biological warfare). Portraits appear, as when the scourge of 

syphilis invents a type of person—the so-called syphilide (a far cry from its near homophone 

“sylphide”). Another head turned to profile is a conglomeration of bends, folds, and impossible torsions of skin amounting to a type that could be termed a convolute. 

Skin is what matters most, but not real skin. Instead, Smith’s Atlas stages a dream about 

skin. The dreamer is an illustrator or surgeon for whom skin tears like paper, in whose hand, 

and through whose eye, bodies can be cut from the swath of their environment like paper 

dolls. We aren’t sure if what we are looking at is part of a human face or a cloth snipped with a 

ragged-edged pair of scissors: the images here recall the theater’s ritual draping of cloths and 

masking (off ) of parts. 

Devoid of 1890s accoutrements, as if by magic, a blue cuff (trimmed in gold) thrusts, 

darts, and points in many of Smith’s illustrations. Suddenly we’re in a marionette theater or 

puppet show. (Fittingly the Atlas’s publisher was the American Manikin Co.) I imagine our 

artist to be a sign painter by day and a dauber of syphilitic chancres by night. We see forms, 

mostly pink on ocher-colored backgrounds. Free floating, three hands detached at the wrist 

perform a ballet of fingers in a macabre parade of missing thumbs. Suddenly, noses struck off 

are reapplied to a face. 

In ancient India, Brahmins developed a remedy for deformities that had been caused by 

“punishment for crime” by taking skin from the forehead to repair the partial or total loss 

of a nose. In fifteenth-century Italy, Antonio Branca and Gaspare Tagliacozzi (whose name 

means “mussel cutter”) devised a nose-forming method that required the patient’s face to 

be rigged to a flap of arm skin for weeks on end. Though the technique usually resulted “in 

deformity more hideous than that which it had been intended to cure,” a statue honoring the 

great Tagliacozzi shows him holding a human nose. Neither Gogol’s famous literary nose nor 

Freud’s equally famous shine on the nose as the site of a patient’s obsession, Elias Smith’s Atlas

features the refashioned nose of the amateur-professional, of masks now tragic, now comic, in 

a world where the distinction between the two is never clear cut.

—Mary Cappello

Atlas of Colored Plates Illustrating Features of Anatomy, 

Surgery, Deformities ...etc. (1889)

Elias Smith 

Peoria, Illinois. Printed book with chromolithographs; 30 plates; 143⁄4 x 101⁄8 in. (37.5 x 25.7 cm)

above: Double harelip with an idealized repair and postoperative sutures. Atlas of Colored Plates, pl. 7

opposite: Rhinoplasty. “The figure shows the kind of bandage 

which the patient will have to make up his mind to endure.” 

The flap of arm skin will need to acquire a blood supply from 

the vessels of the face toward the formation of a new nose. 

Atlas of Colored Plates, pl. 10
142 the national library of medicine

Mesmeric revelations, excitements, cures

What was mesmerism? A mesmeric trance, according to one mesmerist, was 

induced by “the operation of the nervous force or power of one individual in a 

certain degree of activity upon the nervous system of another in a certain degree 

of passivity.” Such trances could be established without even touching the subject, which 

seemed to indicate “the operation of some subtle but physical agency”—an invisible fluid that 

pervaded everything. Whatever the cause, the result was unusual intimacy between mesmerizer 

and mesmerized. Asked if “the minds of the mesmerist and the patient become one,” Harriet 

Martineau replied “sometimes, but not often,” specifying that when such unity occurs, the two 

people “taste, feel &c. the same things at the same moment.”

The age of mesmerism (1775–1890s) was one of almost limitless possibility. People in 

trances communed with distant minds. They saw through solid objects and even bodily tissues 

to identify illnesses. Those most caught up in mesmerism (also called “animal magnetism”) 

were “visionary enthusiasts,” according to an article in Punch, “people like Theodosius Purland 

[1805–81], a dentist who energetically used mesmerism for tooth extractions as well as surgical 

operations.” Alfred Russel Wallace, the evolutionary theorist, described Purland as “one of the 

most interesting, amusing, and eccentric men I became acquainted with during my residence 

in London, and with whom I soon became quite intimate.” Purland had “immense energy and 

vitality—one of those men whose words pour out in a torrent, and who have always something 

wise or witty to say.” He was also “a very powerful mesmerist” who “could succeed in sending 

patients into the mesmeric trance when other operators failed.” 

Purland documented mesmerism in four fascinating scrapbooks. Lovingly glued onto the 

now brittle pages are pamphlets, posters, letters, drawings, sermons, ticket stubs for séances. 

The scrapbooks also document the mesmeric hospital that Purland helped found for the 

alleviation of pain during amputation, tumor excisions, tooth pulling, and the like. 

Mesmerism seemed to enable its subjects to transgress boundaries. In the mesmeric 

trance patients spoke and acted in ways that challenged their gender and class positions. 

They would dance, sing, assume familiarity with their superiors, commit other improprieties. 

In some cases a completely new character appeared, a phenomenon that was labeled double 

consciousness. Who was that person? What exactly was the nature of the self that allowed for 

such a fractured subjectivity?

Purland insisted that mesmerists were scientists. But the medical profession ignored 

the more than three hundred cases where mesmerism had some proven benefit and instead 

championed anesthesia. Why? Perhaps it was an unsettling sense of boundary transgression. 

Anesthesia uses impersonal gas to put a person to sleep and does not depend on a doctor’s 

spell. The anesthetist’s authority is not threatened by dangerous sympathies with his patient. 

The ideal of a community of sensation with strangers near and far is undone.

What a pity that mesmerism’s dreams of openness and intimacy had to be buried along 

with its more outlandish fantasies!

—Marianne Noble

Mesmerism Scrapbooks (1842–54)

Theodosius Purland

London. Scrapbook, with extra illustration, fancy section pages. 4 vols.; 81⁄2 x 103⁄4 in. (21.6 x 27.3 cm)

above: A section page made from cut-out letters of fancy 

typography, “Doctor Esdaills Stupendous Operations,” 

begins a chapter of letters and reports about the Calcutta 

Mesmeric Hospital, India, directed by Dr. James Esdaile 

(whose name is spelled variously in the documents). 

Scrapbook, vol. 4

opposite: Esdaile claimed to have removed a ninety-pound 

tumor from a man “without his knowledge.” Using a specially 

designed knife, he excised it in three minutes, reporting that 

the patient “had no difficulty in recovering from the shock, 

and is doing perfectly well.” Letter (with drawing) from 

Esdaile to Dr. Elliotson, ca. 1850, Scrapbook, vol. 4 
Volume 3 of Purland’s Scrapbooks includes “Lectures,” a 

chapter stuffed with pasted-in handbills advertising mesmeric 

lectures and demonstrations in various English cities and 

towns. These advertisements date from 1842 and 1843. 
146 the national library of medicine

The lost art of dental slapstick

Will you be able to find a good dentist when you need one? This question bedeviled 

mid-twentieth-century dentists and patients. And these wry cartoons play with 

this perennial problem. 

We don’t know for sure, but it seems likely that the man who made them was the 

Hungarian artist Otto Elkan, who was born in Budapest in 1884 and immigrated to France in 

December 1935. In 1943 Elkan (recorded as “Catholique—r. juive”) was detained in a Nazi war 

camp in Chateau Tombebouc. 

There are two series. One features pen-and-ink, black silhouetted figures and scenes, 

with patches of color and dialogue. The other, on textured paper, features watercolored 

drawings—and memorializes an American GI and a dental chair with all the attributes of a 

Weber Model D (patented in the United States in 1931 and widely distributed abroad). It was 

undoubtedly drawn sometime shortly after the Allied liberation of Paris. 

Elkan’s work documents not only the international spread of American dental technology 

in this period, but also a transatlantic cultural preoccupation with access to good professional 

dental care, particularly in wartime. In the late nineteenth century, people in need of a dentist 

faced a marketplace of practitioners with diverse levels of educational attainment, professional 

certification, technological sophistication, and practical competence. The early twentieth 

century brought a dramatic increase in standards of dental education and professional 

practice: luminaries within the field strove to endow dentistry with the scientific authority and 

social and economic status of medicine.

During World War II—when nearly all of Europe’s professionally trained dentists had 

entered military service, been forced to flee, or been put in concentration camps—access 

to good dental care was severely restricted. At the same time dentists’ increasing success in 

persuading the public of the importance of good dental care raised the demand for their 

services. And potential patients felt this lack quite keenly. 

One of Elkan’s scenes hints at the shortage of dentists by portraying the self-care attempt 

of a patient who fastens his aching tooth to a railroad car in an effort to accomplish extraction.

Elkan’s substitution of cats and dogs for dentists and patients is of a piece with a long antic 

tradition in which animals stand in for human beings. But it is also part of a larger genre of dental slapstick fixated on the notion that the individual holding the forceps might not be a trained 

professional dentist—and that a hapless patient might not be able to discern the difference. 

In the United States the same concerns were reflected in a 1943 short featuring the Three 

Stooges in which Larry, Moe, and Curly—window washers who accidentally slop soapsuds into 

the open window of a dentist’s office, causing the proprietor to storm off—assume the dentist’s 

role and extract a patient’s tooth. In a related 1951 episode, The Tooth Will Out, the three—dressed 

in Victorian-era waistcoats as if to historicize the persistence of the problem of dentists’ incompetence—are fired from their jobs and pay $500 to a huckster to become dentists instead.

As in Elkan’s cartoons, hilarity ensues. 

—Alyssa Picard

Dental Cartoons (ca. 1945)

Otto Elkan

Paris. Hand-drawn and painted cartoons on paper; 105⁄8 x 9 in. (27 x 23 cm)
148 the national library of medicine

Eloquent hands

Photographs and hand silhouettes from the collection of Dr. W. H. Whitslar presented 

to his friend Dr. Burton Lee Thorpe” reads a typewritten label on the first page of 

this battered black album from sometime around 1908. 

The book opens with a procession of images that is almost surrealist in its dream 

logic—illustrations based on the pseudoscience of chirognomy (the “Seven Typical Forms of 

Hands”: “Elemental, Square, Spatulate, Mixed, Philosophic, Psychic, Artistic”); an X-ray of a 

six-fingered hand (the most common form of polydactyly); a “U.S. government finger-print 

identification record”; photos depicting “the influence of profession on the shape of the hand” 

(smith, shoemaker, typesetter, tailor, pianist); and finally a palmistry diagram. 

After this free-associated introduction, another typed label—“Noted Dentists”—ushers 

us into a portrait gallery of Gilded Age and Progressive Era medical men in somber suits and 

starched collars, wearing their Vandykes, box beards, and walrus mustaches like badges of 

office. Each is paired with a white silhouette of his hand. Most are presented without comment, though there are exceptions: J. Taft’s page includes the notation “Eloquent hand.”

Dr. Will H. Whitslar (1862–1930), the “W. H. Whitslar” of the commemorative label, was 

a second-generation Ohio dentist and M.D., a professor of dentistry, anatomy, and pathology 

at Western Reserve University in Cleveland, “highly respected by his brethren in the profession,” according to a contemporary source. His journal articles, on subjects ranging from the 

vexations of neurasthenic patients to ether’s tendency to induce “erotic sensations” in female 

patients, reveal a searching mind, inclined toward flights of poetic fancy. 

Whitslar’s greatest hits at dental-society meetings were lectures such as his talk on 

“Chirognomy in Dentistry” (chirognomy being “the science of deducing the characteristics of a 

man from the shape of his hands”). He extolled the virtues of “chirognomical” tests in singling 

out students best fitted (social Darwinian allusion very much intended) for the dental profession. For example, the thick-palmed, stubby-fingered “elementary” hand offers evolutionary 

evidence of “the low grade of human intelligence,” and those possessed of such hands, such as 

“the Laplanders and the lower class of Tartars and Slavs,” are hereditarily unfit to be dentists.

Writing in the long shadow of the eugenicist Francis Galton (1822–1911), whom he quoted 

with approval, Whitslar was a product of his times, a medical man and devout Darwinian who 

nonetheless regarded palmistry, chirognomy, and physiognomy (the inference of a person’s 

inborn character from his facial features) as sciences. In Gothic fiction, atavistic hands gave 

shape to social Darwinian anxieties about racial degeneration: Mr. Hyde, the good doctor’s 

bestial alter ego in The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), has “corded, knuckly” 

hands “of a dusky pallor, and thickly shaded with a swart growth of hair.” Likewise, in the 

eugenic theories of Galton’s disciples polydactylic or brachydactylic (stubby fingered) hands 

were a sure sign of mental deficiency. Visual echoes of Dr. Jekyll’s “large, firm” hands, “professional in shape and size,” the eloquent hands in Whitslar’s little black gift book speak volumes 

about the medical unconscious in the early twentieth century. 

—Mark Dery

Dental Hand Silhouette Gift Album (ca. 1908)

W. H. Whitslar

Cleveland, Ohio. Album of gelatin silver photographs; 33 leaves; 53⁄4 x 8 in. (14.5 x 20 cm)

above: “X Ray picture of six-fingered hand,” Dental Hand 

Silhouette Gift Album

opposite: (Top and bottom rows) “Noted Dentists” with 

autographed hand silhouettes. (Middle row) Chirognomic 

hand types: square (or useful), spatulate (or active), mixed, 

philosophic, psychic, and artistic (or emotional); unidentified 

source. Dental Hand Silhouette Gift Album
hidden tre a sure 151

opposite: Burton Lee Thorpe, D.D.S., president of the National Dental Association, and 

his autographed hand silhouette. Dr. Thorpe was Whitslar’s friend and recipient of the 

gift album. Dental Hand Silhouette Gift Album

above, clockwise from top left: Photograph of Edward C. Kirk [Church?] and 

autographed hand silhouette. Scenes from Japan: a patient undergoing dental 

treatment and people having a meal, with autographed hand silhouette of Japanese 

dentist [Seimori?] Shimura. Photograph of “ ‘Zim’ the artist” (Eugene Zimmerman, 

a political cartoonist and caricaturist for Puck and Judge, the most 

prominent late-nineteenth-, early-twentieth-century American satirical 

weeklies), with autographed hand silhouette. Zim is the only nondentist 

featured in the gift album. Above his photograph, a quote: “When 

drawing distorted features, you will observe that your own face assumes 

similar contortions” (from Zim, This and That About Caricature [New 

York, 1905], p. 25). Palmistry diagram; unidentified source. Dental Hand 

Silhouette Gift Album
152 the national library of medicine

Molecular biology behind the blackboard

T he photograph is dramatic, more dramatic in its own way than the famous one of 

James Watson and Francis Crick. Like that photograph, this one portrays two young 

scientists in the throes—the joys—of collaboration. The names are not as well known: 

the young men are Marshall Nirenberg (1927–2010) and Heinrich Matthaei (b. 1929). But their 

accomplishment was just as important. Watson and Crick worked on molecular reproduction—the DNA molecule formed of two entwined strands, each strand holding the information that guides life’s unfolding, each strand crucial as cells divide. Nirenberg and Matthaei 

worked on molecular function. For the structure of DNA lent itself to thinking of a “code.” 

With a pattern of nucleic acid base pairs, A, T, G, and C, laid out to form a strand of DNA, a key 

was needed to provide meaning—just as Morse code translates dots and dashes into letters 

and words. In this case the dots and dashes were nucleic acid bases, the letters were amino 

acids, and the words were proteins, the complex molecules that guide cellular actions such as 

“break down a sugar,” or “create a cell wall,” or even “make a new molecule of DNA.” Nirenberg 

and Matthaei cracked that code. 

Their approach was simplicity itself (which didn’t make it easy). Make a synthetic 

nucleic acid, run it through a ribosome (which assembles proteins), and see what comes out. 

First, put in a strand of all U’s (uracil, a stand-in for T, in this case). Out comes a synthetic 

molecule made solely of the amino acid phenylalanine, multiple copies joined head-to-tail 

like a protein. So UUU (the code was formed of three bases) means phenylalanine. Vary the 

amounts of the nucleic acid bases and see what amino acids join up and in what proportions. 

Keep it all straight with a chart made of graph paper taped together (dated January 18, 1965, 

191

⁄2 x 1913⁄16 in. [49.5 x 50.2 cm]; detail left) or, actually, many such charts, each a refinement of 

the last. Work so hard that in a scant four years (starting in 1961 and finishing in 1965) it’s all 

straight—all the combinations of bases are matched with all twenty amino acids. Three years 

later, in 1968, pick up a Nobel Prize.

We don’t mind the staginess of the 1962 eight-by-ten glossy. It flatters us. From our place 

“behind the blackboard” we see science being made, at least as we like to think it’s made: two 

men, at the height of their powers, united in a common purpose, working successfully at one 

of the great challenges of modern biology. The vantage point the photographer provides is 

pure genius; a more realistic position would put their backs to us or have them looking away 

from their work. We’re placed in the midst of their creation. We think: “Look, they’re working 

it out for us!”

The photograph and chart come from the extensive collection of letters, photographs, 

and laboratory notebooks connected to Nirenberg’s work on the genetic code; other papers 

deal with his ideas on how the brain works, his next research topic.

—Paul Theerman

Marshall W. Nirenberg Papers (1937–2003)

Marshall W. Nirenberg

National Library of Medicine, Profiles in Science: http://profiles.nlm.nih.gov/JJ/. Manuscript papers; 

159 boxes and oversize materials; 721

⁄2 linear feet; photograph courtesy of Nature © 2011
154 the national library of medicine

Calculated steps

Mechanics of the Human Walking Apparatus (1836)

Wilhelm Eduard Weber and Eduard Weber 

Mechanik der menschlichen Gehwerkzeuge. Göttingen, Germany. Printed book with atlas containing lithographs, 

426 pp. + 10 pp.; text: 43

⁄4 x 77⁄8 in. (12 x 19.8 cm); atlas: 8 x 10 in. (20.5 x 25.4 cm)

Few movements in a living human depend so much on external forces, occur so evenly 

and are so little altered by the Will” as walking. So wrote Wilhelm Weber (1804–91) 

and Eduard Weber (1795–1881) in their treatise on the mechanics of human motion, a 

work that continued a line of inquiry that began in the seventeenth century. René Descartes’s 

conception of the human as a machine animated by a soul and Giovanni Borelli’s application 

of mechanics to anatomy in On the Motions of Animals (1680–81) had helped to initiate the 

long debate over mechanism versus the immaterial soul and materialism versus vitalism. 

The suggestion that mechanics—matter and motion defined by mathematically expressed 

laws—could explain perception, thought, will, and action was politically dangerous and morally suspect. To consider the human a mere “engine” bordered on atheism. Borelli prudently 

avowed that the principal cause of movement is the soul and the active instrument is the will. 

At the beginning of the nineteenth century the Weber brothers also avowed that walking 

and running “depend on free will,” but then methodically demonstrated that “such mechanical 

movements can be predicted by calculation,” so that “a voluntary act of will is not needed to 

move the active instruments successively in the necessary order.” That the legs can oscillate 

like a pendulum, for instance, is a property that makes possible the regularity of successive 

steps. “It appears,” they determined, “that the constant period of the oscillations results from 

the force of gravity without requiring an act of will.”

The Webers were the first investigators to systematically study the mechanics of human 

motion. To do that they needed to devise a way of capturing reliable data. Artists, they argued, 

had misrepresented the curvature of the spine and angle of the pelvis. The investigator seeking 

an accurate visualization of body mechanisms must instead use mechanical and mathematical approaches. The Webers employed the crosshairs of a telescope to measure pelvic tilt at 

different phases of movement, and then analyzed the phases using differential equations. To 

illustrate “the bases of the human walking machine” they encased bones in plaster blocks and 

sawed them into segments to make imprints on paper (left). This method, they claimed, “is so 

true that it replaces the actual specimen.” A draftsman using their equations to determine the 

body’s position at different phases of motion could illustrate running and springing figures as 

they might appear on a stroboscopic disk (opposite). Because the legs articulate “like hinges” 

set in a frame or the cogwheels of a watch, they obey strict rules. Such mathematically reconstructed figures can create an impression of movement “corresponding exactly to nature.”

By using mechanical principles so rigorously, the Webers contributed to the ascendancy 

of a new materialist science of life. Increasingly, inventions such as pumps, telegraphs, combustion engines, and assembly lines would be made to serve as models of organisms and body 

parts—and would even eventually replace or augment them. Humans and machines seemed 

now disconcertingly equivalent: the mechanics of living bodies subverted the idea not only of 

spirit enlivening the human frame but also of free will and even God.

—Allison Muri 

above: Imprints taken from cross sections of the skeletal 

foot demonstrate that the articular surfaces joining the 

lower leg and foot are round only in one direction, rotate 

almost entirely in one direction, and therefore can be 

considered hinges. Mechanik atlas, pl. 11

opposite: Two figures provide a model of how the motions 

of running and springing can be accurately drawn. 

Mechanik atlas, pl. 16
156 the national library of medicine

“The naked truth”

Man and Sunlight (1924)

Hans Surén with photographs by Gerhard Riebicke, C. J. Luther, J. Gross, and Paul Isenfels 

Der Mensch und die Sonne. Stuttgart, Germany. Printed book, 224 pp.; 51⁄8 x 75⁄8 in. (13.1 x 19.7 cm) 

Published in Germany in 1924 and translated into English in 1927, this little volume—

an homage to sunlight and its revitalizing effects—was the best-selling “naturist” 

tract of its time. Its author, Hans Surén (1885–1972), a former army officer and fervent 

advocate of Luft- und Sonnenbad (air- and sunbathing), was nudism’s foremost exponent. 

Exposing the naked body to the sun may have seemed scandalous in Wilhelmine 

Germany, but nudism gained popularity with the craze for body culture in the postwar Weimar 

Republic. Nudism also had a politics. It was allied with eugenics, which aimed to strengthen 

the nation by strengthening the individual body: according to Surén, the “future of a Volk” 

depended on the “bodily and moral armaments” that nudism could provide.

Der Mensch und die Sonne advised readers on how to sunbathe for health: the largest 

possible part of the body’s surface should be exposed to the sun’s rays so that the skin could 

“breathe.” It argued that nakedness was not immoral. After all, the ancient Greeks exercised 

in the open and without clothes. (The original meaning of gymnastics came from gymnos: 

“naked.”) Surén-Gymnastik, practiced during “Surén weeks” (training camps for naturists), 

played a central role. Sunbathing had to be complemented by exercise, skin care, and oiling and shaving the body to harden and smooth its surface. The goal was to make the body 

resemble a Greek bronze. Whiteness as an ideal of beauty was replaced by a classical or 

even primitivist aesthetic. Surén boasted that his “healthy, natural brown skin color” could 

compete with “any Arab inhabitant of the middle of Africa.” At the same time the metallic 

look of tanned, oiled skin over hardened muscles resonated with contemporary physiological 

models of the masculine body as an armored machine. In contrast Surén’s women often had a 

marble-white complexion, denoting purity, and were posed in the postures of classical statues, 

although he could also show them as active and modern. 

To attain the ideal body Surén relied on two visual instruments: the mirror and the 

photograph. Under surveillance in the mirror, the naked body could not hide “defects” and 

“abnormalities.” In the early twentieth century the new technology of the halftone photograph 

was becoming a pervasive feature of mass culture. Naturist publications always featured 

photographs of beautiful naked people, presented as the “living truth” one should strive for. 

Such photographs functioned as the other side of the photographic archives of “abnormal” 

and “exotic” naked bodies shown in criminology, medicine, and anthropology texts. The 

photos in Der Mensch und die Sonne (mostly by Gerhard Riebicke [1878–1957], a newspaper 

photographer who specialized in shots of athletic bodies in motion) mobilized and controlled 

the eroticism—which partly accounted for the popularity of nudist publications. The “artistry” 

of the nudes (and Surén’s insistence on their moral purpose) gave readers the license to take 

pleasure in viewing them.

Surén’s popularity continued after the Nazis gained power. The 1936 edition, retitled 

Man and Sunlight: The Aryan-Olympic Spirit, replaced “naked truth” with “völkisch truth” and 

presented photographs of the nude “Aryan” body as the “realization of the racial ideal.”

—Maren Möhring

above: A man, probably Hans Surén, turns toward the sun. 

Cover art: Ludwig Hohlwein (1874–1949), a renowned poster 

artist who worked for the Nazis even before 1933 and helped 

to shape the visual image of Nazi Germany. Der Mensch und 

die Sonne, cover

opposite: Book pages (left) showing a female “water nude” 

in a pose that conceals her breasts and genitals and (right) 

Surén training a man in gymnastics. Der Mensch und die 

Sonne, pp. 14–15
158 the national library of medicine

Vectors of modernity

Rodney (1950)

Lucifer Guarnier (director), for the National Tuberculosis Association 

New York. Motion picture, color, sound, animation, 16mm; 10:16

It’s 1950 and a fine upstanding teenager named Rodney is stricken with the deadly 

tuberculosis bacterium (Mycobacterium tuberculosis). But rest assured—and rest he will, 

in a tuberculosis hospital—science is on top of the disease.

The early 1950s was a time of high anxiety in American culture. The United States had 

won the world war, but after the Soviets exploded their atomic bomb in 1949, fears of nuclear 

war began to proliferate, along with some undefinable unease about the consequences of 

scientific progress. Yet the 1950s was also a time of optimism, when many believed that you 

could overcome anything by adopting a positive attitude and taking timely action. 

And so this cartoon is both happy and haunted—by the threat of illness and attack. 

Stark posters of a dark profiled man and woman, with the legend “Have a Chest X-Ray,” loom 

strategically in background storefront windows as Rodney happily strolls down the sidewalks 

of his town.

Because TB is an invader within. Like the great science fiction films of the 1950s—such 

as The Man from Planet X, The Day the Earth Stood Still, Invasion of the Body Snatchers—Rodney

plays off cultural dread and suspicion of the Other. 

That Other could also be people of a different social class or ethnicity. At one point 

Rodney (who lives in an all-American small town) says to his doctor that he thought only 

people who live in the slums get TB. The doctor counters, almost poignantly, “Germs don’t 

know one person from another.” Tuberculosis, it turns out, is a modern, democratic disease. 

Even white middle-class people get it, and it’s nobody’s fault. With the defeat of Nazism and its 

racial ideology, and in the aftermath of the genocide that killed six million Jews, there was a 

changed climate of opinion in America: discrimination is wrong.

Rodney’s modernist cartoon animation renderings of cars, people, lungs, bacterial 

invasion, diagnostic technology, and treatment methods capture that moment in American life 

and medicine when everything felt modern. The main vector of modernity here is the X-ray. 

(The National Tuberculosis Association commissioned Rodney for a campaign to encourage 

X-ray screening.) A few years later the emphasis would shift to antibiotics, but Rodney takes 

place on the doorstep of the antibiotic revolution: drug treatment of tuberculosis had already 

been invented but became practicable only in 1952, when isoniazid, the first oral mycobactericidal drug, was created. Rodney makes no mention of antibiotics—and, surprisingly, only one 

fleeting mention of the tuberculin test. 

There is another vector of modernity: the motion picture itself, made in a contemporary 

idiom that powerfully communicates to the public. And the messages are: See your doctor 

regularly (and get regular chest X-rays). If he says you have TB (which may not be evident), 

listen to your doctor and go to a “modern tuberculosis hospital,” where you will rest and 

recover and be isolated until you no longer pose a danger to your family and community. If 

that doesn’t do the trick, the fatherly doctor explains, surgery to collapse a lobe of the lung will 

give it even more rest. Happily that turns out to be unnecessary in Rodney’s case.

—Kathy High and Michael Sappol

above and opposite: Lu Guarnier (1914–2007), director of 

Rodney, was an exponent of the new modernist cartoon 

animation of the 1940s and early ’50s. Cartoon modernism 

emphasized abstraction, bold lines, dynamic distortion, and 

the elimination of unnecessary detail. The new style was 

economical (it required fewer cells and less drawing per 

cell) and brought visual elements from cubism, surrealism, 

art deco, minimalism, even abstract expressionism to 

the mass movie and television audience. Stills from 

National Tuberculosis Association's Rodney reprinted 

with permission, © 2011 American Lung Association. 

www.Lung.org
160 the national library of medicine

Fun with your modern head

The Wonder in Us (1921)

Hanns Günther (Walter de Haas), ed.; cover design by W. Thamm 

Wunder in uns: Ein Buch vom menschlichen Körper für Jedermann. Zürich–Leipzig, 2d ed. Printed book, 454 pp.; 53⁄4 x 83⁄4 in. (14.7 x 22.3 cm)

In the early decades of the twentieth century a modernizing imperative took hold. 

Suddenly it seemed that a new age was dawning—an era of new technologies, fashions, 

and political philosophies—modern times. In the aftermath of the Great War (1914–18), 

with the overthrow of the old European empires, it was all the rage to strip off the veneer of 

fussy decoration and unnecessary detail that choked the preceding era and to replace it with 

designs and inventions that emphasized machine power, strong lines, bold colors, and smooth 

surfaces of metal, glass, concrete, and rubber.

Wunder in Uns: Ein Buch vom Menschlichen Körper für Jedermann bears the marks of this 

moment. In 1921 Hanns Günther (the pseudonym of the German popular science writer 

Walter de Haas, 1886–1969) compiled twenty-eight essays on the human body into “a book for 

everyone.” Furnished with a cover illustration showing a boldly minimalist outline of a human 

heart, Wunder in Uns presented illustrated lessons on “recent developments” in medicine and 

“modern physiology.” Central Europe was then afflicted by postwar political and economic 

turmoil, but even in troubled times the book attracted a wide readership and quickly sold out 

its first edition.

Part of its appeal was its colored plates, which feature stylized cutaway diagrams of the 

interior of the human body. Although anatomical illustrations had long been a staple of 

popular medical books, they typically presented a static view of structures. In contrast, the 

most striking illustrations in Wunder in Uns deploy images of industrial production to visually 

explain the body’s functions. 

The head was the most modern part of the body. Plate 13 (opposite) represents the brain 

as bundles of wires connected to telecommunication offices staffed by little switchboard operators, file clerks, and messengers, who sort and redirect sensory electrical messages received 

from the eyes, nose, mouth, and lower body. In another plate, on digestion, foods tumble off a 

conveyor belt down the esophageal chute into the stomach and intestines, depicted as a sweaty 

mine or furnace room tended by manual laborers. The body then had a class system—the 

clean head office controlled the dirty body factory—which reflected the social organization of 

twentieth-century industry (with one glaring inaccuracy: the workers are represented as adult 

men, even though switchboard operators were usually women). 

Both the form and content of Wunder in Uns signified modernity. Its admixture of 

text, drawings, and photographs was in the graphic style that had recently been developed 

in American newspapers and magazines. Each colored plate was preceded by a tissue-paper 

overlay printed with captions, a slick packaging concept. 

America was another signifier. Wunder in Uns tried to do things the modern industrialized American way. Its illustrations of the industrial body were borrowed (then colorized) 

from an American encyclopedia, Pictured Knowledge (1919). Later in the 1920s, Wunder in Uns

essayist Fritz Kahn (1888–1968) developed modernist medical illustration in a series of popular publications. In the 1940s, as a refugee from the Nazis, he returned the genre to America. 

—Michael Sappol

above: “The vestiges of the branchial apparatus in humans.” 

A photomontage superimposes an anatomical diagram over 

the photograph of a young woman—which is parallel to an 

evolutionary superimposition: our evolutionary past coexists 

in our body with the evolutionary present. The structures 

of the human eye, ear, nose, jaw, and throat shown here 

correspond to the gill structures of fish. Wunder in Uns, pl. 19

opposite: “An attempt to represent our brain’s setup, 

shown graphically.” The anatomy of the brain and nervous 

system is here reconfigured as linked rectilinear offices 

of functions—and covered over with printed tissue paper. 

Wunder in Uns, pl. 13
162 the national library of medicine

Chinese health puzzles

In 2005 the National Library of Medicine acquired more than fifteen hundred Chinese 

public health posters plus an assortment of other materials, mainly from the Communist 

era (1949 to the present). Among these riches is a charming set of eight block puzzles. 

The pictures on the sides of each block, when put together, make six scenes aimed at fostering 

revolutionary consciousness and teaching hygienic behavior through the cycle of a day. 

Scene one: As a cat looks up at him and the sun rises through an open window, a boy 

brushes his teeth (left, top). He will next use the basin and towel behind him to wash his face. 

The dawn is to the new day as the boy is to the new political order: optimistic, bright, and full 

of promise. 

Scene two: The boy joins his sister and older brother, walking on a country road. They 

stretch out their arms to exercise before school begins. 

Scene three: In class the boy reads while other boys rub their eyes, which are strained 

from reading. A wall poster urges, “Protect your eyes; rest at regular intervals.” (The exhortatory poster campaign was a hallmark of the Communist regime.)

Scene four: The boy and his sister join a mass health campaign (left, center). He helps 

hold up a banner that says “Exterminate!” and shows drawings of a mosquito, fly, rat, and 

louse. His sister waves a flyswatter. One boy holds a pesticide sprayer; another carries a 

bamboo pole dangling a mousetrap. “Carry out sanitation to make things beautiful” reads a 

sign on a wall as they march past.

Scene five: Now home, the boy and his sister wash their hands and face. Their mother 

brings steaming dishes to the table as dusk falls outside the window. The boy looks to his 

mother, anticipating a tasty supper. 

Scene six: Their blue jackets and red scarves hang on a rail, and it’s time to get ready for 

bed (left, bottom). The boy’s older brother bathes in a large red tub, and the ever diligent boy 

cleans the window as the sun sets. A green bucket and mop wait for cleaning up after bathing. 

Soon all the children will have a good night’s sleep. 

The Number 10 Shanghai Toy Factory probably produced these blocks between 1960 and 

1966. Since no posters of Mao Zedong are seen on the home, school, or village walls, the blocks 

likely were issued before the Cultural Revolution (1966–76), when Mao’s portrait became ubiquitous. The “Four Pests” banner suggests the years following the Great Leap Forward (1958–61): 

in May 1958 Mao ordered that “the whole people, including five-year-old children, must be 

mobilized to eliminate the four pests” (sparrows, rats, mosquitoes, flies). In March 1960 Mao 

replaced sparrows (targeted for eating too much grain) with lice.

The two-year campaign nearly exterminated sparrows in China. Without natural enemies 

to keep them in check, swarms of locusts proliferated, consuming large quantities of grain and 

contributing to a famine in which 35 to 50 million people died—among them children who 

participated in the earliest Four Pest extermination campaigns portrayed on these very blocks.

—Marta Hanson

Health and Hygiene Puzzle Blocks (ca. 1960–66)

Number 10 Shanghai Toy Factory 

Shanghai, China. Eight blocks; printed in four-color on six sides; 13⁄8 x 13⁄8 in. (3.5 x 3.5 cm)

above: Selected scenes from the puzzle blocks
164 the national library of medicine

“There ain’t no match for a mucous patch”

T uberculosis attracted considerable attention from artists and writers. Along with syphilis and polio it was so rampant that cautionary visual messages appeared in myriad 

public places, from offices to restrooms. A wall in my third-grade classroom routinely 

displayed public health flyers, pamphlets, and posters—some benign, others nightmarishly 

frightening. They were specters of horror that left mental scars on an impressionable little me. 

In the “Crusade Against TB,” tuberculosis was often symbolized by hooded demons or 

skeletons. They were not pleasant to look at but did the job of raising awareness. Yet not every 

anti-TB product was scary. The logo for TB, the cross with the double horizontal crossbars, 

was a friendly brand. Even friendlier was Huber the Tuber, a Story of Tuberculosis, which was 

conceived, drawn, and written for the National Tuberculosis Association in 1943 by Dr. Harry 

Wilmer (1917–2005), who was then recovering from his own bout with tuberculosis. This 

entertaining little illustrated book stars Huber, an anthropomorphic tubercle (a lung nodule 

caused by the Mycobacterium tuberculosis), who goes on a series of adventures in “The Promised 

Land ‘o’ Lung.” In the course of his escapades he gets caught up in a war that looks suspiciously like the one then raging in Europe and Asia and meets up with Nasty von Sputum, 

Rusty the Bloodyvitch, and Huey the Long Tuber (a reference to Senator Huey Long). And the 

reader gets otherwise serious lessons about the causes, diagnosis, pathology, and treatment 

of tuberculosis. 

A few years later Wilmer created a companion volume, Corky the Killer, a Story of Syphilis, 

for the American Social Hygiene Association, an anti–venereal disease advocacy group. Time

magazine described Corky as “a slightly bawdy blend of fact and fancy that seeks by cartoons 

and comic-strip dialogue to tell about the syphilis spirochete and how it works.”

The villain is Corky, a nasty 1/3,000th of an inch tall, with a corkscrew body (characteristic of the spirochete), a nose like a golf tee, and spindly legs. He is the leader of a band 

of syphilitic saboteurs and the Mayor of Chancretown, whose anthem is “Down by the Old 

Blood Stream.” Dodging anti-syphilitic “magic bullets” (the drug Salvarsan, developed by Paul 

Ehrlich), Corky makes a mad dash through “Man World” and latches on to the first blood cell 

that floats by. Soon he rejoins his fellow saboteurs, who love to cause nasty skin eruptions 

(chancres). Eventually caught, he is brought to trial and, after losing his case, sentenced to the 

Soap and Water Chamber of Torture, where he is scrubbed to death. The moral of the story: 

syphilis can be prevented or cured, if caught early and treated appropriately. 

Wilmer, a passable pen-and-ink draftsman in Huber, greatly improved his craft in Corky. 

But somehow the drawings in Huber, which look like doodles, are more effective. Both books 

have a bit of magic in them: the health message is subordinated to the sheer joy of visual 

storytelling. Like the best illustrated children’s books—and graphic novels and animated 

cartoons—each creates an imaginative universe that refers back to the real world with wit, 

humor, and insight. 

—Steven Heller

Huber the Tuber (1943) and Corky the Killer (1945)

Harry A. Wilmer

New York. Printed books with line drawings, Huber: 83 pp., 63⁄4 x 97⁄8 in. (17 x 25.2 cm); Corky: 67 pp., 7 x 97⁄8 in. (17.5 x 25.2 cm)

above: Huber the Tuber and his associates ride cough 

droplets to their next human victim. Huber the Tuber, p. 3

opposite: (Top row) Corky the Killer and friends contemplate 

locating a snug place in their victim’s body where they will be 

secure from attack by the body’s dog-faced defenders. Corky 

the Killer, pp. 31, 53. (Bottom row) Huber the Tuber and his 

associates find lodging in a victim’s lungs. Huber the Tuber, 

pp. 35, 59. Excerpts from National Tuberculosis Association's 

Huber the Tuber reprinted with permission, © 2011 American 

Lung Association. www.Lung.org; Corky the Killer courtesy 

the National Social Hygiene Association © 2011
166 the national library of medicine

Healing the “Sick Man of Asia”

T uberculosis carried a social stigma for both the individual and the nation in the 

early twentieth century, when China was depicted as the “Sick Man of East Asia.” 

The adoption of Western ideas, standards, and practices of health was taken to be a 

yardstick of progress, while traditional religious beliefs and health practices were disparaged 

as superstitious and backward. When the newly founded National Anti-Tuberculosis Association of China began conducting anti-tuberculosis campaigns in 1933 it used images, motifs, 

and visual styles influenced by, and sometimes directly borrowed from, European and 

American posters, flyers, and pamphlets. The anti-TB campaigns and the formation of an 

activist public health movement were tied to modernization efforts. 

The Chinese anti-TB campaigners believed that visual images must play a vital role in 

health education and mobilization campaigns in a nation where many were poorly educated 

or illiterate. The flyers shown here are part of a series made in the 1940s under the anticommunist Kuomintang government. Branded with the double-barred Cross of Lorraine, 

the international anti-TB trademark, the flyers placed the fight against tuberculosis in a 

distinctively Chinese framework. In one flyer (opposite, bottom left) the domestic scene is 

completely Western, but in the far background next to the window can be seen a Chinese 

painting of winter-plum blossoms. Winter blossoms symbolize perseverance and vitality in 

a harsh environment, a common theme in traditional Chinese art and rhetoric. Next to the 

image of a mother kissing her baby the flyer says “love but don’t harm your son.” In keeping 

with contemporary Western campaigns it argues that kissing is bad because it transmits germs 

that cause TB. 

Another flyer (opposite, top right) shows a man in traditional dress spitting a gob of 

sputum—which is revealed by a microscope to contain bacteria—in an alley where innocent 

children play. The text cautions that spitting is an “unforgivable mistake” because it spreads 

tuberculosis, and instructs readers to correct this bad habit. An old woman in another flyer 

kneels before an altar and prays for health, with a poster inset that advertises traditional 

nostrums and quack remedies (opposite, top left). The flyer featuring a seated man, with a 

question mark and whirls of confusion around his head (opposite, bottom right), urges people 

to see a doctor at the first sign of illness rather than engage in wishful thinking and passively 

hope that diseases will go away on their own. 

In contrast, a detail from another flyer (left) shows a doctor explaining a lung X-ray to a 

young woman. The title, “Knowing people’s faces but not their lungs,” plays on the Chinese 

proverb “Knowing people but not their hearts.” The accompanying text argues that to prevent 

and treat TB, people should seek the advice of doctors trained in scientific medicine (the germ 

theory, good hygiene, nutrition, physical fitness, and sanitary engineering), who are equipped 

with the latest technologies—the microscope, X-ray, tuberculin test, BCG vaccine, and mass 

media. The underlying premise is that in heeding the advice of health experts the Chinese 

people can modernize themselves and their nation. 

—Liping Bu

Chinese Anti-Tuberculosis Flyers (1940s)

National Anti-Tuberculosis Association of China 

Shanghai, China. Printed flyers, 51⁄8 x 71⁄2 in. (13 x 19 cm)

above and opposite: Flyers from a larger series of antituberculosis flyers (Shanghai, 1940s and ‘50s), Chinese 

Public Health Collection, National Library of Medicine
168 the 

national libraryof medicine hidden tre a sure 169

“Love the Nation Hygienic Movement” and other slides T he National Library of Medicine owns perhaps the world’s largest collection of materi

-

als relating to public health in China, dating from the 1800s into the Communist era 

(1949 to the present). In this treasure trove of posters, pamphlets, and ephemera is a 

unique collection of more than forty sets of slides designed for projection in classrooms and 

other spaces where audiences assembled. Most of them were made for health campaigns: 

tuberculosis vaccination; eradication of flies, rats, and mosquitoes; child hygiene; prevention 

of childhood diarrhea, pneumonia, and rickets; family planning; rural drinking water sanita-

tion; coal-smoke and natural-gas poisoning; first aid; vomit and phlegm sanitation; processing 

human manure into fertilizer; prevention of dysentery, liver-fluke disease, hepatitis, diphthe-

ria, tuberculosis, and meningitis; and methods to reduce intestinal disease, and so forth. The 

oldest sets, consisting of glass slides sewn into cloth frames, date to the 1950s–60s. The more 

recent ones, from the 1970s, are mostly film in cardboard frames, produced for the public 

health campaigns of the Cultural Revolution.

The glass slide set illustrated here (opposite) comes from a 1950s-era campaign for BCG 

(Bacillus Calmette-Guérin) vaccination to prevent tuberculosis. Made in Hangzhou, Zhejiang 

province, the slides are each stamped in blue, “It is the parents’ responsibility to get their 

children the BCG vaccine.” The first slide presents French scientists Albert Calmette and 

Camille Guérin, who developed the vaccine. The campaign’s focus on children is signaled by 

scenes of children playing in the village and nursery. The second row of slides depicts the 

subcutaneous injection method, symptoms of tuberculosis, and three stages to expect after 

vaccination (redness, swelling, scarring). The third row presents a mother bringing her son 

to be checked by a doctor, a hospitalized child, and the four stages of child development. The 

show concludes with slides that tell parents how to get BCG vaccinations for their children 

(they can go to a clinic or wait until doctors come to their village). The final image, of a young 

girl next to an enlarged BCG vial, advises, “Children who want to prevent consumption quickly 

get vaccinated with BCG!” 

Other sets range from nine to more than fifty slides. Ten slides on the “Love the Nation 

Hygienic Movement” document the peak of the Cultural Revolution with Chairman Mao quota-

tions, his red book, revolutionary banners, and proletariat workers. More than fifty slides depict 

human evolution from apes and illustrate Engel’s maxim that “Labor created humanity.” Some 

sets still have booklets that give the lectures and sometimes the year of the campaign they were 

connected to (1972, family planning; 1974, intestinal disease prevention among soldiers). 

Slide lectures were held in conjunction with postering, parades, publications, exhibi-

tions, mass rallies, public address announcements, theatrical performances, and film—some 

of which can be seen in their projected images. Communist-era Chinese public health 

campaigns used a coordinated approach to media as a socialist technology of total mobiliza-

tion for vaccination, sanitary engineering, personal hygiene, and revolutionary consciousness 

initiatives. These rare slides give viewers a glimpse of that lost world.

—Marta Hanson

Chinese Public Health Slides (1950s–70s)

Hangzhou and other cities, China Painted and printed glass slides in cardboard and cloth-stitched frames, 4 x 3

1

⁄8 in. (10.2 x 7.9 cm)

above, top: Slide 12 from a series on human evolution shows 

the relationship of humans with apes. above: Slide 3 from the series “Love the Nation Hygienic 

Movement” features Mao’s little red book held high. opposite: Slides instruct parents on the need to protect their 

children against TB.
170 the national library of medicine

Don’t eat the iguana!

T his sometimes charming, sometimes dreadful little book offers a series of profusely 

illustrated lessons designed to teach “the young” how to stay healthy amid the many 

dangers in the tropics. Its intended readership is not native-born children but the 

offspring of white settlers—military officers, businessmen, colonial officials, and missionaries. Native people, we are told and shown, have a regrettable tendency to live in damp, 

overcrowded, and unsanitary dwellings in close quarters with domestic animals, rodents, and 

insects. Their customs and ways of doing things threaten their own health and the health of 

others. The book’s author, Azel Ames (1845–1908), was well known for his writings on medicine 

and health. A major in the U.S. Army, he was a veteran of the Civil War and Spanish-American 

War and later represented the United States Public Health Service in the Philippines as 

military and civil sanitary inspector and in Puerto Rico as director of vaccination. 

Ames begins his book by lecturing on the importance of being well. Sick people cannot 

work or find pleasure; if a man cannot earn anything for his family, he will be “poor, hungry 

and wretched.” With good health, however, the same man is likely to be prosperous, contented, 

and happy. Ames lists the “musts”—the things we must know and must understand and laws 

we must obey lest we become ill, wretched, and dead. 

After this rather terrifying introduction his advice is generally sound. We need to breathe 

clean air, eat nutritious food, rest and sleep well, and reduce wastes of every kind. At the end 

of each chapter he poses questions for the reader to answer. The question “What are the air 

cells in our lungs like?” has two possible right answers: masses of air cells are like “very great 

bunches of very small grapes”; single air cells, however, are like “small red toy balloons with 

very thin gutta-percha skins, blown up full of air.” 

He often uses colorful metaphors. The body, he says, like a well-kept horse, will repay us 

well for our good treatment. His advice on nutrition is a mix of the scientific knowledge of the 

time and a dose of common sense. Ames does not hesitate to disapprove of others’ customs; 

he frowns on the French habit of having only coffee and bread for breakfast. In parts of the 

tropics, he says, people eat reptiles such as iguanas, but these are not fit food for decent people. 

As for clothing, Ames insists that children should wear flannel bands to keep their bowels 

warm. While native people laugh at the idea of wearing flannel bands around the body, he says, 

many of their children die.

Ames has a particular horror of “impurities” of every kind and sees their pernicious 

effects everywhere. These include foul air, vile odors, dirty water, rotting filth, decaying 

animals and plants, bodily wastes, and dangerous vapors from sewer pipes. These must be 

countered by the most scrupulous attention to cleanliness. He tries to be cheery and uplifting 

but mainly depicts the tropics as a disease-plagued environment that poses a grave risk to 

white children. I feel fortunate to have missed reading this little volume when growing up as a 

child in British Malaya.

—Elizabeth Fee

Elementary Hygiene for the Tropics (1902)

Azel Ames 

Boston. Printed book, 180 pp.; illustrated; 5 x 71⁄4 in. (12.5 x 18.3 cm)

above: A native village street adorns the cover of this guide to 

living in the tropics.

opposite: A photograph shows tropical natives polluting their 

water supply. Elementary Hygiene, p. 89
172 the national library of medicine

Atabrine and a bit of hubba-hubba

To young American GIs waging World War II in the South Pacific malaria posed a threat 

as dire as that of the enemy’s military forces. Tens of thousands of men died, due in 

part to shortages of quinine, then the only available treatment. 

Early in the conflict the army’s surgeon general established a malaria control office 

that provided ample supplies of the newly developed antimalarial agent Atabrine. Soldiers 

in the field, however, didn’t view the threat seriously enough to swallow the bitter pill and 

risk its malaria-mimicking side effects: headaches, nausea, and vomiting. Consequently, only 

one-third of his troops were fit for combat at any given time, according to General Douglas 

MacArthur, the rest either afflicted by the disease or recovering.

In response, Armed Forces Radio began broadcasting so many malaria advisories that it 

became known as “the mosquito network” among the grunts, and “antimalaria squads” offered 

education and treatment in the field. But, as with the Private Snafu series of animated cartoons, 

GIs responded most avidly to information presented as entertainment. In 1944 an enlisted 

artist named Frank Mack was assigned the duty of designing pinup calendars to reach these 

homesick, bored, and horny soldiers, sailors, and marines.

If Mack, who went on after the war to work on the “Ripley’s Believe It or Not” newspaper 

syndicated comics feature, lacked the artistic skill that peers such as Dr. Seuss brought to their 

own wartime posters, his rambunctious style, well showcased in the “Malaria Moe” comic strips 

he drew for the Stars and Stripes military newspaper, was an ideal choice for the task at hand.

The two months featured here are charming examples of Mack’s work. In the pinup 

for May 1945 a comely redhead in a see-through nightie poses à la Rita Hayworth alongside 

a photo of her soldier boy, promising hubba-hubba-and-how, if only he’ll thwart the insect 

foe and return, hale and hearty, to her yearning arms. Mack draws her with the kind of 

clunky eroticism GIs already enjoyed in novelty postcards, aircraft nose art, Tijuana bibles, 

and tattoos.

More homespun desires, with a note of slapstick ribaldry, turn up in June’s pinup. Here, 

Malaria Moe himself, buck naked and barracks-bound, dreams of the pleasures waiting back 

home, blissfully unaware that the gum-bubble sheen of his upturned buttocks provides an 

irresistible target for an especially ornery and enormous specimen of, perhaps, Anopheles 

flavirostris, dubbed “Skeeter” in Mack’s Stars and Stripes comics.

These rare pinup calendars are fascinating not only as images but as objects—souvenirs 

of military life as lived. The tack holes in their corners testify to active duty decades ago, 

perhaps hanging on a medic’s office wall to attract the eye of some green, buck-naked private. 

There, vulnerable as Frank Mack’s hapless Moe, he might find distraction from “bend over 

and cough” indignity by counting the remaining calendar days until—thanks to his bug 

net, his M1, and a bit of luck—he’d come marching home, ready to lay that pistol down and 

commence the postwar mission of producing bouncing baby boomers.

—Sport Murphy

Malaria Pinup Calendars (1945)

Frank Mack, for the U.S. Army 

Washington, DC. Printed posters, color; 63⁄8 x 71⁄4 in. (16.2 x 18.2 cm)

above: Sleepytime down SOPAC (South Pacific) way. If Moe 

is too recklessly macho to let fears of a wee mosquito bite 

prick his dream balloon of hetero homefront joys, maybe 

the threat of figurative (and literal!) buggery will drive the 

point home. 

opposite: A swell pair of all-American gams serve as a 

risqué reminder to keep pulling for victory over both Japan 

and mosquitoes. These pinup calendars were part of a larger 

antimalaria campaign that emphasized the use of bed nets, 

mosquito repellent, Atabrine (an antimalarial pill), avoidance 

of places where mosquitoes swarm at night, and keeping 

skin covered.
174 the national library of medicine

“Use your head . . .”

Inspired by the U.S. Army’s popular Private Snafu animated cartoon series, late in World 

War II the navy hired Hugh Harman (1908–82) to do a similar series, focused on health. 

His Commandments for Health may have consisted of ten short black-and-white cartoons 

(mirroring the Ten Commandments) but was not widely distributed or shown. Today it is 

extremely rare. The National Library of Medicine holds five titles; only two others are known 

to exist. 

Harman began his career in the 1920s with Walt Disney and Warner Bros. in the 1930s. 

For the navy’s film series he hired top talent Mel Blanc (the voice of Bugs Bunny) to voice the 

dim-witted McGillicuddy and the smart regular-guy narrator. But unlike the Snafu series, the 

animation is jerky and backgrounds are static, sure signs that the cartoons were made quickly 

and cheaply. (Animation in the 1940s was labor intensive: the more drawings, the smoother 

the action.) Each film follows the same formula: the main character, the hapless U.S. Marine 

private McGillicuddy (a Snafu clone), violates a health commandment, endangering himself 

(and sometimes also his fellow soldiers). In Drinking Water, “Mac” ignores the third commandment: “Thou shall not drink water from any source other than that designated.” Instead, after 

using up his water and baking under a scorching sun (drawn as a caricature of Japan’s prime 

minister Tojo), the parched Mac jumps into a stream contaminated with a gorilla, “dead Japs,” 

and a native village’s latrine. (McGillicuddy cartoons contain a dose of anti-Japanese propaganda that goes over the edge into racism.) In the end Mac has to make so many urgent trips 

to the “head” (a toilet) that his feet dig a trench. 

Personal Cleanliness also has a third commandment—another sign that the cartoons were 

rushed through production—“Thou shall keep thy personal habits clean.” Mac, predictably, 

refuses to bathe. His socks walk off by themselves, his skin itches, and slant-eyed athlete’sfoot “germs” attack his toes with saws and jackhammers (opposite, middle right). The film 

concludes with more racial stereotyping: natives who appear to be cannibals and speak in 

minstrel-show dialect pick him up and dump him into a kettle, but only to give him a bath.

Cleaning Mess Gear’s fifth commandment is “Thou shalt faithfully wash thy mess 

gear . . .for verily if thou become negligent in this habit thy guts shall be like knots in a 

wet rope.” Once again, Mac doesn’t comply. He licks his plate clean instead of sterilizing it 

in scalding water. Later, an X-ray view shows his intestines literally tied in knots (left; the 

line running down the right is the sound track). In the next scene, sadistic doctors subject 

him to a stomach pump, a huge dose of castor oil, and a 50-gallon enema. In Use Your Head the 

seventh commandment is “Thou shalt not use any spots except chosen ones for the deposition 

of your excrement.” But Mac makes his own private toilet, attracting a swarm of Japanesefeatured flies (opposite, top center) that gives the whole camp dysentery. When a Japanese 

radio announcer thanks Mac by name (opposite, top left), the marines use a steam shovel to 

dump him and his latrine into a pit. 

—Michael Rhode

Commandments for Health (1945)

Hugh Harman Productions, for the U.S. Navy 

Washington, DC. Motion pictures, black-and-white, sound, animation, 16mm: Personal Cleanliness (5:00); 

Cleaning Mess Gear (5:00); Drinking Water (6:00); Use Your Head (5:00); Native Food (6:00) 
176 the national library of medicine hidden tre a sure 177

Slide show follies as therapy

commercial companies, for the general public, and many were designed purely for entertainment purposes. The most famous is the Langenheim Brothers’ “The Attack of the Monster 

(Pulex Irritans),” a surreal and somewhat horrifying double exposure in which a magnified 

flea menaces an ax- and shears-wielding man—actually one of the brothers. Other images in 

the St. Elizabeths collection similarly highlight the ludicrous and the bizarre: a man trying 

to chop off his own foot; a pair of eyeglasses becoming two people; a sleeping man having a 

nightmare featuring a blue mare astride a giant turtle brandishing a sword and lobster; a cook 

bearing a human-headed dish of pudding; a bather jumping into a huge fish’s mouth. 

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. But theory trumped such considerations. According to a leading 

practitioner of moral treatment, Dr. John Minson Galt, asylum amusements should feature 

techniques of “revulsion”—that is, psychological interventions that would cause patients 

to recoil from their delusions by externalizing them and subjecting them to the ridicule of 

others. In particular, “hilarity” would help “supplant the place of delusive ideas and feelings. . . . 

If you can get [the insane] to laugh natural, it is quite apt to explode the whole affair.”

—Benjamin Reiss

Picture the scene. Seated in a lecture hall, several hundred well-dressed mental 

patients—watched carefully by attendants—await the entrance of the medical 

director of their hospital. Gaslight dims and the doctor emerges, striding toward a 

lectern. “Today’s topic,” he announces, “is the symmetry of natural forms.” An attendant at the 

back hunches over an elaborate contraption that burns streams of hydrogen and oxygen over 

a cylinder of calcium oxide. The resulting beam of intense white light—limelight—is focused 

on a glass plate coated with tiny particles of silver salt affixed to the glass with albumen. Cast 

across the auditorium onto a screen is the perfect image of microscopically observed snowflakes, ten feet in diameter.

According to the art historian Emily Godbey and the psychiatrist George S. Layne, such 

magic lantern displays were more than a pastime to amuse nineteenth-century patients. 

Originated in the early 1850s by Dr. Thomas Kirkbride (1809–83) of the Pennsylvania Hospital 

for the Insane, in collaboration with German émigré photographers William Langenheim 

(1807–74) and Frederick Langenheim (1809–79), they were an important part of the “moral 

treatment” of patients. Subscribing to John Locke’s “impression” theory of mental process, early 

American asylum superintendents believed that rational, orderly imagery could be “impressed 

upon the mind,” thus—according to Kirkbride—effacing “delusions and morbid feelings, 

at least for a transitory period.” Many of the images (some mechanically reproduced, others 

hand-painted), accordingly, were manifestly instructive: several illustrate the perils of drink 

and tobacco; others depict order and beauty drawn from nature and travel. Some of the images 

even moved. Using “slip slides”—a pair of sequenced images slipped into and out of a wooden 

frame—operators created the first form of animation, preceding flip books by several decades. 

The therapeutic use of magic lantern slides spread well beyond Philadelphia. The 

images gathered here are from St. Elizabeths Hospital—originally the Government Hospital 

for the Insane—a federally funded institution built in 1855. All of them were produced by 

St. Elizabeths Magic Lantern Slide Collection (1855–1890s)

American Stereoscopic Company (Philadelphia); T. M. McAllister (New York); 

James W. Queen & Co. (Philadelphia); and unknown manufacturers 

Glass slides in wooden frames; photoprinted and handpainted 

above: “The Attack of the Monster (Pulex 

Irritans).” Lantern Slide 136

opposite, top: Slip slides, with two glass cells in 

the same frame, were manipulated to create the 

illusion of motion. Lantern Slide 80

opposite, bottom: Snowflake. Lantern Slide 47, 

James W. Queen & Co.
178 the national library of medicine

Relics of the infectious past

T he history of public health cannot be understood without artifacts such as those 

pictured here—the handbills, forms, public notices, signs, educational circulars, and 

pamphlets that document and in part constitute the street-level history of public 

health. They are relics of the infectious-disease prevention campaigns of late-nineteenth- and 

twentieth-century state and local public health agencies as they sought to isolate the sick, 

encourage physicians to report cases, and educate ordinary men and women. Such humble 

pieces of disposable paper and cardboard document vital links between the worlds of law 

and medicine, the laboratory and the bedside, public policy and the political and professional 

stakeholders who created and enforced those policies. 

Disposable printed items, called “ephemera” in the book and printing trades, until 

recently had only a small place in our most prominent libraries. The shelves of our established 

medical libraries are laden with words written to be preserved: theses, medical journals, 

monographs, and textbooks. Learned books and articles were the history of medicine for 

generations of its chroniclers. This cumulative record of intellectual achievement excluded 

by definition the ephemeral—print with an instrumental, transactional, or commercial 

purpose, to be used and discarded. But in recent years a new historical sensibility has made 

such ephemera indispensable, as we seek to link high culture with low, theory with practice, 

medical institutions with everyday life. Only the more prescient libraries, such as the National 

Library of Medicine, have purposefully collected such undignified materials. 

These objects reflect a changing consensus of epidemiological and laboratory knowledge. 

They also illuminate the not always direct relationship between that knowledge and public 

health practice. Smallpox, for example, had been known to be transmitted from person to person since at least the eighteenth century, yet late-nineteenth-century outbreaks of the disease, 

which gave rise to an aggressive policy of isolation and official encouragement of vaccination, 

had to struggle against resentment of compulsory measures and in some instances the organized opposition of anti-vaccinationists. Newer immunizations for scarlet fever, diphtheria, 

and whooping cough, which joined the list of reportable ills in the late nineteenth and early 

twentieth centuries, similarly required the education and mobilization of an often wary public. 

And thus ongoing campaigns for childhood immunizations remain a reality in the twenty-first 

century—just as they were a half century earlier in the era of Jonas Salk’s novel polio vaccine. 

Each threatened epidemic has provided a new focus for debate and discussion. Today 

fears of emerging diseases, and the needs and anxieties of a global health community, underscore the continued importance of outreach and implementation as well as research. The past 

half century has witnessed a revolution in mass media, and the need to deploy old and new 

modes of communication remains as central to the tasks of medicine and public health today 

as when these health signs were printed many decades ago. 

—Charles Rosenberg

Disease Warning Sign Collection (ca. 1890–1960)

Various public health departments

United States. Cards printed on colored stock

above: Examples of public health warning cards in the National 

Library of Medicine’s collection, probably late nineteenth 

century. The smallpox and poliomyelitis cards were printed 

in San Francisco, the others in unidentified locales. 

opposite: Salk polio vaccination campaign sign, ca. 1955. 
180 the national library of medicine

T his curious little nightmare movie is addressed to black soldiers. It depicts black men 

as overgrown, impulsive, hypersexualized children who are unable to contain their 

primordial desires. The film’s title refers to venereal disease but could equally refer to 

women, who in this bleak tale of misogyny are invariably represented as sexually promiscuous 

and solely to blame for passing along the pox. The title is perhaps also self-referential—its 

message is “easy to get.” It was produced as part of a larger wartime “Easy to Get” multimedia 

anti-VD campaign (aimed at all male soldiers, not just black men). There were “Easy to Get” 

comic books, animated cartoons, posters, pamphlets, radio skits, even matchbooks—which 

tried to recruit the attention of their target audience by showing views of provocatively sexy 

women alongside queasy glimpses of festering genitals, oozing sores, and congenital deformities. An unbeatable combination.

The film’s daytime segments—its ego, if you will—take place in the office of a white 

doctor, played with dripping condescension by Wendell Corey. The first of two representative black GIs, Corporal Baker, normally “one happy mister,” visits the doc to find the source 

of a baffling infection. Believe it or not, says the doc, the shy, “clean-looking” gal Baker met 

in the drugstore at home—the girl with the soft voice, the one whose parents are “good 

people”—turns out, like every other woman in the film, to be “filthy and diseased.” Why, 

implies the doc, would anybody ever take such a foolish risk?

We soon see why. A series of evocative, artful noirish sequences form the film’s id, from 

which the daytime scenes seem impossibly distant. At night the film’s second representative 

black GI, Private Anderson, “something of a playboy,” picks up a smoldering bad girl in a wild 

jitterbug joint. “Sure, he knew she was a whore, so what?” Even worse, instead of jumping 

up afterward to chummily soap down his cock with other soldiers in the “pro [prophylactic] station,” Anderson languidly lights a cigarette, lays back, and figures he can afford a 

second helping. 

The horror show that follows—the film’s superego—displays the consequences of such 

undisciplined behavior. One soldier, a former athlete, now has knees like basketballs; another 

collapses and dies suddenly at a luncheonette counter; a third can’t remember three words in a 

row because “the syphilis germs got into his brain.” In close-up we see the swollen, oozing genitals of a guy who “rubbed whiskey on his rod after a pickup.” Nastiest of all, one man passes 

the disease to his wife, who gives birth to a monster spawned from undisciplined desire—a 

cretinous gargoyle with a misshapen skull, half a nose, and eyes rolling back in its head. 

This ghastly sight is juxtaposed with images of black heroes, men who have sublimated 

their lusts so as to better serve their race and their nation: heavyweight boxing champion Joe 

Louis and Olympic track stars Jesse Owens and Ralph Metcalfe. As a grand finale, speaking 

magisterially from behind an imposing desk, Paul Robeson bellows a final exhortation. Grow 

up, boys, and leave women alone!

—Mikita Brottman

Easy to Get (1947)

Army Pictorial Service, Signal Corps (Official Training Film T.F.8 1423)

Washington, DC. Motion picture, black-and-white, sound, 16 mm; 22:00

Child-men, fast women
182 the national library of medicine

Minié balls, cannonballs, and diseases of war

On May 21, 1862, Surgeon General William Hammond (1828–1900) issued two “circular” 

letters to the officers of the Army Medical Corps. Circular No. 2 directed officers to 

submit medical and surgical specimens to the newly formed Army Medical Museum. 

Circular No. 5 asked them to submit “details of cases . . . and the results of investigations” 

for publication in a Medical and Surgical History of the War of the Rebellion. Contributing to 

the museum and book served to affirm and reshape the professional identity of Union army 

surgeons and physicians. It articulated a new epistemological foundation for American medicine, based on the experience of dealing with thousands of wounded and sick patients, the 

critical comparison of cases, and a commitment to learning and developing new theories and 

techniques. And it prompted the officers to make photographs of unique and interesting cases. 

Those photographs were mounted on cards, along with a short printed text detailing 

the subject’s case history: where he was wounded, course of treatment, results, and attending physician’s name. The cards became medical records, used to determine the amount of 

pension that the wounded men would receive. They also became teaching and research aids 

with visual and verbal documentation of wounds inflicted by minié ball, cannonballs, and 

accidents; camp and hospital diseases; gangrene, ulcers, and surgical techniques. Soldiers are 

posed and identified by name, rank, company, regiment, and state in many of the photographs, 

but the disease or wound or amputation is meant to be the focus of the picture.

Some photographs were made by officers at the Army Medical Museum, but most were 

made by Lieutenant Colonel and Surgeon Reed Brockway Bontecou (1824–1907) while in 

charge of Harewood General Hospital, a three-thousand-bed facility in Washington, where 

he was posted from October 1863 to May 1866. The images show a wide array of war diseases 

and injuries—gunshot wounds of the legs, arms, head, face, eyes, chest, abdomen; resections, 

amputations; cases of acute erysipelas (bacterial skin infection), sloughing and spreading gangrenous ulcers, and prosthetic limbs. Taken together, they provide an extraordinary document 

of the damage the war wrought and the challenges facing Civil War medical practice. 

Bontecou’s cards are in a number of repositories, but the National Library of Medicine’s 

set is unique. Many of its cards are marked with hand-drawn arrows in red ink, showing the 

entry and exit of the bullet. Lesions or gangrenous ulcers are circled and colored red. Some 

cards also have pencil or pen notations. Bontecou and his colleagues prided themselves on 

their modern, scientific approach to medicine and surgery and they regarded the photographs 

as a kind of two-dimensional clinic. A set of cards was exhibited at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition of 1876. 

These images of patients set squarely before the camera are touching and disquieting, a 

powerful display of suffering. Many of the soldiers willingly offered themselves up as photographic subjects, proud to record the terrible marks of their service to the nation —and proud 

to contribute to the advancement of medical knowledge.

—Shauna Devine

Civil War Surgical Card Collection (1860s)

Army Medical Museum and the Surgeon General’s Office 

Washington, DC. 146 numbered cards, with tipped-in photographs and case histories; 97⁄8 x 117⁄8 in. (25 x 30 cm)

above and opposite: The Army Medical Museum’s staff mined 

incoming reports for “interesting” cases—such as a gunshot 

wound of the “left side of scalp, denuding skull” or “gunshot 

wound, right elbow with gangrene supervening”—and cases 

that demonstrated the use of difficult surgical techniques, 

such as an amputation by circular incision or resection of the 

“head of humerus and three inches of the left clavicle.” 
184 the national library of medicine

Florence Nightingale’s art of persuasion

T here are few figures in medicine who are also iconic figures in world history. Florence 

Nightingale (1820–1910) is one such individual—the mythic lady with the lamp, 

founder of professional nursing, savior of the British soldier in the Crimea and India, 

and decisive advocate for clean and orderly hospitals. It is all true if oversimplified, yet her 

heroic personal narrative obscures one key aspect of her success. 

That is her skill in communication, her ability to deploy an array of words and images 

as rhetorical tools in convincing her readers that the current state of health and disease is 

intolerable, and that both logic and morality dictate a new institutional order. She used not 

only figures of speech, but figures—numbers, in the form of statistics and raw data, as well as 

plans, tables, and charts that dramatized instructive differences in morbidity and mortality. 

Words and images allowed her to reach out from her invalid’s rooms in London to influence a 

generation of reformers throughout the world. Nightingale’s simple arithmetic demonstrating 

the—culpable—difference in death rates between hospitals constituted in itself a powerful 

argument for reform. That difference was both diagnostic and motivating. If death rates could 

be lower, then they should be. Nightingale was a master of the Is and Ought. 

And she was a pioneer in using the power of graphic representation to show how the 

Ought could become the Is. Her Notes on Hospitals (in its third enlarged and revised edition 

by 1863) was filled with floor plans indicating the placement of beds and windows to allow 

a health-preserving circulation of air in one-story pavilion-style wings or freestanding 

buildings. That same influential book also provides model forms for tabulating, managing, 

and reporting every aspect of a hospital’s cumulative experience. Nightingale’s summary 

indictment of the British army medical staff and its hospitals in the Crimean War (published 

in 1859) used a then novel color-coded chart to show month by month the proportion of 

preventable deaths to those from wounds and other causes. It was a grim and damning reality 

that could be changed for the better by the nursing and hospital reforms she orchestrated.

Knowledge demanded responsibility, and responsibility action. The three things that 

destroyed so many soldiers in the Crimean War, Nightingale contended, were ignorance, 

incapacity, and “useless regulation.” “Health is known to depend on the observance of certain 

laws,” she argued. “Surely, before a picked body of men in the prime of life could have been 

cut off by a mortality greater perhaps than that of any pestilence on record, there must have 

been some very glaring disobedience to these laws.” Cleanliness, order, ventilation, and sound 

diet ensured health—disorder, filth, and poor diet brought an inevitable punishment in the 

form of cholera, scurvy, dysentery, and fevers. In the Crimea, Nightingale was an activist on 

the ground, but for the remainder of her long life she was a publicist for reform—a powerful 

rhetorician who used words and images to invoke a health-sustaining world of predictable 

order. She was more modern than she knew. 

—Charles Rosenberg

Nightingale Collection (1845–1939)

Florence Nightingale

London and other locations. Books, pamphlets, letters, photographs, engravings, lithographs, sound recordings

Above: Plan of the Hospital Lariboisiere, Paris. Nightingale 

approved of the hospital’s pavilion design but criticized some 

features (e.g., privies in the middle). Nightingale, Subsidiary 

Notes as to the Introduction of Female Nursing into Military 

Hospitals in Peace and War (London, 1858)

Opposite: “Diagram of the Causes of Mortality in the Army 

in the East,” in A Contribution to the Sanitary History of 

the British Army during the Late War with Russia (London, 

1859). Anonymously published, Contribution was a brief but 

powerful indictment of unnecessary, because preventable, 

deaths among British soldiers in the Crimea. Nightingale’s 

bold use of color in the summary chart was far ahead of 

its time.
186 the national library of medicine

Bandaging “the terror of war”

In 1870–71 the Prussian war machine tore through France with ruthless efficiency, 

eliciting fear and admiration in equal measure. What impressed international 

observers was not only the power and precision of the Prussian army but also the 

arrangements it had made for the prevention of disease and the evacuation and treatment 

of casualties. Whereas the French army suffered more than 200,000 cases of smallpox, the 

Prussians had fewer than 5,000, and whereas the French wounded often went untended, 

the Prussians made extensive use of railways to evacuate casualties and dealt with them far 

more effectively on or near the battlefield. 

These vaunted achievements were the fruit of bitter experience. Those who planned 

the medical evacuations during the Franco-Prussian War included many veterans of earlier 

conflicts, beginning with the First Schleswig War of 1848–51, when Germans in that duchy 

attempted to secede from Denmark. The secession, at first crushed by the Danish army, 

was achieved by force with the support of Prussia and Austria in 1864. Two years later the 

battle-hardened Prusso-German army went on to defeat Austria, signaling the reemergence of 

Prussia as a major military power. In these earlier conflicts, German forces had failed to plan 

effectively for the treatment of their war wounded.

At the heart of this turmoil was Friedrich von Esmarch (1823–1908), who was to become 

one of the most famous surgeons of his day. Born on the west coast of Schleswig-Holstein, 

Esmarch was a German patriot who strove for independence from Denmark. He obtained his 

medical degree from Kiel University in 1848 and shortly afterward enlisted as a surgeon in the 

army of the Schleswig Germans. His experience as a frontline surgeon led him in 1851 to write 

a treatise on bullet wounds in which he showed that injured limbs could sometimes be saved, 

avoiding amputation. When war broke out again in 1864, Esmarch served in the field hospitals 

of Flensburg, Sundewitt, and Kiel. After war was declared against Austria he was called to 

Berlin in 1866 to become a member of the hospital commission and to oversee surgery in 

military hospitals there. This accumulated experience formed the basis of his best-known 

work, First Aid on the Battlefield. 

The pamphlet had enormous influence on first aid in both military and civilian life. It 

endeavored to make first aid comprehensible to laymen and was included in a kit to be carried 

by soldiers. This kit famously contained a triangular cloth bandage (pictured here) printed 

with instructional illustrations for securing injured limbs and reducing bleeding on different 

parts of the body. 

Esmarch went on to make other important innovations in surgery and first aid, including 

a rubber tourniquet bandage that enabled what he referred to as “bloodless surgery.” His works 

on surgery and first aid were translated into other languages and went through many editions. 

As someone who was revolted by what he termed “the terror of war,” Esmarch through his life 

and work exemplified the complexities of an age in which barbarism and humanitarianism 

marched hand in hand. 

—Mark Harrison

First Aid on the Battlefield (1869)

Johann Friedrich August von Esmarch 

Der erste Verband auf dem Schlachtfelde. Kiel, Germany. 

Printed book with illustrations, 23 pp., 33

⁄4 x 63⁄4 in. (9.5 x 17.2 cm); with printed bandage, 36 x 36 x 511 ⁄2 in. (91.4 x 91.4 x 130.8 cm)

above and opposite: Esmarch’s triangular bandage for a 

battlefield first-aid kit. The realistic, crowded battlefield 

scene was later considered to be demoralizing and too 

visually complex. It was dropped in subsequent editions 

and replaced with a simpler diagram of six men (against no 

background at all), illustrating how the bandage should be 

tied around different limbs. 
188 the national library of medicine

Copper masks and faceless men

Atiny, black-robed woman scurries down a deserted street and ducks into an alley 

overgrown with ivy. The black-and-white film flickers, as though what is left 

of the emulsion might crumble away at any moment. The alleyway dissolves; 

we find ourselves in an artist’s studio. The walls are lined with plaster heads. Are these death 

masks, works of art, or a gallery of lost souls? Abruptly a young soldier standing in the foreground removes his chin to reveal a scarred hollow where his jaw once was. He reattaches the 

chin. A woman in military uniform appraises the fit. She is Anna Coleman Ladd (1878–1939), 

an American sculptor and former socialite. This is the Studio for Portrait Masks, where, as the 

soldiers put it, you come to get a “tin face.”

A bearded sculptor holds up the cast of a head. As he turns it, the profile switches from 

classical elegance to terrible deformity. He is Francis Derwent Wood (1871–1926), an artist who 

pioneered the use of masks to hide the destroyed faces of the men who fought in World War I. 

Soldiers are routinely maimed in war, but trench warfare dramatically increased facial injury. 

These galvanized copper masks offered a way to “face” the world. 

The psychological toll was enormous. Some men went on to become cinema projectionists, hiding from the world in the darkness of the projection booth. It would surely have been 

disturbing for them to view again and again films of profound paranoia, centered on the face 

and shifting identities, in contemporary films such as Louis Feuillade’s Fantômas (1913–14), in 

which Paris is terrorized by a criminal mastermind who with the help of fake beards or facial 

prosthesis could become any- and everyone, or Fritz Lang’s Dr. Mabuse (1922), another master of 

disguise.

Plastic Reconstruction inverts the ideals of Western art. The plaster casts of classical Greek 

sculpture that adorned the nineteenth-century sculptor’s studio are replaced by casts that 

denote the wreckage of those ideals of beauty and symmetry. We see a young woman painting 

the tip of a soldier’s nose. She appears to be flirting with the handsome mustachioed officer, 

shown in profile (opposite, fig. 9). The image recalls The Corinthian Maid (1782–84), a painting by Joseph Wright of Derby, based on a story by Pliny, in which a Grecian girl traces the 

silhouette of her departing lover on the wall, substituting an image for the man she is about to 

lose. Plastic Reconstruction, in contrast, looks to a mythic future where man is no longer quite 

human. Beyond L. Frank Baum’s Tin Man, these soldiers of flesh and metal, hidden behind 

reproductions of themselves, anticipate the androids and cyborgs that would populate science 

fiction yet to come.

After the war people stopped paying attention. The war wounded became just another 

part of the human landscape. The last image in Plastic Reconstruction is of a soldier who literally takes off his face (opposite, fig. 12). He turns directly to the camera, fixes us with his one 

good eye, and the film abruptly ends. We are left with an indelible afterimage: a “faceless” man.

—Zoe Beloff

Plastic Reconstruction of the Face (1918)

Filmmaker unknown

Paris. Motion picture fragment, black-and-white, silent, no intertitles, 16mm; 6:00

1. Paris, the Latin Quarter. The entrance to the Studio 

for Portrait Masks.

4. Anna Coleman Ladd watches as a soldier removes the 

mask that covers his missing chin.

7. Francis Derwent Wood studies the life cast .

10. An assistant smokes anxiously as Wood appraises 

a cast.

A woman dips a sculpted ear into a chemical solution and 

adjusts the current. The ear, plated with copper, will then 

be attached to a soldier. To make the attachment, a cast 

was made of his disfigured features (after his wounds had 

healed), a suffocating ordeal. The sculptor used the cast to 

re-create the man’s missing parts and prewar appearance. 

Details such as eyebrows or mustaches were made from 

real hair or slivers of tinfoil and glued on. It was difficult to 

paint masks to convincingly resemble flesh, despite the skill 

that went into their creation. Children were known to flee in 

terror at the sight of a masked veteran.

2. An alleyway leads to a courtyard populated with 

statues.

5. Painting a copper facial mask. Between 1918 and 1919 

220 masks were made here.

8. Ladd creating a nose.

11. Wood fits a soldier with a prosthetic nose attached 

to glasses.

3. Lining the walls of the studio, filled with flowers and 

draped with flags, are masks in progress.

6. Fitting the mask over a plaster cast of the soldier’s 

face.

9. Each mask was painted on the patient to best blend in 

with his complexion.

12. The final shot. A “faceless” man.
190 the national library of medicine

“Funny-isms” and “ Ward Gossip”

Between 1918 and 1919, across twenty-one states and the District of Columbia, at 

least fifty military hospitals produced official in-house magazines—“house organs.” 

Endorsed by the Surgeon General’s Office, magazines such as The Mess Kit of Camp 

Merritt Base Hospital, New Jersey, The Silver Chev’ of Camp Grant Base Hospital, Illinois, and The 

Come-Back of Walter Reed General Hospital, Washington, DC, were brought to life by wounded 

soldiers and military staff who contributed articles, jokes, poems, illustrations, and other 

material. Magazine work served to distract from bullet, shell, and bayonet wounds, influenza 

and other infectious diseases, gas exposure, gangrene, and shell shock. Like counterpart publications produced in British hospitals, these magazines served as “safety valves” to help relieve 

the stress experienced by frontline soldiers and their caregivers. And, like their British counterparts, American house organs took up the latest developments in the print culture of their time: 

editors playfully interwove a variety show of cartoons, embellishments, photographs, and texts. 

One editor, Corporal Sydney Flower, conveyed the spirit of the publications. “Mess-Kit,” 

he wrote, is “written by the enlisted man for the enlisted man. . . . The Mess-Kit is . . .his voice.” 

Corporal Flower continued: “This magazine, belongs first to the Khaki [Army] and the Serge 

[Navy]; afterwards to humanity generally, and particularly to patriotic humanity. Its field is very 

wide; its contents are varied; its uses many. In this number . . . you will find Cup, Plate, Knife, 

Fork, Spoon, and a good meal, for the small sum of One Dime, served with some little attention to the picturesque. You have only to draw up your chair. You are welcome.”

Readers of such magazines likely did feel welcome. Columns such as “Ward Gossip,” 

“Funny-isms,” “Nurses Department,” and “Recreation News” informed and entertained readers 

and encouraged them to participate in the social life and programs of the hospital camp. 

Profiles of charitable organizations such as the Jewish Welfare Board, Knights of Columbus, 

Salvation Army, and YMCA described how recreational activities were as integral to hospital 

life as medicine and surgery. Advertisements from local businesses showed the support that 

army hospitals received from surrounding communities and offer us glimpses of the commercial and civic life of the towns where soldier-patients spent time while on leave from their 

institutional confines. The purchase of magazines by readers also helped to support hospital 

activities: in many instances a portion of publication revenues funded recreation programs for 

soldier-patients and staff. 

There is perhaps no better assessment of the value of military hospital magazines 

than that offered by Martha Alberta Montgomery, an aide who taught wounded soldiers 

writing, drawing, and painting as occupational therapy. As “strict products of soldier talent,” 

Montgomery observed, hospital magazines “furnished meaningful occupation” and “afforded 

diversion from affliction. . .instilled into all a pride in their organization.” They also “aroused 

local interest in. . .uplift work,” “drew the public into sympathy with Army life and plans . . .for 

soldier care, comfort, and amusement,” and “served as a medium for reaching men for 

re-enlistment in the various branches of the service.”

—Jeffrey S. Reznick

The Mess Kit and The Silver Chev’ (1919)

Various U.S. military hospitals

Camp Grant, Illinois; Camp Merritt, New Jersey. U.S. military hospital magazines, color lithographic and halftone covers; 

Mess Kit: 83

⁄4 x 13 in. (22 x 33 cm); Chev’: 81⁄4 x 11 in. (21 x 28 cm)

Cartoon detail from Silver Chev’, June 1, 1919, p. 7; drawing 

probably by Sgt. Christian G. Christensen.
192 the national library of medicine

“Human bullets”

During the Russo-Japanese War (1904–05) Japanese forces lost 85,600 men, while the 

Russian army incurred from 40,000 to 70,000 deaths. At least 20,000 Chinese civilians died as well. The Japanese army suffered from supply shortages that limited the 

use of heavy artillery and forced General Maresuke Nogi to take the fortified positions outside 

of Port Arthur through three bloody assaults. The army sustained more than 56,000 casualties 

in the battle of Port Arthur. (Nogi atoned by ritually disemboweling himself after the Meiji 

emperor died in 1912.)

This collection of photos from the war centers on Port Arthur (modern-day Lüshunkou), 

the Russian Hospital located there, and the care of Russian soldiers by Japanese medical 

personnel. Many of the pictures reveal the gruesome realities of fighting in Manchuria across 

the winter months of 1904 and 1905, including frostbitten limbs that required amputation 

(opposite). Western audiences, through the reports of foreign observers, received a glowing 

picture of how the Japanese army treated friend and foe alike. The American doctor Louis L. 

Seaman, touring hospital facilities in Japan and Manchuria during the war, marveled at how 

well trained, staffed, and supplied the medical corps were. According to Seaman, Japan had 

the most sophisticated military triage system and field hospitals in the world. Doctors and 

stretcher bearers took the wounded from the front to dressing stations, where they received 

superficial treatment before being conveyed to a field hospital. After surgery the wounded 

were carried to the nearest railroad station and sent on to the main hospital base in Dairen 

(modern-day Dalian). Once rested, the wounded traveled to hospitals in Japan. 

Reports of men treated at field hospitals in Manchuria, however, tell a very different story. 

Lieutenant Tadayoshi Sakurai, who lost his right arm during the siege of Port Arthur, left a bleak 

account of life inside field hospitals. In his memoir Nikudan (Human Bullets), Sakurai wrote, 

“Large armies of flies attacked the wretched patients, worms would grow in the mouth or nose, 

and some of them could not drive the vermin away because their arms were useless. . . . Those in 

charge of the surgical work . . .had to crowd more than a thousand patients into a field hospital 

provided for two hundred [so] they were powerless to give any better care to the sufferers.”

Seaman, no doubt, was shown only what his hosts wanted him to see: the best hospitals 

in Port Arthur and Liaoyang. In the same vein, these photographs were designed to depict 

the civilized approach of the Japanese army to the treatment of the war wounded and the 

advanced state of Japanese military medical services. 

We don’t know how this collection came to the National Library of Medicine. The 

photographs, furnished with captions that offer detailed analysis of battlefield wounds, are 

aimed at a Japanese-speaking medical audience. They do, however, fit the pattern of wartime 

reporting—newspapers, photojournalism, and woodblock prints—which was designed to 

bolster domestic morale and international support by portraying Japanese soldiers in acts of 

bravery or compassion and stoic Russian soldiers suffering defeat with dignity.

—Alexander Bay

Russo-Japanese War Photo Album (ca. 1905)

Compiler unknown

Japan. Album of 50 original gelatin silver photographs; handwritten captions in Japanese; 81⁄4 x 57⁄8 in. (21 x 15.2 cm)
194 the national library of medicine

They saved Hitler’s medical record

Compiled by American military intelligence in the months after the German surrender, 

this report contains all of Adolf Hitler’s available medical records plus interrogations 

of several physicians who cared for Hitler. Whether the confidential document was 

shared with America’s wartime allies is unclear, but by 1958 it had been declassified.

Everyone connected with the report had an agenda: the doctors who defended their 

medical care of Hitler while downplaying their Nazi allegiances, and the intelligence officers, 

who wanted to debunk myths about Hitler, guard against future Hitler impostors, and provide 

“research material for the historian, the doctor and the scientists interested in Hitler.” The 

authors almost certainly had another, unstated, goal: to see if there was a medical explanation 

for the brutal behavior of the world’s most infamous mass murderer. 

The report is revealing. Hitler was a victim of “VIP Syndrome”: his medical care was compromised because of his fame. His primary physician from 1937 to 1945 was Theodor Morell 

(1886–1948), a “shrewd, money-crazed quack,” who dosed his hypochondriacal patient with 

twenty-eight different “medications”—including vitamins, stimulants, hormones, and pills 

containing dangerous amounts of atropine and strychnine. (Morell had a proprietary interest 

in his nostrums, which Hitler ordered German hospitals to buy.) Hitler was Morell’s guinea 

pig; Morell was Hitler’s enabler. Like other famous patients, the Führer worsened his problems by self-medicating. Hitler’s other doctors, more competent and conventional, resented 

Morell’s primacy. Three were fired after openly criticizing their unorthodox colleague.

In a sense, the report is all that remains of the Führer’s corporeal remains. Hitler and Eva 

Braun killed themselves in April 1945 as Soviet troops swept into Berlin. Their bodies were 

burned (but it is rumored that his skull was taken to the Soviet Union). Hitler as Seen by His 

Doctors contains evaluations of Hitler’s body systems, tests such as electrocardiograms and 

blood counts, diagrams of his teeth and nose, as well as five X-rays of his head. The photographic and motion picture documentation of Hitler is vast, but here is a record of his insides.

Which leads one to wonder: If medical records might be considered “windows to the 

soul,” what can we learn about Hitler from his charts? Could some underlying condition 

explain his mad quest for world domination and the evil he perpetrated? Could some explanation be found in his doctors’ examination of his body and psyche?

Although one summary statement noted that Hitler’s facial expressions “had an intense 

quality that subdued and captivated most individuals,” this was more opinion than scientific 

fact. When it came to exceptional medical findings, there were disappointingly few. Morell 

found Hitler to be emotionally labile but without hallucinations, illusions, or paranoia. Karl 

Brandt termed Hitler a “psychopathic personality,” and Hans Karl von Hasselbach termed his 

persistent expectations of victory a delusion, but both, along with Erwin Giesing, agreed there 

were no phobias or obsessions. At least in the areas they tested, Hitler’s judgment was good.

The U.S. Army interrogators had learned what they could from the doctors: Hitler 

remained an enigma.

—Barron H. Lerner

Hitler as Seen by His Doctors (1945–46)

Military Intelligence Service Center, United States Army, European Theater 

Frankfurt-am-Main, Germany. Bound photocopy of typescript, 2 vols., with photographs and charts; 7 x 111⁄2 in. (17.7 x 28.2 cm)

above and opposite: Sketches and X-ray of Hitler’s nasal 

passages and teeth. Hitler as Seen by His Doctors, annex X 

and unnumbered prints of X-ray photographs between 

annexes I and III
196 the national library of medicine

Bearing witness: The first calamity of the nuclear age

T he atomic bomb exploded over Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. Some seventy thousand 

people died that day—upwards of a quarter of the city’s population. Another seventy 

thousand were injured. Many would die from wounds, burns, and radiation poisoning 

over the next few weeks. The city was devastated, its doctors and nurses scattered or killed, its 

hospitals and clinics destroyed. Two days later, the Imperial Army Medical College and the 

First Tokyo Military Hospital sent doctors into the chaos of destruction. Over the next months 

these men were the mainstays of care—and data gathering and analysis. 

Though the American medical investigation of the atomic bombing is well known, 

Japanese doctors provided the earliest and most detailed studies. Americans did not enter 

Hiroshima in any numbers until mid-October, forestalled by a hurricane and the formal 

commencement of Occupation. At that point, three separate American investigations (from the 

Army Medical Corps, Manhattan Project, and the navy) sprang up. Coordination was needed 

and, on October 12, the supreme commander for the Allied Powers, General Douglas MacArthur, 

set up the four-party “Joint Commission for the Investigation of the Effects of the Atomic 

Bomb on Japan” (the Japanese were the fourth party). The commission’s work was completed 

by mid-1946 and the supporting materials shipped stateside. To continue the research, President 

Truman established the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission. It remained in existence until 1975. 

This report—entirely a Japanese production—preceded almost all of that work. Issued in 

November 1945, when the Joint Commission had only just begun, the mimeographed typescript 

of several hundred pages has a hand-lettered title page and glued-in tables. Its roughness evokes 

the dire circumstances of its production. Amid the catastrophe the Japanese army doctors 

labored to describe what they had seen and done, diagrammatically, quantitatively, professionally, and objectively. In charts, tables, and case histories, they laid out the symptoms of radiation sickness and patterns and circumstances of death. They prepared a hand-colored map of 

Hiroshima, distinguishing completely destroyed areas from those partially destroyed; drew 

the smoke cloud that the A-bomb left over the city; made diagrams of shock-wave patterns; 

described the treatments they administered; and inserted photographs of wrecked buildings 

and people, most famously a photo showing the pattern of a print dress rendered in flesh. And 

they provided case histories, such as the example of K. Ishida, a twenty-five-year-old officer. 

On the very day of bombing appeared vomiting. . . . Felt sore throat. . . . Was admitted to 

the . . .hospital. The tongue was coated brownly & had tendency of bleeding. Both tonsils 

were swelled. Scalp-hair were sparsely. Small petechias [red spots] were generalized on the 

whole body surface. On 29/VIII appeared bloody stool & epistaxis [nose bleeding], which was 

difficult to stop. On 1/IX appeared disturbance on consciousness. . . . Died on 2/IX. 

Tellingly the Japanese medical officers wrote their report in English. They were already 

cooperating with the American military but perhaps had a larger goal: to bear witness to the 

scope of death and devastation in a form that could be circulated to the wider world.

—Paul Theerman

Medical Report of the Atomic Bombing in Hiroshima (1945)

Imperial Army Medical College and First Tokyo Military Hospital 

Tokyo. Bound mimeographs with insert charts, diagrams, and photographs; 101⁄4 x 141⁄2 in. (26 x 37 cm)
198 the national library of medicine

“ To eradicate pests is to defeat the American imperialists”

In spring 1952, in the depths of the Korean War, Chinese newspapers reported that 

American forces were conducting germ warfare against Chinese and North Korean 

forces and civilians. According to reports, vigilant citizens had spotted large quantities of fleas, flies, mosquitoes, and rats in unexpected places in Manchuria and the coastal 

city of Qingdao. Premier Zhou Enlai called upon the nations of the world to condemn “U.S. 

imperialists’ war crime of germ warfare.” Zhou’s charges tied the health of the Chinese people 

to the war effort in Korea. A Patriotic Health Movement was launched throughout China: the 

Communist Party mobilized the masses to eliminate pests to prevent disease and contribute 

to the war effort. Trained and untrained artists threw themselves into the creation of health 

posters to support the anti–germ warfare campaign. 

The posters shown here, selected from two series, are the handiwork of unidentified 

artists from the Chinese interior, far from the theater of war. A title poster (left), in bold red 

ink and framed with a deep blue pattern, proclaims “Even Germs Cannot Save the Fate of the 

American Bandits.” Another poster (opposite, top left), “Flies Spread Diseases,” shows flies 

dropping American cholera bombs. Under them, at the bottom of the image, are the roofs of 

houses. The caption reads: “Flies like to live in cesspools and like to sing in front of people 

too; they carry countless germs and throw germ bombs everywhere.”

From the same series, another poster (opposite, top right) presents a domestic scene. A 

mother boils infected clothes and burns infected material. Her son kills a fly with a flyswatter. 

Her husband cleans the top part of the house. The caption reads: “Germs rely on pests as a way 

to spread diseases. To eradicate pests is to defeat the American imperialists.”

A poster from another series (opposite, lower left) shows a fleeing, wounded American 

who spits out rats and carries them by the tail. A rat clinging to his back wears a hat with a 

swastika, another wears a Japanese army hat, signifying that the American enemy is morally 

equivalent to the now-defeated Nazis and Japanese imperialists. Disease-bearing insects 

swarm beneath and behind the “rat-man.” The caption reads: “The American bandits, paying 

no attention to the just sanctions of humanity, openly dropped loads of germs on Korea, our 

country’s northeast, and Qingdao city.” 

The next poster in the sequence (opposite, lower right) shows how to destroy the enemy. 

A soldier, doctor, and worker attack the rat-man with the weapons of their trade—gun, fumigation sprayer, and shovel. The caption reads: “Under the attack of the Chinese and Koreans, 

as well as peace-loving people all over the world, the heinous crimes of the Americans cannot 

save them from their inevitable defeat.” 

The poster images are predominantly blue and black, colors that in Chinese art usually 

signify fearful things. The limited palette may also be evidence of a shortage of colored paint. 

The posters must have been frequently displayed: the paper is worn, wrinkled, and stained, 

and there are many tiny thumbtack holes in the four corners. 

—Liping Bu

Anti–Germ Warfare Campaign Posters (ca. 1952)

Second People’s Cultural Institute

Fuping County, Shaanxi Province, China. Hand-inked and painted posters on paper; 141⁄4 x 15 in. (36.2 x 38.3 cm)

above and opposite: Hand-drawn Korean War propaganda 

posters, from two incomplete sequences in the collection 

of Chinese medical and health materials acquired by the 

National Library of Medicine. 
200 the national library of medicine

Hanaoka’s experiment with anesthesia for cancer surgery

T his manuscript contains early records of the first surgeries ever done with general 

anesthesia. The Japanese surgeon Seishu Hanaoka (1760–1835) in 1804 used an anesthetic while performing a successful operation to excise a tumor of the breast. The 

records in this book date from around 1808. At the time Japan was closed to the outside world, 

except for limited contact with the Netherlands and China. Hanaoka, born into a family of 

doctors, studied Dutch surgery and Chinese medicine and was fascinated by the possibility of 

combining the two. He succeeded by re-creating the lost Chinese anesthetic Mafeisan for use 

in Western-style surgery. The development of Mafeisan was not easy. The main ingredients, 

datura and wolfsbane, can be lethal. The members of Hanaoka’s family who volunteered as 

test subjects suffered terribly: his mother died; his wife lost her eyesight. The eventual success 

of the method, however, brought him wide recognition and many patients. He was awarded 

the rank of sword-wielding samurai. Students sought Hanaoka from all over the country, and 

he gladly took them into his school, Shun-Rin-Ken (“House of Spring Woods”), which trained 

more than a thousand doctors. Despite Hanaoka’s large following, he left no records of his 

procedures, and information is scarce on his methods, including the exact recipe for Mafeisan.

He used the traditional pedagogical method of hands-on apprenticeship to teach the secrets 

of the trade to his students, but he was so unusually secretive that he required his apprentices 

to submit a nondisclosure agreement signed in blood. Fortunately, Gencho Honma (1804–72) 

and other students wrote medical texts that provide information on the Hanaoka method. 

Accused of revealing his master’s secrets, Honma was expelled from the school. 

Other information comes from the notes of the apprentices. The National Library of 

Medicine’s copy of notes by Hanaoka’s disciple Ken Matsuzawa is a later recollection rather 

than a real-time record but appears to be stunningly accurate. The opening text reads: 

“Observing my Master Hanaoka’s operations over the years, while it is clearly beyond the feat 

of this average person, I will record it in drawings for future generations.” Good thing he did.

The manuscript is not a structured textbook. There are lists of unrelated medicines and 

accounts of successful surgical operations to excise tumors, but also of cases where Hanaoka 

refuses to treat a patient or where a patient is afraid to have her breast cut open and refuses 

treatment. Many of the cases deal with sexually transmitted diseases, the dark side of the often 

glamorized brothel culture of the period. 

Hanaoka’s pioneering work with general anesthesia never left Japan and was unknown 

in the West (where anesthesia was independently invented forty-two years later). He was both 

a traditionalist and an innovator. You can see Western scalpels in the drawings but his theory 

of medicine was mainly Chinese—he believed that dark/negative chi caused tumors—and 

he employed traditional folk remedies to increase breast milk and treat snakebite. The text 

recommends the application of earthworm guts for toothaches. Any volunteers? 

—Hiroo Yamagata 

Selected Dictation of Curious Records (1818)

Ken Matsuzawa

Bunsen Kiroku. Japan. Bound manuscript with illustrations, 128 pp.; 63⁄8 x 91⁄8 in. (16.3 x 23.2 cm)

above and opposite: Hand-drawn illustrations of tumors to 

be excised with general anesthesia. Bunsen Kiroku, pp. 46 

and 67 
202 the national library of medicine

An order clerk’s view of cancer

I 

found this odd little book by chance while browsing the dimly lit stacks of the 

National Library of Medicine. The catalogue record gave few hints as to its riches, 

but beneath its grubby, faded blue front cover is a treasure trove of material from the 

1930s and 1940s—badges, buttons, posters, labels, string tags, transparencies, motion pictures, 

filmstrips, statistical charts, exhibition materials, window stickers, car cards, counter cards, 

booklets of sticky labels, and a wide selection of pamphlets. 

The American Society for the Control of Cancer (ASCC) first released this catalogue 

sometime in the early 1940s, possibly December 1941, the date printed on the index page. 

The NLM’s copy has a library binding dated July 23, 1946, but originally it came in a loose-leaf 

binder from which pages could be removed and others substituted or added. Most pages are 

individually dated to distinguish originals from replacements, and the NLM’s copy includes 

pages labeled from December 1941 to December 1943. This catalogue offers for sale material 

on cancer prevention and treatment put out or distributed by the ASCC shortly before it 

became the American Cancer Society in 1944, when a new leadership of business people and 

advertisers transformed its educational programs. 

At first glance the “X-ray-radium-surgery” image reproduced here would not seem to be 

a hidden treasure. It was designed by Dorothy Darling Fellnagel (1913–2006), a brilliant though 

not very well known graphic artist, who did her best work for the United States Public Health 

Service (which often collaborated with the ASCC). Digital copies can be found online at NLM 

and National Archives websites. But look at the mimeographed typescript beneath the image. 

Unlike the original posters and digital reproductions, this image comes with details of pricing 

and purchasing, as does the Detectives Wanted! (1942) pamphlet that encouraged children to 

remind family members to watch for the warning signs of the disease. The catalogue was 

made for those who wanted health education materials for display or distribution. 

Here is all the information a school administrator, county public health official, local 

ASCC organizer, or community activist might need: shipping costs, product dimensions, 

special offers, service charges, “close out” supplies, “out of stock” materials, and instructions on 

how to order and sometimes how to display or use. Samples of some of the smaller materials 

are glued or taped onto the pages. (Some, such as Detectives Wanted!, have come loose because 

the adhesive has dried.) Larger materials, like the Fellnagel poster, are printed directly onto 

the page in reduced size (and somewhat altered color). Other pages include photographs of 

large artifacts such as exhibit displays. Some materials have no images or artifacts, just a short 

printed description as an aid to ordering (e.g., the movies, filmstrips, and The Doctor Speaks on 

Cancer—ten talks supplied to physicians for public lectures). This catalogue is a window into 

the material, visual, and literary culture of health mobilization in the early 1940s. It is also a 

glimpse of cancer from the order clerk’s perspective.

—David Cantor

Catalogue of Educational Material (1941–44?)

American Society for the Control of Cancer 

New York. Album with pasted-in pamphlets, flyers, and handbills, unpaginated; bound volume: 83⁄8 x 103⁄4 in. (21.3 x 27.3 cm)

Detectives Wanted!: 51

⁄2 x 71⁄4 in. (14 x 18.4 cm)

above: This pamphlet was designed to recruit young fans of 

detective and gangster stories to the fictional Family Bureau 

of Investigation (FBI) to track down “Cancer the Gangster.” 

Detectives Wanted! (1940; Westchester Cancer Committee, 

Bronxville, New York, 1942)

opposite: “Only X-ray, radium, surgery, ever cured cancer,” 

illustration by Dorothy Darling Fellnagel (United States 

Public Health Service, 1941). Thomas Parran (1892–1968), 

a visionary surgeon general and modernizer, hoped to 

remake the U.S. Public Health Service into something like 

a European ministry of health. Under his direction the 

agency commissioned and produced posters, often featuring 

modernist designs, for many health campaigns. 
204 the national library of medicine

“Uses of the products of beasts, birds, fishes or insects”

T his is a rare book in several senses. Not only are surviving copies scarce but there is 

nothing much like it. Although a search of any serious library will reveal dozens—even 

hundreds—of books with “materia medica” in the title, they will likely focus on 

substances derived from plants. Peter Peyto Good (1789?–1875) did not set himself to swim 

completely against this tide: before he turned his attention to the animal kingdom, he had 

edited The Family Flora and Materia Medica Botanica (1845). 

His animal material medica, “Containing the Scientific Analysis, Natural History and 

Chemical and Medical Properties and Uses of the Substances That Are the Products of Beasts, 

Birds, Fishes or Insects,” is a kind of hybrid. It combines elements from traditional natural 

history compendia, including the bestiaries of the medieval period, with elements that reflect 

the zoology of his time. The introduction offers a brief outline of formal scientific taxonomy 

and locates each of the twenty-four creatures to be discussed within this system, but that is 

not the order in which they appear (at least if buyers followed Good’s instructions about how 

to bind the installments—since each animal appeared in a separate installment, idiosyncratic 

orderings were theoretically possible). Instead, the table of contents suggests a view of the 

world as composed of randomly related phenomena: thus the sheep is followed by the oyster 

and the stag is followed by the blood-sucking leech.

The entries all ostensibly follow the same general structure. Headed by the Latinate and 

vernacular names of the creature, they first specify the nature and uses of the medicinal substance it produces, then proceed through sections on scientific analysis, natural history, and 

chemical and medical properties and uses. Sometimes Good offers surprising information. For 

example, he lists rattlesnake venom as a treatment for alcoholism, mercury poisoning, erysipelas 

(an acute bacterial infection associated with skin rash), fainting fits, and hydrophobia (rabies). 

Despite their shared design the entries vary greatly in length and in the kind of material 

they contain; up-to-date zoology rubs elbows with folk wisdom and anecdote. Nor did Good 

always apply the same standard of relevance. To return to the rattlesnake, most of the long 

discussion of its “medical properties and uses” details treatments for snakebite; relatively little 

concerns the palliative qualities of venom. When Good considers farmyard species, most of 

which find a place in his catalogue, he tends to include digressions about the history and 

merits of their constituent breeds. The entry on the cochineal insect, on the other hand, fulfills its initial promise completely and efficiently, explaining how the creatures are collected, 

ground into powder, and then used to cure neuralgia and to color tinctures and ointments. 

Even the illustrations reflect the miscellaneous traditions from which Good drew. (By 

the 1840s lithographs could be inexpensively reproduced, and brightly colored illustrations 

were available in books for popular audiences.) Some of the images, like that of the cochineal 

insect, recall an older botanical convention of disaggregation and separation, but most, like 

that of the cuttlefish, enjoy the richly delineated settings that came to characterize nineteenthcentury natural history publishing.

—Harriet Ritvo

A Materia Medica Animalia (1853)

Peter P. Good

Cambridge, Massachusetts. Printed book with chromolithographs, 272 pp. + plates; 51⁄2 x 91⁄8 in. (14 x 23.1 cm)

above: Cochineal insects swarm on a cactus. Materia Medica 

Animalia, pl. 10

opposite: A cuttlefish, valued for its “bone,” which could be 

ground up to make a tooth powder, rests on a beach. Materia 

Medica Animalia, pl. 18
206 the national library of medicine

Remedies for gout, fevers, webs in the eye. . .

In 1693 Elizabeth Strachey (ca. 1670–1722) wrote her name on the inside cover of a 

notebook. Over the next three decades she filled the book with recipes for remedies. 

While hundreds of such recipe books survive, many lack an attribution, making it difficult to understand the larger context in which they were made and used. But here we know 

that in 1692 Elizabeth Elletson married a gentleman, John Strachey (1671–1743), who inherited 

the family home at Sutton Court in Somerset. He was also a Fellow of the Royal Society who 

worked on geography and geology. She began keeping her recipe book the following year.

The book was a collaborative production; almost fifty people are credited with recipes. 

Some are family members, such as “Cousin Cross” or “Aunt Clarke.” Others may have been 

friends with a shared interest in medicine. “Mrs. Newark,” for example, is credited with a 

dozen recipes. The book was built up incrementally, over many years; recipes were added 

over time without any apparent larger structure. Mrs. Newark’s recipes are in clumps of three 

or four, suggesting a visit or a letter prompted their inclusion. Strachey also drew upon the 

expertise of doctors. She mentions Drs. Hill, Butler, Chambers, and Griffiths, and she took 

advice from the philosopher John Locke, a family friend and a physician by training.

The book is not solely hers. Strachey died in 1722, but entries continue for about a decade 

afterward. Her successor (perhaps one of her daughters?) drew upon written sources, other 

manuscript recipe books, and printed works such as William Salmon’s Practical Physick (1692). 

Elizabeth had drawn mainly upon her large network of friends and acquaintances.

The recipes deal with a wide array of conditions, including gout, fevers, webs in the eye, 

and scurvy—typical of the period. But you would never know from this volume that Strachey 

gave birth to nine sons and nine daughters: there are few recipes for reproductive problems 

and disorders. The recipes are not complex, relying upon local herbs and on measures like “as 

much as will lie on a penny.” There’s a powder to kill rats and mice, cunningly compounded 

of oatmeal, bacon fat, and lime. But Strachey was a sophisticated consumer and producer 

of medical knowledge. She recorded Richard Mead’s remedy for the bite of a mad dog. She 

mastered the art of distilling. Many of the recipes reveal a careful accounting of efficacy: they 

are “approved,” tested by trial and error, in much the same way her husband and his Royal 

Society colleagues assessed the results of their trial-and-error experiments. 

Other recipes hint at a tenuous boundary between magic and natural knowledge. 

Strachey recommends a lodestone (a magnet) to draw away pain. On a corner of the page the 

word “abracadabra” is written as an acrostic. This age-old charm could have been written on 

a piece of paper that was worn next to the skin or chewed and swallowed. We cannot tell if it 

was merely a curiosity or a bit of insurance against the tide of ill health that any mother of 

eighteen confronted day in and day out.

—Mary E. Fissell

A Book of Receipts of All Sorts (1693–1730s)

Elizabeth Strachey

Somerset, England. Bound manuscript; 83 leaves and 14 loose scraps with recipes; 51⁄2 x 71⁄2 in. (14 x 19 cm)

above: The inside cover of Elizabeth Strachey’s recipe book 

bears her signature and a date.

opposite: A typical page of the diary features recipes to treat 

“A bluddy flux” and deafness.
208 the national library of medicine

The lost world of medical card collectibles

T he earliest medical cards, dating to the seventeenth century, were engraved advertising 

announcements used by physicians, apothecaries, pharmacists, and dentists, often 

featuring images relevant to their trade: mortar and pestle, distillation apparatus, drug 

jars, bandages, artificial teeth, or a portrait. 

In the nineteenth century, as the speed and quality of printing techniques improved—

especially lithography, which enabled printers to print bright colors cheaply in large 

quantities—medical cards became ubiquitous. Retailers and marketers of patent medicines 

increasingly used cards to advertise their products and services. The cards came in a variety 

of shapes and sizes, with attention-getting, colorful images on one side and hard sells on the 

reverse. Certain manufacturers—Ayer’s, Hoods, Lydia Pinkham, Liebig, Wampole’s Preparation, and the marketers of Holloway’s Pills and Mrs. Winslow’s Soothing Syrup—used cards 

as a primary vehicle of promotion to create brand names. There were also “stock” cards, for all 

types of product, that enabled the smallest pharmacists and producers to advertise, by having 

a printer add their name in a space left blank for that purpose. Printers such as Currier & Ives 

and Louis Prang made such cards available in small quantities. Postcards, embossed cards, diecut cards, and, later, matchbook covers became advertising vehicles, incorporating public health 

warnings, information, and educational literature too. Although the pictures were sometimes 

the work of known artists, most were made by anonymous employees of commercial printers.

Like baseball cards, many medical cards showed heroes, men and women who had made 

great contributions to the healing arts and sciences. Cards for collectors came in the form of 

cigarette cards, biographical cards, and sets of playing cards that presented portraits of wellknown physicians and scientists, alongside brief biographies of their productive lives. Vesalius, 

Galen, Hippocrates, Edward Jenner, Louis Pasteur, Claude Bernard (the French physiologist 

who was an exponent of laboratory experimentation), William Harvey, Florence Nightingale, 

and Paul Ehrlich are frequent figures in these series, as well as later figures like Ernst Chain 

(the biochemist who helped to develop penicillin) and Jonas Salk. Cards also featured mythical 

figures such as Asclepius and Hygeia and religious figures who were said to have performed 

healing miracles. Patent medicine manufacturers sometimes tried to make it seem as though 

the scientists and physicians portrayed on their cards had supplied testimonials. But sometimes the testimonials were authentic, and some cards bore testimonials from nonmedical 

figures, a king or celebrity, or made reference to some nonmedical historical event or fact. 

Cards could also be designed to be appealing playthings for children.

They remained popular until daily newspapers and monthly magazines proved more 

effective as advertising media. In their heyday, medical cards were frequently collected and 

pasted into albums and scrapbooks, an activity providing relaxation and entertainment prior 

to the advent of radio and television. The cards were intended to be ephemeral, but thankfully 

many have survived and serve as relics of past medical practices and remedies and of the 

innovative marketing practices of patent medicine manufacturers and distributors.

—William H. Helfand

Medical Trade Card Collection (ca. 1820–1940s)

Various manufacturers and retailers 

France, Great Britain, Mexico, United States, and other countries. Donor: William Helfand

above, top: Wampole’s Preparation die-cut advertising 

card (Philadelphia, ca. 1895). The text on the reverse side, 

directed to parents, praises Wampole’s chemists for their 

ability to disguise the taste, odor, and appearance of the 

product’s basic ingredient, cod liver oil.

above and opposite: Dr. Miles’ Laxative Tablets movable, 

die-cut advertising novelty card (Elkhart, Indiana, ca. 1910). 

Above, reverse side of the card; opposite, the front of the 

card, lowered and raised
210 the national library of medicine

Modernist design for modern medicine

Targeted at doctors, pharmacists, and other health professionals, Scope was a monthly 

magazine published by Upjohn Pharmaceuticals between 1941 and 1957. Its mission was 

to explain the latest medical research, to report on advances in diagnoses and treatment, and to advertise Upjohn’s prescription drugs. 

Uniquely among specialized magazines of its time and type, Scope richly featured technical content, presented in innovative ways. Two pioneering American graphic designers were 

hired during different periods to create colorful covers, pages, and spreads with visual impact. 

Scope’s first issue was designed by Will Burtin (1908–82) in 1941. On a field of metallic silver, it 

featured a dramatic image of a baby behind a test tube. Symbolizing the progressive nature of 

Scope, the cover of this first issue imagined a “test tube baby,” some thirty-seven years before in 

vitro fertilization was invented. 

The German-born Burtin, who came to the United States in 1938 after fleeing the Nazis, 

was a visionary, one of the first graphic designers to understand the importance of transforming highly scientific verbal content into coherent and clear visual form, using typography, 

diagrams, symbols, color, and photography that matched the special requirements of the subject 

matter. According to Burtin: “The extra-sensatory reality of science provides man with new 

dimensions. It allows him to see the workings of nature, makes transparent the solid and gives 

substance to the invisible. . . . The designer stands between these concepts, at the center, because 

of his unique role as communicator, link, interpreter and inspirer. . . . Through unceasing comparison and interrelation of factors, he gains an understanding and exciting insight into their 

nature and value, enabling him to depict even that which had been invisible. Thus he creates.” 

After that first issue Lester Beall (1903–69), Burtin’s colleague, designed Scope for seven 

years in the 1940s, until Burtin returned as art director in 1948. The match between Beall’s 

creative style and the progressive management at Upjohn led to magazine layouts that were 

unparalleled in the history of publication design. Beall’s standing with the company was so 

high that he was given permission to design a cover, spread, or advertisement and send the 

original graphics directly to the printer without having to get a final approval from Upjohn. 

This uniquely open process enabled Beall to experiment visually and stimulated his creativity. 

Beall looked back on his years of designing Scope as “very exciting from so many different 

angles: the design and layout, the typography and the opportunity of interpreting in terms 

of photographs, drawings or paintings.” His designs demonstrated what was possible when a 

brilliant designer was given freedom of expression. An aggressive self-promoter, Beall received 

accolades from the prestigious European design journal Graphis for many of his Scope pages. 

The work of Burtin and Beall at Scope helped to spark the development of a larger theory 

and method of “visual reasoning,” which sought to simplify complicated topics, banish complexity, and create in its place “a certain beauty of clear statement.” Scope set the highest standard for 

the effective and beautiful blending of form and content, which still inspires designers today. 

—R. Roger Remington

Scope Magazine (1941–57)

Will Burtin and Lester Beall (designers), for Upjohn Co. 

Kalamazoo, Michigan. Printed magazines, color, 5 vols.; 81⁄2 x 11 in. (21.5 x 27.8 cm)

above: Scope, vol. 1, no. 1, 1941: Will Burtin

opposite (top row, left to right): Scope, vol. 1, no. 8, 1944 

(Beall); vol. 1, no. 2, 1942 (Beall); vol. 1, no. 7, 1944 (Beall); 

vol. 1, no. 7, 1944 (Beall); (center row, left to right) Scope, 

vol. 2, no. 2, 1942 (unknown); vol. 1, no. 2, 1942 (Beall); vol. 1, 

no. 7, 1944 (Beall); vol. 1, no. 6, 1944 (Beall); (bottom row, 

left to right) Scope, vol. 1, no. 7, 1944 (Beall); vol. 1, no. 6, 

1944 (Beall); vol. 1, no. 5, 1943 (unknown); vol. 1, no. 10, 1945 

(Beall)

page 212, clockwise from top left: Scope, vol. 4, no. 3, 1954 

(Burtin); vol. 1, no. 3, 1943 (Burtin); vol. 1, no. 7, 1944 (Beall); 

vol. 1, no. 3, 1942 (Unknown)

page 213, clockwise from top left: Scope, vol. 1, no. 5, 1943 

(unknown); vol. 1, no. 6, 1944 (unknown); vol. 1, no. 6, 1944 

(unknown); vol. 1, no. 5, 1943 (unknown)
212 the national library of medicine
214 the national library of medicine

It was owned by Charles Darwin, Jean-Martin Charcot, Hermann von Helmholtz, and 

other illustrious scientists. It was displayed as a triumph of Swedish science at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia in 1876, along with other Swedish exhibits (such as the 

model schoolhouse now known as the Swedish Cottage in New York’s Central Park). Written in 

German, the most important scientific language of the day, the massive two-volume Studies in the 

Anatomy of the Nervous System and Connective Tissue deals with the brain and spinal cord (particularly the covering membranes and communicative passages between the brain’s ventricles, 

serous spaces, and lymphatic vessels) and the nerves (their structure, sheaths, and endings). 

Four men worked together closely for seven years to produce it: Key (1832–1901), Retzius 

(1842–1919), and the artists Nils Otto Björkman (1833–1900) and Theodor Lundberg (1852–1926). 

Key was professor of pathological anatomy at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm and later 

its director. A liberal public intellectual, he had studied with Rudolph Virchow in Berlin and, 

like other Swedish scientists, was well connected to European scientific networks. Retzius, 

son of the prominent comparative anatomist Anders Retzius, was beginning a productive 

career that would range over histology (mainly of the nervous system and sense organs), 

comparative anatomy, physical anthropology, popular medicine, conservative politics, and 

even newspaper production. Björkman was an expert scientific draftsman, known for graceful 

renderings of the minute details of microscopic specimens and also for ethnographic travels 

to Lapland, where he made drawings and collected Sámi artifacts. The young and talented 

Lundberg would later become a celebrated sculptor and director of the Royal Academy of Art 

in Stockholm.

Their project of mapping the brain was a visual exploration. First, they acquired their 

numerous specimens of brains and spines, most likely from the autopsied bodies of people 

who died in public hospitals, jails, and workhouses. Then the anatomists adapted and developed histological techniques to make the specimens reveal the desired features. They injected 

them with colored substances and also dipped them in acidic salt solutions of gold, silver, 

and osmium (the same method Camillo Golgi later used when he discovered the nerve cell). 

Handling the specimens required expertise and first-rate equipment: the sharpest scalpels and 

microtomes for slicing the brains, the finest microscopes for examining them. The Karolinska 

Institute had extensive collections, and some of the specimens likely ended up there, among 

thousands of other microscopic slides. The artists drew the selected specimens with meticulous attention to detail, form, color, and depth. The printers then used the colored drawings to 

produce superb chromolithographic plates to go with the text. It was a costly book to print, in 

large format with superior binding and high-quality ink on fine paper, and could be completed 

only with support from a benefactor who donated 20,000 kronor—roughly $140,000 in today’s 

money. (After marrying the wealthy philanthropist Anna Hierta in 1876, Retzius never again had 

to depend on donations to realize his projects.) In this and other works, Retzius collaborated 

Studies in the Anatomy of the Nervous System 

and Connective Tissue (1875–76)

Axel Key and Gustaf Retzius

Studien in der Anatomie des Nervensystems und des Bindegewebes. Stockholm. Printed book, 

with color and black-and-white lithographs, 2 vols., 220 pp. + plates, 228 pp. + plates; 12 x 16 in. (30.4 x 40.6 cm) 

Beautiful brains

above: Subarachnoid injections of the human brain. Studien, 

vol. 1, pl. 6, figs. 1–6

opposite: Injections of the subarachnoid spaces and 

ventricles of the human brain. Studien, vol. 1, pl. 7, figs. 1–4
216 the national library of medicine

with the finest Swedish and German artists, photographers, and printers, although 

the collaborations were not always easy. Retzius eventually broke with Björkman, a 

superb draftsman, over stylistic matters. The artist, he believed, sacrificed accuracy 

in favor of aesthetics. Retzius thereafter chose to make his own drawings. 

The images in these volumes are not mere illustrations of scientific findings—they are the findings. Without the image there is no scientific result. But 

scientific illustrations also do other work. Illustrated monographs and articles 

help to build personal and institutional reputations and to attract funding and 

students. Today’s neuroscience is just as dependent on technologies of visualization, but with computed tomography, positron emission tomography (PET), and 

magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scientists can look into the brains of living 

people—something that would have been inconceivable to Key and Retzius. 

However, the beauty of their lithographic brain images has never been surpassed.

—Eva Åhrén

above, top: Section through the olfactory tissue of a rabbit, with blood 

vessels in red, lymph ducts in blue. Studien, vol. 1, pl. 37, fig. 3

above: Transverse sections of the human spinal column. Studien, vol. 1, 

pl. 2, figs. 1–19

opposite: Arachnoid villi, or pacchionian bodies, of the human brain. 

Studien, vol. 1, pl. 30, figs. 1–5
218 the national library of medicine

A twisted answer to life and the universe

T he paper is only about eight hundred words and the text is almost superfluous. The 

real content lies in the single unnumbered figure. It is a mere cartoon, platonic in its 

simplicity, “purely diagrammatic,” according to the legend. Two ribbons, side by side 

and linked by crossbars, wrap sinuously around a thin central axis. Two arrows, one angling 

up, the other down, suggest polarity for the ribbons. There are no nucleotides, no As, Cs, Gs, or 

Ts. No hydrogen bonds, phosphates, or pentose rings.

Its meaning is conveyed in a single arrogant sentence, one of the most memorable in 

biology: “It has not escaped our attention that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material.” A with T; C with G: 

Chargaff’s rules. Specifying the copying mechanism of course specifies cell division, which 

in turn specifies development and evolution. In The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the 

Discovery of the Structure of DNA (1968) James Watson reported Francis Crick as bursting into 

the Eagle pub, bellowing, “We have found the secret of life!”

The image was just another pretty picture until researchers elsewhere turned that 

“possible copying mechanism” into the foundation of the science of heredity. It happened 

gradually. Although well received in the scientific community, the double helix had little 

impact on the public consciousness until the 1960s. Watson (b. 1928), Crick (1916–2004), 

and Maurice Wilkins (1916–2004) won the Nobel Prize in 1962, following publication of the 

“operon” model of the gene and the first cracks in the genetic code. 

Crick lived in the Golden Helix, his house in Cambridge, but it was Watson who transmuted the snipped tin plates of their model into gold. After the Nobel, he sat down to write 

the first textbook of DNA. It was a hit. Then in 1968 he published The Double Helix, his memoir 

of the discovery. The book infuriated his friends, confounded his enemies, made him rich, and 

made his twisting diagram famous. 

The double helix became Watson’s logo. When he became director of the laboratory at 

Cold Spring Harbor he stamped it on the stationery, the sign at the entrance, the spines of 

the books published by the in-house press. Helical imagery infected the laboratory, from the 

hilltop bell tower to the statuary in the lobby to the wallpaper and light fixtures. 

As medicine went molecular, DNA became its emblem. The double helix became as interesting to sociologists and literary theorists as it is to biologists. Since the fiftieth anniversary 

of the 1953 article’s publication it has been commemorated federally and commercially each 

April 25 as DNA Day, a day of celebration of all things nucleic—including discounted subscription prices from genomics companies that provide DNA mapping to individual customers.

Where the Bohr atom represents elemental nature, the double helix stands for human 

nature. It is an icon of identity. In its claims to tell us who we are and how we are made, there is 

encoded both the power and danger of science. The double helix satisfies graphically, elegantly, 

the double-edged, near universal desire for determinism—for a single, simple “secret of life.”

—Nathaniel Comfort

“Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids: 

A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid” (1953)

James D. Watson and Francis H. C. Crick 

London. Nature 171.25 (April 1953): pp. 737–38. Printed journal, with line drawing; height 97⁄8 in. (25.1 cm). Double helix DNA model. 

Plastic, stainless steel tube, wire, 15 ft., made by A. A. Barker, Cambridge, UK, 1969. 

Above: The first published illustration of the double helix. 

James D. Watson and Francis H. C. Crick, “Molecular 

Structure of Nucleic Acids: A Structure for Deoxyribose 

Nucleic Acid,” Nature 171.25 (April 1953): pp. 737–38. The 

caption reads: “The figure is purely diagrammatic. The two 

ribbons symbolize the two phosphate-sugar chains, and 

the horizontal rods the pairs of bases holding the chains 

together. The vertical line marks the fibre axis.”

Opposite: This sculpture, suspended from the ceiling of the 

NLM’s rotunda, was originally displayed in a 1969 exhibition 

on the work of Nobel laureate Dr. Marshall W. Nirenberg. It 

represents the atomic constituents of DNA: hydrogen (white), 

oxygen (red), nitrogen (blue), carbon (black), and phosphorus 

(purple). A complete DNA molecule on the scale of this 15-foothigh model would be 142 miles long. Photo: J. D. Talasek
220 the national library of medicine hidden tre a sure 221

All kinds of objects previously hidden from view

Dr. William J. Morton (1845–1920) hurried this book into print in September 1896, 

a mere nine months after Wilhelm Röntgen made public his discovery of the new 

ray. The news of a strange kind of radiation that defied all standing theories of light 

and matter—and enabled people to see through opaque objects—had generated worldwide 

excitement. Almost overnight the mysterious rays and their eerie images began to circulate 

not only in scientific and medical journals but also in newspaper and magazine articles, 

advertisements, stories, songs, and cartoons. Physicists rushed to experiment with the new 

rays that seemed unrefractable and indifferent to electromagnetic fields, while other investigators attempted to use them to capture all kinds of objects previously hidden from the human 

eye—from hearts and bones to thoughts and souls. 

Morton was the professor of “Diseases of the Mind and Nervous System and ElectroTherapeutics” in the New York Post Graduate Medical School and Hospital and one of the first 

American physicians to experiment with the new rays. His father, the dentist William T. G. 

Morton (1819–68), in a September 1846 tooth extraction had famously demonstrated the 

magical powers of anesthesia, a miraculous technology that would revolutionize surgery. Half 

a century later, it was his son’s turn to demonstrate, to the medical profession and the public, a 

miraculous technology—the magical powers of new rays that could look into the human body 

without cutting it open. 

Written with the help of the electrical engineer Edwin W. Hammer, Morton’s little 

green book describes the electrical apparatus and photographic techniques essential to X-ray 

photography. It quickly became popular among doctors, surgeons, dentists, and others who 

were contemplating the addition of an X-ray apparatus to their laboratory or office. The 

complex relations between the electrical apparatus and the properties of the rays it emitted 

were far from understood in 1896. If the rays were too “soft,” they barely passed through the 

skin; if too “hard,” they passed through the thickest bones and produced little contrast on 

the photographic plate. The only reliable way to calibrate the rays’ penetrating power was for 

the operator to inspect his own hand against the fluoroscope screen (opposite). No precautions 

were taken against radiation exposure: no one suspected the dangers involved. Morton did 

note that, after prolonged X-ray sessions, his eyes often got sore and his eyelids were often 

inflamed. Many X-ray pioneers would die of painful debilitating cancers before the danger was 

recognized and protective measures taken. 

Rapid improvements in the infant technology soon allowed for ever shorter exposures 

and increasingly better imaging. Mastering X-ray technology was not enough, though. Medical 

practitioners would need more experience and training before they became competent to 

reliably read the exotic images and distinguish between normal and pathological appearances. It took more than two decades for the medical professions to fully adopt the new visual 

technology and combine it with traditional diagnostic methods: interviewing, listening with 

the stethoscope, and touching the body.

—Tal Golan

The X-Ray: Or, Photography of the Invisible 

and Its Value in Surgery (1896)

William J. Morton with Edwin W. Hammer

New York. Printed book, illustrated with wood engravings and halftones, 196 pp. + plates; 51⁄3 x 8 in. (13.5 x 20 cm)

above: Properly exposed X-ray plates captured clear outlines 

of the skeleton and also softer tissues, such as the skin, 

muscles, tendons, and even veins and arteries. But many of 

the finer details could be lost in the transfer to print. This 

figure displays the first-ever outline of an infant’s liver, 

within its natural surroundings of flesh and bones. The X-Ray, 

fig. 59

above: The apparatus in early X-ray photography: a huge induction coil 

(on the table against the wall) provides high voltage to drive the rays in 

a partially evacuated gas tube; behind it, in the back corner, a motoroperated interrupter repeatedly breaks the direct current supply to 

create magnetic-field changes for induction. The large flat disk in front of 

the table is the power control, made of an adjustable resistor. A rack on 

the wall holds spare gas tubes. The complicated interactions between the 

electrical characteristics of the tube, its gas pressure, and the properties 

of the rays it emitted were not well understood. Much of the operator’s 

expertise lay in knowing his tubes by heart and choosing the right one for 

the task. The X-Ray, fig. 54

overleaf: Selected photographs from The X-Ray, figs. 66, 67, 

53, 51, 73, 60, 63, 68

224 the national library of medicine

“Fool patients evolve fool doctors”

Elbert Hubbard (1856–1915), Arts and Crafts guru and follower of the British reformer 

William Morris (1834–96), is best known for writing the inspirational self-help essay 

“Message to Garcia” (1899). In the early 1900s his books could be found in many 

middle-class homes. He was an opponent of formal education and the professions in general, 

which he saw as destroying self-worth and poisoning individual initiative. The Doctors, his 

“satire in four seizures,” is similar in tone to other contemporary critiques of medicine, such 

as Mary Baker Eddy’s Christian Science. 

The plot is familiar: Mrs. X is sent unconscious and in chains to the State Hospital by 

her husband, the Reverend Cecil Kelrusey, whose family is distraught that he has married 

an “actress.” Seizing their young child, he tries to have his wife declared incompetent. The 

story echoes that of Mrs. Elizabeth Packard, which made headlines in the 1860s when her 

husband, the Reverend Theophilus Packard, had her committed to the Illinois State Hospital 

for disagreeing with his theology. Freed after a widely publicized court case, Mrs. Packard went 

on to found the Anti–Insane Asylum Society and wrote Marital Power Exemplified, or Three Years’ 

Imprisonment for Religious Belief (1866), which provided Hubbard with many of the details for 

his satire. 

In Hubbard’s play the doctors treat Mrs. X with fashionable techniques such as the “rest 

cure” (presented here as a torture in which the patient is strapped to a bed for weeks at a time, 

causing her to lapse into despair). The physicians are based on prominent “alienists” of the 

day: the asylum superintendent is Dr. Agnew Weir (S. Weir Mitchell invented the rest cure); his 

assistant is Dr. Jean Charlcot (Jean-Martin Charcot was a proponent of the hysteria diagnosis). 

With the help of asylum workmen Mrs. X outsmarts her doctors and becomes a force for good 

in the lives of the other patients, introducing “healthy” activities such as gardening and exercise. Eventually she converts Dr. Weir to the cause, is granted a divorce, reclaims her child, and 

marries the doctor, who decides to run the asylum on modern principles—healthy food, light 

gymnastics, fresh air—which sound a lot like those of J. H. Kellogg’s Battle Creek Sanitarium. 

Drugs and invasive therapies are out. The other doctors quit in disgust. 

Hubbard, as was his wont, intersperses the pages of the play with artfully illustrated 

aphorisms: “The Three Learned Professions [medicine, law, religion] surely need our 

sympathy, since they know so many things that are not so.” “Is the World all wrong? Reform 

yourself.” “Breathe more, eat less and think well of everybody especially doctors.” Seemingly an 

early example of anti-psychiatry, The Doctors is more prone to preach the dogma of the “selfmade man,” a phrase coined by Frederick Douglass (1817/8–95) and propagated in the novels 

of Horatio Alger (1832–99). Hubbard is as critical of patients as he is of institutions: “Fool 

patients evolve fool doctors.” Writing for a middle-class audience in the heyday of muckraking 

progressive journalism, Hubbard planted his critique in the pages of a beautifully wrought, 

leather-bound, letterpress gift book.

—Sander L. Gilman

The Doctors: A Satire in Four Seizures (1922)

Elbert Hubbard 

East Aurora, NY. 1st ed., 1909; printed book with two-color linocut illustrations on textured paper, embossed leather cover, 

108 pp.; 51 ⁄2 x 8 in. (13.8 x 20.3 cm)

above: An aphorism from The Doctors

opposite: Illustrations in the volume were printed in two 

colors on textured paper. The figure of the greedy, lustful, 

deceitful, manipulative doctor presented in The Doctors

looks very much like anti-Semitic caricatures of the Jew, 

which were appearing with increasing frequency in the 

central European press of the day. 
226 the national library of medicine

The last pas de deux

T his collection of copper-plate engravings, published in 1744 by the engraver JacquesAntony Chovin (1720–76) of Basel, features the naked, decaying figure of Death 

dragging women and men to the dance floor. All of the types of Renaissance society 

are represented: rich and poor, noble and lowborn, religious and apostate, beautiful and ugly, 

young and old, educated and ignorant. No one appears to be looking forward to this last pas 

de deux. But there is no choice: Death is in the mood for dancing, as the accompanying poetry 

(in French and German) makes clear. 

Todten-Tanz /Danse des Morts is an allegory on the universality of death: we all must die. 

This is perhaps an unpleasant thing to contemplate. Why then did Chovin, a specialist in 

engraving maps and globes, choose to publish on the theme? A popular subject in the late 

Middle Ages, by the eighteenth century the fragility of life and inevitability of its ending had 

lost much of its appeal as “enlightened” readers strove for a life of reason. Indeed, it seems 

probable that Chovin had no deep commitment to the danse macabre. The copper plates were 

not even his own; he merely reengraved an older set of plates made in 1649 by the famous 

Basel-born engraver Matthäus Merian (1593– 1650). Merian’s preface, reprinted in Chovin’s 

1744 publication, further reveals that Merian did not create the death scenes but faithfully 

reproduced them from a churchyard mural. Dating to the plague of the mid-fifteenth century 

and some sixty meters (nearly two hundred feet) long, the mural had been commissioned by 

the city council to commemorate the many residents killed by the deadly calamity. The mural 

survived the iconoclastic controversy of the Reformation and became one of the city’s main 

tourist attractions. For Merian to publicize such a famous feature of his beloved hometown 

fitted well with his business interests; he was well known for his Theatrum Europaeum (1635) 

and Topographia Germaniae (1642–54, 16 vols.), collections of hundreds of prints of city scenes, 

maps, and topographies of German- and non-German-speaking regions. He had published 

maps of Basel in 1615, and his preface explains it was then that he began his first sketches for 

the Todten-Tanz (seventeenth-century German for “Dance of Death”). 

By the time Chovin came to reengrave Merian’s plates the mural had fallen into disrepair. 

New aesthetic values, together with incomprehension and even disdain for medieval religiosity, led some citizens of Basel to call for its demolition (which was finally accomplished in 

1805). Hence Chovin’s new edition of Todten-Tanz was more a reminder of Basel’s former most 

famous landmark than of human mortality. And it was a reminder too of the quaintly morbid 

and “unenlightened” obsessions of Europeans in centuries past: not a memento mori at all. 

Chovin, like Merian before him, kept an attentive eye on the market. By the eighteenth century 

the educated European traveler no longer conversed in German but in fashionable French à 

la mode. To accommodate his trendy readers, Chovin translated Merian’s German poetry, and 

Todten-Tanz became Danse des Morts. 

—Claudia Stein

The Dance of Death (1744)

Jacques-Antony Chovin

Todten-Tanz / Danse des Morts. Basel, Switzerland. 

Printed book with copper-plate engravings, text in German and French, 132 pp.; height 8 in. (20.3 cm)

above: The title page of Todten-Tanz / Danse des Morts (1744) 

refers the reader to the Basel mural on which the plates 

were based.

opposite: Selected pages: top left, Death dances with the 

queen; center, Death dances with a painter; top right, Death 

dances with an itinerant hawker of wares; bottom left, Death 

dances with the pope; bottom right, Death dances with a 

moneylender. 
2 2 8 2 2 9

Acknowledgments

The making of a volume such as this requires the hard work, care, and special expertise 

of many people. The editors of Hidden Treasures want to particularly acknowledge the help 

of Doug Atkins, Ba Ba Chang, Dr. Milton Corn, Kristi Wright Davenport, Elizabeth Fee, 

Erin Goldstein, Stephen Greenberg, Holly Herro, Margaret Kaiser, Donald Kennison, 

Kelli Langley, Dr. Donald A. B. Lindberg, Michael North, Karen Pitts, Emmett Powell, 

Jeffrey Reznick, Crystal Smith, Ken Swezey (Blast Books), Sandy Taylor, Paul Theerman, and 

Déshaun Williams. Additional photography was done by Joanna Ebenstein (Morbid Anatomy 

Library), Hank Grasso (Office of NIH History), and Ginny Roth (History of Medicine Division, 

Images and Archives). 

We also want to thank Jay Aldam and Kim Bradway (The Studley Press), Simon Chaplin 

(Wellcome Library), Joe Charuhas, Walter Cybulski, Todd Danielson, Marie Dauenheimer 

(medical illustrator), Dora Deegbe, Cathy Dorsey, Nancy Dosch, Linda Draper (Museum 

of Optometry, St. Louis), Laurie DuQuette, Sarah Eilers, Laura Hartman, Robin Hope, 

Sheldon Kotzin, Wendy Kramer (San Francisco Public Library), James Labosier, 

Joan E. Lynaugh (University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing), Melanie Modlin, 

Christie Moffatt, Willem J. Mulder (independent scholar), Thanh Nguyen, Phil Osborne, 

Niki Papavramidou (University of Thessalonika), Gregory Pike, Kathy Powderly (SUNY, 

Downstate Medical Center), John Rees, Michael Rhode (National Museum of Health and 

Medicine), Suzanne Salinetti (The Studley Press), Fran Sandridge, Aris Sarafianos (University 

of Ioannina), William Schupbach (Wellcome Library), Jerry Sheehan, Akihito Suzuki (Keio 

University, Tokyo), and Sheng Tarn. 

Contributors

Eva Åhrén, a Swedish historian of science and medicine, has 

been a postdoctoral fellow at Yale University; curator and head of 

research at the Nobel Museum, Stockholm; and research fellow at 

Uppsala University. The author of Death, Modernity, and the Body: 

Sweden 1870–1940, she has focused her research mainly on nineteenth- and twentieth-century anatomy. Åhrén holds a fellowship 

in the History Office of the National Institutes of Health and is 

working on turn-of-the-century bacteriology in the United States. 

Bridie Andrews holds a doctorate in the history of medicine 

from the University of Cambridge and is affiliated with Bentley 

University. She has co-edited two volumes on the history of 

modern medicine in non-Western environments and is completing a monograph on the history of Chinese–Western medical 

exchanges in China. 

Alexander Bay teaches East Asian history at Chapman 

University. A Japan specialist, he focuses on the history of science 

and medicine across the premodern/modern divide as well as 

during the interwar years. He is completing a manuscript entitled 

Making a National Disease: Beriberi, Medicine and Power in Modern 

Japan and writing a short history of hemorrhoids in Japan. His 

next book-length project concerns Hansen’s disease in Japan. 

Zoe Beloff is an artist and Associate Professor at Queens College, 

CUNY, in the departments of Media Studies and Art. She works 

with a range of media. Her projects grow out of historical research, 

investigating a space where technology intersects with the unconscious. Her work has been exhibited internationally at venues 

including the Whitney Museum, MoMA, Pacific Film Archives, and 

the Pompidou Center.

Timothy Billings is Professor of English Literature at Middlebury College. He is the editor and translator of Matteo Ricci’s 

Chinese essay On Friendship and of Victor Segalen’s French and 

Chinese poems, Stèles, which received the Modern Language 

Association’s Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for translation. He 

holds advanced degrees from Cornell University and the School of 

Oriental and African Studies at the University of London.

Sheila S. Blair and Jonathan M. Bloom, a wife-and-husband 

team of art historians who share the Norma Jean Calderwood 

Professorship of Islamic and Asian Art at Boston College and 

the Hamid bin Khalifa Endowed Chair of Islamic Art at Virginia 

Commonwealth University, write on all aspects of Islamic art and 

architecture. Their latest work is the three-volume Grove Encyclopedia of Islamic Art and Architecture.

Ron Broglio is author of On the Surface: Thinking with Animals 

and Art and Technologies of the Picturesque. His research focuses 

on how philosophy and aesthetics can advance a rethinking of 

the relationship between humans and the environment. He is 

Assistant Professor of English and Senior Scholar of the Global 

Institute of Sustainability at Arizona State University. 

Mikita Brottman is a British scholar, psychoanalyst, author, 

and cultural critic known for her psychological readings of the 

dark and pathological elements of contemporary culture. Her 

articles and case studies have appeared in Film Quarterly, American 

Journal of Psychoanalysis, New Literary History, and American Imago. 

The author of books on the horror film, critical theory, reading, 

psychoanalysis, and the work of the American folklorist Gershon 

Legman, she teaches at the Maryland Institute College of Art.

Liping Bu is Professor of History at Alma College. She has 

published extensively on public health and international cultural 

relations. Working with health images, she has created several 

online exhibits at the National Library of Medicine. Her recent 

book is Science, Public Health, and the State in Modern Asia. She is 

writing a book on public health and modernization in twentiethcentury China.

David Cantor is Deputy Director of the Office of History, 

National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland. His scholarly 

work focuses on the twentieth-century history of medicine. He 

is the editor of Reinventing Hippocrates and Cancer in the Twentieth 

Century and co-editor with Christian Bonah and Matthias Dörries 

of Meat, Medicine, and Human Health in the Twentieth Century. 

Mary Cappello’s four books of literary nonfiction include a Los 

Angeles Times –bestselling book-length essay on awkwardness, 

Awkward: A Detour; a critical memoir on cancer, Called Back, that 

won a ForeWord Book of the Year Award and an Independent 

Publisher’s Prize; and the lyric biography Swallow: Foreign Bodies, 
230 contributors contributors 231

Their Ingestion, Inspiration and the Curious Doctor Who Extracted 

Them. She is Professor of English at the University of Rhode Island. 

Andrea Carlino teaches the history of medicine at the University of Geneva and has taught, as visiting professor, at the 

Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris and the University of Western 

Australia. He is the author of Books of the Body, Paper Bodies and, 

with Michel Jeanneret, Vulgariser la médecine. He currently works 

on the relationship between medicine, natural philosophy, and the 

humanities in early modern Europe.

Nathaniel Comfort is Associate Professor of the History of 

Medicine at Johns Hopkins University. His books include The 

Tangled Field: Barbara McClintock’s Search for the Patterns of Genetic 

Control and The Panda’s Black Box: Opening Up the Intelligent Design 

Debate. His essays have appeared in the New York Times, Natural 

History, and The Believer and on National Public Radio. His next 

book will be a history of medical genetics, tentatively entitled 

The Science of Human Perfection.

Harold J. Cook is John F. Nickoll Professor of History at Brown 

University and from 2000 to 2009 was Director of the Wellcome 

Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at University College 

London. He has published extensively on early modern science 

and medicine, his most recent book being Matters of Exchange: 

Commerce, Medicine, and Science in the Dutch Golden Age. 

Pia F. Cuneo, Professor of Art History at the University of 

Arizona, specializes in northern Renaissance art. Her current 

research, focusing on illustrated horsemanship manuals, examines 

the nexus between the production and consumption of books, the 

practice and evaluation of horsemanship, and social, political, and 

professional identities in early modern Germany.

Olaf Czaja of Leipzig University focuses his research on Tibetan 

history, art, and medicine, particularly the textual tradition of 

Tibetan medicine. He has pursued Tibetan, Indian, and Mongolian 

studies in Bonn and Kathmandu and received a doctorate in 

Tibetan studies at Leipzig University with a thesis on the political 

history of a Tibetan ruling house. 

Luke Demaitre is Visiting Professor of History in the Center for 

Biomedical Ethics and Humanities at the University of Virginia. 

He has published widely on the role of the first universities in 

medical teaching and practice. His most recent book is Leprosy in 

Premodern Medicine: A Malady of the Whole Body, and he is preparing 

a book-length study, The Medieval Physician’s Manual, for publication in 2012.

Mark Dery is a cultural critic. His books include The Pyrotechnic 

Insanitarium: American Culture on the Brink; Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century; and Flame Wars: The Discourse of 

Cyberculture. He has been a professor of journalism at New York 

University, a Chancellor’s Distinguished Fellow at the University of 

California Irvine, and Visiting Scholar at the American Academy in 

Rome. He is at work on a biography of the artist Edward Gorey.

Shauna Devine is a historian of science and medicine and is 

Visiting Research Fellow at the Schulich School of Medicine, 

Department of Medical History, University of Western Ontario. 

Her forthcoming book, Dissecting the Civil War Body: Science in 

the Practice of Medicine, 1861–1865, examines the development of 

scientific medicine during the American Civil War and the impact 

of the war’s events on American medicine. She is researching 

projects on the Civil War South and human experimentation in 

Civil War hospitals. 

Elizabeth Fee, Senior Historian at the History of Medicine Division of the National Library of Medicine, has taught at Princeton 

and Johns Hopkins universities. From 1995 to 2011, she was Chief 

of the History of Medicine Division. The author of Science and the 

“ Woman Question,” she has written many articles and co-edited 

many volumes on the history of medicine and public health.

Mechthild Fend is Lecturer at the History of Art Department at University College London. She specializes in French 

eighteenth- and nineteenth-century visual culture and art theory; 

major research interests include the history and representation 

of the body and the historically changing relationships between 

art and science. She has worked and published in particular on 

skin as a scientific object and an object of representation. She 

is finishing a book, Fleshing out Surfaces: Skin in French Art and 

Medicine, 1650 – 1850.

Paula Findlen is Ubaldo Pierotti Professor of Italian History at 

Stanford University. Her publications, in addition to many essays 

on science and culture in the early modern world, include Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting, and Scientific Culture in Early Modern 

Italy; Athanasius Kircher: The Last Man Who Knew Everything; and 

with Pamela Smith, ed., Merchants and Marvels: Commerce, Science, 

and Art in Early Modern Europe.

Mary E. Fissell is Professor in the Department of the History of 

Medicine at Johns Hopkins University. Her scholarly work focuses 

on how ordinary people in early modern England understood 

health, healing, and the natural world; her most recent book is 

Vernacular Bodies: The Politics of Motherhood in Early Modern England. 

She is writing a social and cultural history of Aristotle’s Masterpiece, 

a long-lived popular medical book. 

Sander L. Gilman is Distinguished Professor of the Liberal Arts 

and Sciences as well as Professor of Psychiatry at Emory University. 

A cultural and literary historian, he is the author of the basic study 

of the visual stereotyping of the mentally ill, Seeing the Insane. For 

twenty-five years he was a member of the humanities and medical 

faculties at Cornell University where he held the Goldwin Smith 

Professorship of Humane Studies. During 1990–91 he served as 

Visiting Historical Scholar at the National Library of Medicine, 

Bethesda, Maryland. 

Elisabeth Gitter is Emeritus Professor of English at John Jay 

College, CUNY. A specialist in Victorian literature and culture, 

she is the author of The Imprisoned Guest: Samuel Howe and Laura 

Bridgman, the Original Deaf-Blind Girl. 

Tal Golan is Associate Professor of the History of Science and 

Science Studies at the University of California San Diego. His 

research has focused on the history of scientific evidence, on the 

relations between science and law, and on science policy. He is the 

author of Laws of Men and Laws of Nature: The History of Scientific 

Expert Testimony in England and America. 

Charles Hallisey is Yehan Numata Senior Lecturer in Buddhist 

Literatures at Harvard Divinity School. His academic interests 

focus on the cultural history of Sri Lanka, especially the history of 

Buddhism and Sinhala literary cultures.

Marta Hanson has taught in the Department of the History of 

Medicine at Johns Hopkins University since 2004. Her book is 

entitled Speaking of Epidemics in Chinese Medicine: Disease and the 

Geographic Imagination in Late Imperial China. She writes about the 

history of disease, epidemiology, and public health in China; currents of medical learning, regionalism, and pluralism in Chinese 

history; and East Asian arts of memory. 

Mark Harrison is Professor of the History of Medicine and 

Director of the Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine at the 

University of Oxford. His publications include The Medical War: 

British Military Medicine in the First World War; Medicine in an Age 

of Commerce and Empire: Britain and Its Tropical Colonies, 1660–1830; 

and Medicine and Victory: British Military Medicine in the Second 

World  War.

William H. Helfand, a retired pharmaceutical executive, has 

published five books, including Pharmacy: An Illustrated History

(with David Cowen), The Picture of Health, and Quack, Quack, Quack, 

the catalogue of recent exhibitions at the Grolier Club and the 

Philadelphia Museum of Art. A former president of the Grolier 

Club and the Library Company, in 2003 he received the Lifetime 

Achievement Award of the American Association of the History 

of Medicine.

Steven Heller, author and editor of more than 130 books on 

graphic design, satiric art, and popular culture, is co-founder and 

co-chair of the MFA Designer as Author program at the School of 

Visual Arts, New York. He is also co-founder of the MFA in Design 

Criticism, MFA in Interaction Design, MFA Social Documentary 

Film, and MPS Branding programs. He writes the “Visuals” 

column for the Book Review and “Graphic Content” for the T-Style/

The Moment blog. His website is www.hellerbooks.com.

Kathy High is a media artist from New York working with biology 

and art. She produces videos, sculptures, and installations that 

have been exhibited in galleries and museums nationally and 

internationally. In 2010 she was awarded a fellowship from the 

John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. High is Associate Professor of Video and New Media in the Department of Arts 

at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, a department specializing in 

integrated electronic arts practices.

Mami Hirose is President of Asano Laboratories, Inc., and Senior 

Consultant for Mori Art Museum in Tokyo. She has curated and 

coordinated numerous exhibitions, including Zenga—Return from 

America (2000, Shoto Museum of Art), Laughter in Japanese Art (2007, 

Mori Art Museum), Medicine and Art (2009, Mori Art Museum), and 

Roppongi Art Night (2010). Currently, she is curating Laughter in 

Japanese Art for Maison de la culture du Japon (Paris) and Hakuin

for Bunkamura (Tokyo).

Ludmilla Jordanova is Professor of Modern History at King’s 

College, London. She has a long-standing interest in medicine and 

visual culture from 1600 onward and has published on Charles 

Bell. She is the author of Sexual Visions, Nature Displayed, and 

Defining Features, each of which explores the visual dimensions 
232 contributors contributors 233

Sheena M. Morrison is a doctoral candidate in the History 

and Ethics of Public Health and Medicine Program at Columbia 

University. She holds a master’s degree in public health from 

Hunter College, CUNY. A practicing historian, she has worked as a 

contractor for the National Library of Medicine.

Allison Muri is Assistant Professor at the University of 

Saskatchewan. Her research interests include digital media 

studies and the history of cyberculture in early modern science, 

medicine, and technologies of communication. In The Enlightenment Cyborg: A History of Communications and Control in the Human 

Machine, 1660–1830 she examines the history of mechanically 

steered, or “cyber,” humans in the works of seventeenth- and 

eighteenth-century thinkers. 

Mike “Sport” Murphy is a singer and songwriter who has 

released three albums on the Kill Rock Stars label and has written 

frequently about popular culture for the New York Post and the 

New York Daily News. He lives with his wife and two children on 

Long Island, where his hobbies include constructing bogus habitat 

dioramas, cartooning, and hosting monthly gatherings devoted to 

the tasting of exotic spirits. 

Marcia D. Nichols is Assistant Professor in the Center for 

Learning Innovation at the University of Minnesota Rochester. 

A recipient of several fellowships, including a Mellon Fellowship 

for Early American Literature and Material Texts at the McNeil 

Center for Early American Studies, she has published essays on 

bawdy travelogues and Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland. Her 

current book project analyzes constructions of gender, sexuality, 

and identity in British and American midwifery manuals. 

Marianne Noble is Associate Professor at American University 

in Washington, DC. She is the author of The Masochistic Pleasures 

of Sentimental Literature as well as articles on Dickinson, Stowe, 

Hawthorne, and Gothic and sentimental literature. She is working on a book entitled Sympathy and the Quest for Genuine Human 

Contact in American Romantic Literature. 

Michael J. North is Head of the Rare Books and Early 

Manuscripts Section in the History of Medicine Division of the 

National Library of Medicine. He has worked in special collections 

at Swarthmore College, Georgetown University, the New York 

Academy of Medicine, and the Grolier Club of New York.

Lisa O’Sullivan is Senior Curator of Medicine at the Science 

Museum, London, where she curates the Wellcome medical 

collections. In 2010–11 she was Postdoctoral Research Fellow in 

the History Department at the University of Sydney. Her areas 

of interest include the history of clinical nostalgia, the history of 

anatomy and anthropology, the sciences of racial difference, and 

the place of material culture in academic exchange networks.

Alyssa Picard is the author of Making the American Mouth: 

Dentists and Public Health in the Twentieth Century. She directs 

contract campaigns and guides the formation of new non-tenuretrack faculty unions for the American Federation of Teachers’ 

Michigan affiliate. Her next book will be a history of postwar 

labor, political, and popular-culture constructions of middle-class 

identity in the United States.

Rosamond Purcell is a photographer and writer whose photography books include Finders Keepers; Eight Collectors (with Stephen 

Jay Gould), Dice: Deception, Fate and Rotten Luck (with Ricky Jay), 

and Landscapes of the Passing Strange: Reflections from Shakespeare

(with Michael Witmore). Her interests include the history of 

seventeenth-century science and many twentieth-century artists 

(Dadaist and surrealist in particular), and she is the author of 

Owls Head: On the Nature of Lost Things and Special Cases: Natural 

Anomalies and Historical Monsters.

Anne Marie Rafferty is Head of the Florence Nightingale 

School of Nursing and Midwifery, King’s College London, and 

holds degrees from the University of Edinburgh, BSc (Soc Sci) in 

Nursing Studies, Nottingham University, M.Phil (Surgery), and 

Oxford University, D.Phil (Modern History). She was awarded the 

Agnes Dillon Prize for Nursing History from the University of 

Virginia, the first non-American nurse so honored, and made CBE 

in the 2009 New Year’s Honours.

Sita Reddy is Research Associate at the Smithsonian Institution’s 

Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage. A sociologist of 

medicine, with a doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania, 

she specializes in Asian history, museology, and cultural heritage 

policy and is working on an exhibition and book on the social 

iconography of modern yoga.

Elizabeth Reis is the author of Bodies in Doubt: An American 

History of Intersex and Damned Women: Sinners and Witches in 

Puritan New England. She is Associate Professor of Women’s and 

Gender Studies at the University of Oregon.

of medicine, including the role of gender in representation. Her 

next book is The Look of the Past: Visual and Material Evidence in 

History Practice.

Lauren Kassell is Senior Lecturer in the Department of 

History and Philosophy of Science and a Fellow of Pembroke 

College at the University of Cambridge. She has published on the 

history of astrology, alchemy, medicine, and magic in early modern 

England and is directing a project to prepare a digital edition of 

the fifty thousand medical cases recorded by the astrologers Simon 

Forman and Richard Napier.

Mark Kessell inflects his artwork with the strong biological 

and scientific focus of his previous career as a medical doctor. 

Much of his work is directed toward a deeper understanding of 

what it means to be human. He uses a variety of media including 

daguerreotypes, photography, installation, animation, and sound. 

Kessell has exhibited at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, George 

Eastman House, International Center of Photography, Museum of 

Fine Arts of Houston, and Princeton University.

Nikolai Krementsov is Associate Professor at the Institute 

for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology at the 

University of Toronto. He is the author of several books, including Stalinist Science; The Cure: A Story of Cancer and Politics from the 

Annals of the Cold War; International Science between the World Wars: 

The Case of Genetics; and A Martian Stranded on Earth: Alexander 

Bogdanov, Blood Transfusions, and Proletarian Science.

Shigehisa Kuriyama is Reischauer Institute Professor of 

Cultural History at Harvard University and author of The 

Expressiveness of the Body and the Divergence of Greek and Chinese 

Medicine. His primary area of research is the comparative history 

of medicine and the body in East Asia and Europe.

Hannah Landecker is Associate Professor at the University of 

California Los Angeles, in the Department of Sociology and the 

Center for Society and Genetics. She is the author of Culturing 

Life: How Cells Became Technologies. Her current research interests 

include the use of moving images in life science and the history 

and social study of metabolic sciences.

Susan E. Lederer is Robert Turell Professor in History of 

Medicine and Bioethics at the University of Wisconsin School of 

Medicine and Public Health. Her books include Subjected to Science: 

Human Experimentation in America before the Second World War; 

Frankenstein: Penetrating the Secrets of Nature; and Flesh and Blood: 

A Cultural History of Transplantation and Transfusion in TwentiethCentury America.

Barron H. Lerner is Professor of Medicine and Public Health 

at the Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons and the 

Mailman School of Public Health. His books include The Breast 

Cancer Wars: Hope, Fear and the Pursuit of a Cure in Twentieth-Century 

America; When Illness Goes Public: Celebrity Patients and How We Look 

at Medicine; and One for the Road: Drunk Driving Since 1900. He is 

also a practicing internist.

Laura LIndgren (designer and publisher) designs art and 

photography books and exhibition catalogues for publishers and 

museums. She is also co-publisher of Blast Books in New York, 

and she is the editor, designer, and publisher of Mütter Museum

and Mütter Museum Historic Medical Photographs, and Dissection: 

Photographs of a Rite of Passage in American Medicine 1880 – 1930, 

among others. Her websites are www.lindgrendesign.com and 

www.blastbooks.com.

Melissa Lo holds a SMArchS degree from MIT’s History, Theory 

and Criticism of Architecture and Art program, where she wrote 

her master’s thesis on Bourgery’s Traité. She is a doctoral candidate 

in the history of science at Harvard University. Her dissertation 

analyzes the images that manifested and transformed Cartesian 

physics from 1630 to 1690. 

Mark S. Micale is Professor of History, University of Illinois 

at Champaign-Urbana. His research focuses on comparative 

European intellectual and cultural history, 1700 to the present; 

the history of science and medicine (especially psychiatry, 

psychoanalysis, and neuroscience); French history, 1789 to the 

present; and historical and theoretical gender studies. He has 

written Hysterical Men: The Hidden History of Male Nervous Illness

and Approaching Hysteria: Disease and Its Interpretations. 

Maren Möhring is Lecturer of Modern and Contemporary 

History at the University of Cologne. She received her doctorate from Ludwig-Maximilians University with a study on 

German naturism. She has been awarded fellowships (NEH/GHI 

Fellowship at the German Historical Institute in Washington, 

DC; Feodor Lynen Fellowship of the Humboldt Foundation at 

the University of Zurich) to work on a book on foreign cuisines 

in West Germany. 
234 contributors contributors 235

Benjamin Reiss is Professor of English at Emory University. 

He is the author of Theaters of Madness: Insane Asylums and 

Nineteenth-Century American Culture and The Showman and the Slave: 

Race, Death, and Memory in Barnum’s America. He is also a co-editor, 

with Leonard Cassuto and Clare Eby, of The Cambridge History of the 

American Novel.

R. Roger Remington is Massimo and Lella Vignelli Distinguished 

Professor of Design at Rochester Institute of Technology. He is the 

author of four books on design history, most recently Design and 

Science—The Life and Work of Will Burtin. He received his master’s 

degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and his BFA in 

Graphic Design from Rochester Institute of Technology.

Jeffrey S. Reznick, PhD, a social and cultural historian of 

medicine and war, is Chief of the History of Medicine Division 

of the National Library of Medicine and a fellow of the Royal 

Historical Society. He is author, most recently, of John Galsworthy 

and Disabled Soldiers of the Great War in the Cultural History of 

Modern War series of Manchester University Press.

Michael Rhode is Archivist in the U.S. Navy Bureau of 

Medicine’s Office of Medical History and for many years was Chief 

Archivist of the National Museum of Health and Medicine. He 

is the editor of Harvey Pekar: Conversations, and an editor of the

International Journal of Comic Art. He is an author of the book Walter 

Reed Army Medical Center Centennial: A Pictorial History, 1909–2009

and the exhibit catalogues Battlefield Surgery 101: From the Civil War 

to Vietnam and “American Angels of Mercy”: Dr. Anita Newcomb McGee’s 

Pictorial Record of the Russo-Japanese War, 1904.

Stephen P. Rice is Professor of American Studies at Ramapo 

College of New Jersey. He is author of Minding the Machine: 

Languages of Class in Early Industrial America. His current research 

focuses on nineteenth-century commercial wood engraving and 

visual culture in the United States. 

Harriet Ritvo is Arthur J. Conner Professor of History at the 

Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she teaches courses 

on British history, environmental history, the history of natural 

history, and the history of human-animal relations. Her books 

include The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the 

Victorian Age; The Platypus and the Mermaid, and Other Figments of the 

Classifying Imagination; The Dawn of Green: Manchester, Thirlmere, 

and Modern Environmentalism; and Noble Cows and Hybrid Zebras: 

Essays on Animals and History.

Charles Rosenberg is Ernest Monrad Professor in the 

Department of the History of Science, Harvard University. 

He has written widely on American medicine and science and 

has a long-time interest in the place of print in the culture 

of medicine.

Michael Sappol is curator-historian at the History of Medicine 

Division of the National Library of Medicine and the author of 

A Traffic of Dead Bodies: Anatomy and Embodied Social Identity in 

Nineteenth-Century America and Dream Anatomy and co-editor of 

A Cultural History of the Body in the Age of Empire. His current work 

focuses on twentieth-century modernist medical illustration and 

the history of medical film. 

Emilie Savage-Smith, recently retired as Professor of the 

History of Islamic Science, University of Oxford, is Senior 

Research Consultant to the Bodleian Library. She has written 

extensively on the history of anatomy, surgery, and ophthalmology 

in the medieval Islamic world and prepared the online catalogue 

Islamic Medical Manuscripts at the National Library of Medicine. 

Recent publications include Medieval Islamic Medicine (with 

P. Pormann) and Ibn Hindu: The Key to Medicine and a Guide to 

Students (with A. Tibi).

Jonathan Sawday is the Walter J. Ong, SJ, Chair in the 

Humanities in the Department of English at Saint Louis University. 

His books include The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the 

Human Body in Renaissance Culture and Engines of the Imagination: 

Renaissance Culture and the Rise of the Machine. He is a Fellow of 

the Royal Historical Society, of the English Association, and of the 

Royal Society for the Arts.

Walton O. Schalick, III, is a practicing pediatric rehabilitation 

physician as well as a historian of medieval medicine and of 

modern disability. He is Assistant Professor of Medical History 

and Bioethics, Orthopedics and Rehabilitation, Pediatrics, History, 

and History of Science at the University of Wisconsin, where he is 

also Director of the Disability Studies Cluster. He has published 

on all of these subjects and has received federal and private funding for his research.

Antony Shugaar is a writer and translator. He is the author, 

most recently, of Coast to Coast: Vintage Travel in North America;

I Lie for a Living: Greatest Spies of All Time; and (with Gianni 

Guadalupi) Latitude Zero: Tales of the Equator. He is the translator 

of Margherita Dolce Vita by Stefano Benni and Everybody’s Right by 

Paolo Sorrentino, among other works. He lives in Charlottesville, 

Virginia, with his wife and daughter.

Jonathan Smith is Professor of English and Director of the 

Science and Technology Studies Program at the University of 

Michigan-Dearborn. He is the author of Charles Darwin and 

Victorian Visual Culture, Fact and Feeling: Baconian Science and the 

Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, and numerous articles on 

Victorian literature, science, and culture.

Jennifer Spinks is Australian Research Council Postdoctoral 

Fellow in the School of Historical Studies at the University of 

Melbourne. She is the author of Monstrous Births and Visual Culture 

in Sixteenth-Century Germany and, with Susan Broomhall, co-author 

of the forthcoming Early Modern Women in the Low Countries: 

Feminizing Sources and Interpretations of the Past. She is working on a 

study of “wonder books” in early modern Europe. 

Claudia Stein is Associate Professor in the Department of 

History, University of Warwick, and Director of the Centre for the 

History of Medicine. The author of Negotiating the French Pox in 

Early Modern Germany, she is working on a study of the emergence 

of biopower in eighteenth-century Germany and, with Roger 

Cooter, on a history of biopolitics and visualization strategies in 

Germany and Britain, ca. 1880–1930.

Arne Svenson (photographer) is the author of Prisoners and Mrs. 

Ballard’s Parrots and photographer and coauthor (with Ron Warren) 

of Sock Monkeys and Chewed. He is currently working on a new 

book on forensic facial reconstructions, Unspeaking Likeness. He 

lives and works in New York City.

James Taylor’s Shocked and Amazed! On & Off the Midway is the 

world’s only periodical devoted to the history and current status 

of sideshow, novelty, and variety exhibitions. He has been covering 

“the other entertainment” for more than two decades and has 

been featured in assorted media worldwide for his work. He is the 

co-founder of Baltimore’s American Dime Museum and the Palace 

of Wonders in Washington, DC.

Paul Theerman is Head of the Images and Archives Section 

of the History of Medicine Division of the National Library of 

Medicine. Trained as a historian, he has an abiding interest in 

the cultural history of modern science and medicine. He oversees 

programs in Archives and Modern Manuscripts, Prints and Photographs, and Historical Audiovisuals and digital projects based on 

those collections, notably Profiles in Science and Images from the 

History of Medicine. 

Charles W. J. Withers is Professor of Historical Geography at 

the University of Edinburgh and a Fellow of the British Academy. 

He has teaching and research interests in the historical geography 

of science, the Enlightenment, and the history of cartography. His 

latest book is Geography and Science in Britain 1831–1939: A Study of 

the British Association for the Advancement of Science.

Hiroo Yamagata is an infrastructure development consultant 

as well as a prominent writer and translator. Based in Tokyo, he 

specializes in interdisciplinary subjects ranging from economics, third world development, the Internet, and free software 

to architecture, urban planning, art, and literature. He writes a 

regular column in GQ Japan and serves on the book review board 

at Asahi Newspaper. 
2 3 6 inde x 2 37

childhood immunizations, 178

China: anti–germ warfare posters from, 198, 

198, 199; Buddhist texts from, 76; traditional 

medicine in, 38, 38–41, 40, 80, 84, 200

China Illustrated (Kircher), 64–66, 64–67

Chinese public health campaigns: antituberculosis flyers, 166, 166, 167; health and 

hygiene puzzle blocks, 162, 162, 163; slide sets, 

168, 168, 169

chirognomy, 148, 149

chiromancy, 94, 94, 95

Chôtei Kaitai Shinsho (Ôtsuki), 84

Chovin, Jacques-Antony, 226, 226, 227

Civil War, surgical cards showing diseases and 

injuries in, 182, 182, 183

Cleaning Mess Gear, 174, 174

Cleyer, Andreas, 38, 38, 39

Clinical Collection on Dermatology and Syphilology

(Mansurov), 112–15, 112–15

Clorion, 42, 42, 43

“collage” technique, 115

Colombo, Realdo, 86

Come-Back, The, 190

Commandments for Health, 174, 174, 175

Commelin, Caspar, 34, 34, 35

Commelin, Jan, 34, 34, 35

“Company School” paintings, 72

conjoined twins, 97–100, 98–100; Chang and Eng 

Bunker scrapbook, 104, 104–7

Constantin, Georg, 124

copying, culture of, 42

Corky the Killer, 164, 165

cosmography, of al-Qazwini, 78, 78, 79

cosmos, divine light of, 26, 27

Couplet, Phlippe, 38

cow pox, 120, 120, 121

Crick, Francis, 152, 218, 218, 219

Crimean War, 184, 185

cross-eyed children, stereoscopic pictures for, 130, 

130, 131

Cultural Revolution, 162, 168

Dance of Death, The (Chovin), 226, 226, 227

Daniells, Thomas and William, 72

Darnton, Robert, 8

Darwin, Charles, 68–70, 68–71, 214

Darwin, Francis, 70

David, Jacques-Louis, 44

deaf-blind person, biography of, 134, 134, 135

De anima (Aristotle), 14, 14–17

Death, dance of, 226, 226, 227

De conceptu et generatione hominis (Rueff ), 96, 96, 97

Harvey, William, 86, 86, 87, 208

Hasselbach, Hans Karl von, 194

health and hygiene puzzle blocks, 162, 162, 163

heart, 81; role of, 86

Hebra, Ferdinand, 112, 122–24, 122–27

Heitzmann, Carl, 122

Herbst, Johannes (Oporinus), 18

hereditary conditions, 130

hermaphrodites, 108, 108, 109

Hermeticism, 26, 64

herpes iris, 124

Herpes zoster (shingles), 124, 128, 129

Hindous, Les (Solvyns), 72, 72

Hindu castes, 72, 72, 73

Hippocrates, 22, 22, 24–25, 208

Hiroshima bombing, 196, 196, 197

hirsutism, 122, 126–27

Hitler as Seen by His Doctors, 194, 194, 195

Hohlwein, Ludwig, 156

Holmes, Oliver Wendell, Sr., 128

Honma, Gencho, 200

Hooke, Robert, 28

Hooker, Joseph, 70

horses, Langenburg Manuscript and, 30, 30–33

hospitals, Nightingale’s reforms and, 184, 184

Howe, Samuel Gridley, 134

Hubbard, Elbert, 224, 224, 225

Huber the Tuber, 164, 164, 165

Huydecoper, Joan, 34

hygiene campaigns: Ames’s Elementary Hygiene for the 

Tropics, 170, 170, 171; Chinese, 162, 162, 163, 168, 

168; U.S. Navy, 174, 175

India, Solvyns’s depictions of, 72, 72, 73

Inozemtsev, Feodor, 112

intestines, anatomy of, 82, 83

Iohannitius (Hunayn ibn Ishaq al-Ibadi), 22

Isenfels, Paul, 156

Islamic works: al-Qazwini’s Marvels of Things Created, 

78, 78, 79; Mansur’s Anatomy, 36, 36, 37

Jacob, Nicolas-Henri, 44

Japanese medicine, 38; first surgeries with general 

anesthesia, 200, 200, 201; Kaishi Hen, 80, 80–83; 

Kaitai Shinsho, 80, 84, 84, 85; Russo-Japanese 

War of 1904–05 and, 192, 192, 193

Jenner, Edward, 120, 120, 121, 208

Jesuit missionaries, in China, 38, 64, 66

Journal des débats, 44

Index

(Page references in italic refer to illustrations.) 

acupuncture, 38, 38–41, 40

Adam and Eve, 19, 50, 96

Africa, Park’s account of travels in, 74, 74, 75

African Americans: midwives, 56, 56, 57; soldiers, 

anti-VD campaign directed at, 180, 180, 181

African Association, 74

Akin, James, 108, 108, 109

albinism, 122, 125

Alibert, Jean-Louis-Marie, 122

American Society for the Control of Cancer (ASCC), 

202, 202, 203

Ames, Azel, 170, 170, 171

Amman, Jost, 96

Amsterdam, medical garden of, 34, 34, 35

anatomical works: acupuncture and, 40, 40, 41; 

Bourgery’s Traité, 44, 44–49; on circulatory 

system, 86, 86–89, 88; Clorion’s copies, 42, 42, 43; 

Doyen’s Atlas, 90, 90–93; Harvey’s De motu cordis, 

86, 86, 87; Japanese, 80, 80–85, 84; Mans.u�r’s 

Anatomy, 36, 36, 37; Vesalius’s The Epitome, 18, 

18–21, 50

Anatomy of the Human Body, The (Cheselden), 42, 43

anesthesia: in dentistry, 220; general, 200, 200, 201

animal material medica, 204, 204, 205

animation: magic lantern displays and, 176. See also

cartoons, animated

Anti-Insane Asylum Society, 224

Aphorisms (Hippocrates), 22, 22, 24–25

Aquinas, St. Thomas, 14, 14–17

Aristotle, 14, 14–17, 86

Armed Forces Medical Library, 9

Armed Forces Radio, 172

Army, U.S.: anti-VD campaign, 180, 180, 181; Hitler as 

Seen by His Doctors, 194, 194, 195; malaria pinup 

calendars, 172, 172, 173

Army Medical Library, 8, 9, 10, 182; as tree of medical 

knowledge, 6–7. See also National Library of 

Medicine

Army Medical Museum, 10, 11

arteries, drawings of, 86, 86–89, 88

Articella, 22, 22–25

Artificial Teledioptric Eye, or Telescope, The (Zahn), 

26–28, 26–29

astrological calendar, Sinhalese, 62–63

astrology, 94

Atlas of Colored Plates (Smith), 140, 140, 141

Atlas of Skin Diseases (Hebra), 122–24, 122–27

Atlas of Topographic Anatomy (Doyen), 90, 90–93

atomic bombing of Hiroshima, 196, 196, 197

“Attack of the Monster (Pulex Irritans), The,” 177, 177

Auzias-Turenne, Alexander, 112

baldness, malignant, 114

Banks, Sir Joseph, 74

battlefield injuries: in Civil War, 182, 182, 183; 

Esmarch’s pamphlet on first aid for, 186, 186, 

187; reconstruction of faces after, 188, 188, 189; in 

Russo-Japanese War (1904–05), 192, 192, 193

BCG vaccination, 168, 169

Beall, Lester, 210, 210, 211

“Bearded Lady,” 113

Bell, Charles, 88, 88, 89

Berliner, Milton Lionel, 132, 132, 133

Bichat, Xavier, 44

Billings, John Shaw, 8–9, 10, 11

Biomicroscopy of the Eye (Berliner), 132, 132, 133

Björkman, Nils Otto, 214, 216

Blackburn, Laura, 56

Blanc, Mel, 174

Boleyn, Anne, 100

Bontecou, Reed Brockway, 182

Borelli, Giovanni, 154

botanical atlases, 34, 34, 35, 50

Bouchon, J.-P., 90

Bourgery, Jean-Baptiste Marc, 44, 44–49

Boym, Michael, 38

brain, anatomy of, 80, 80, 160, 161, 214, 214–16, 215, 

217

Branca, Antonio, 140

Brandt, Karl, 194

Braun, Eva, 194

Bridgman, Laura Dewey, 134, 134, 135

Brödel, Max, 138

Buddhist Sutra of Great Liberation, 76, 76, 77

Bunker, Chang and Eng, 104, 104–7

Burtin, Will, 210, 210, 211

caesarean methods, 49

Calmette, Albert, 168

camera obscura, 26, 28, 28

cancers, 90, 128; ASCC educational material on, 202, 

202, 203; tumor excisions and, 47, 48, 200, 200, 

201; X-rays and risk of, 220

Carey, James, 108, 108, 109

cartes de visite, 68

cartoons, animated: Commandments for Health, 174, 

174, 175; Private Snafu, 172, 174; Rodney, 158, 158, 

159

cartoons (drawings), dental, 146, 146, 147

caste system, in India, 72, 72, 73

Charcot, Jean-Martin, 214, 224

Charles I, king of England, 86

Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, 18

Cheselden, William, 42, 43

De humani corporis fabrica (Vesalius), 18, 84

Delécleuze, Étienne-Jean, 44

De motu cordis (Harvey), 86, 86, 87

dental cartoons, 146, 146, 147

dentists: anesthesia and, 220; with autographed hand 

silhouettes, 148, 149–51; chirognomy and, 148

dermatological conditions: cow pox, 120, 120, 121; 

Falcadina, 116–18, 116–19; Hebra’s atlas of, 

122–24, 122–27; Mansurov’s writings on, 112–15, 

112–15; Rainforth’s stereoscopic images of, 128, 

128, 129

De Rocco, Adriana, 118, 118

Descartes, René, 154

Descent of Man (Darwin), 68, 70, 70

Detectives Wanted! pamphlet, 202, 202

Dickens, Charles, 134

Didusch, William P., 138, 138, 139

diphtheria, 178, 178

dissections, 18, 36, 50, 58; Japanese texts on, 80, 

80–85, 84; from Klinkenberg’s Monstra, 100, 101; 

temporal, 50

divination, 94; chiromancy and, 94, 94, 95

DNA: cracking code of, 152, 152, 153; double helix 

structure of, 218, 218, 219

Dr. Franke’s Phantom, 58

Doctors, The (Hubbard), 224, 224, 225

dolls, midwife, 56, 56, 57

Double Helix, The (Watson), 218

Doyen, Eugène-Louis, 90, 90–93

Doyen, R., 90

Drinking Water, 174

Duhem, Pierre, 14

Easy to Get, 180, 180, 181

Eco, Umberto, 14

Eczema erythematosum, 128, 129

Edwards, Bryan, 74

Ehrlich, Paul, 164, 208

Elementary Hygiene for the Tropics (Ames), 170, 170, 171

Elfinger, Anton, 122

Elkan, Otto, 146, 146, 147

Enlightenment, 30, 44, 74, 88

Epitome, The (Vesalius), 18, 18–21, 50

Esdaile, James, 142, 143

Esmarch, Johann Friedrich August von, 186, 186, 

187

ethnographic surveys: Park’s account of travels in 

Africa, 74, 74, 75; Solvyns’s depictions of India, 

72, 72, 73

eugenics, 156

evolution, 68, 70, 160, 168, 168

Experimental Surgery Drawings (Didusch), 138, 138, 139

Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, The

(Darwin), 68, 71

eyes: anatomy and physiology of, 26, 26, 28, 80, 132, 

133; operating on, 45. See also ophthalmology

eye-test charts, 136, 136, 137

Falcadina disease, 116–18, 116–19

Fellnagel, Dorothy Darling, 202, 203

Ferguson, Adam, 74

Feyerabend, 96

finger-print identification, 148

Firor, Warfield Monroe, 138, 138, 139

First Aid on the Battlefield (Esmarch), 186, 186, 187

flap books, 50, 50, 51

Flower, Sydney, 190

Fludd, Robert, 94

forceps delivery, 51

Franco-Prussian War (1870–71), 186

Fugger, Marx, 30

Fuld, Helene, Health Foundation, 54

Galen, 22, 38, 86, 208

Galt, John Minson, 177

Galton, Francis, 148

Gerhardus de Monte, 14

Géricault, Théodore, 44

germ warfare, 198, 198, 199

Giesing, Erwin, 194

God, 26, 30, 34, 42, 56, 88, 134, 154

Godbey, Emily, 176

Golgi, Camillo, 214

Good, Peter P., 204, 204, 205

Gossuin, Maria, 118, 118

Gould, John and Elizabeth, 68

Gros, Antoine-Jean, 44

Gross, J., 156

Guarnier, Lucifer, 158, 158, 159

Guérin, Camille, 168

Gullstrand, Allvar, 132

Günther, Hanns, 160, 160, 161

hairy people, 112, 113, 122, 126–27

halftone, 138, 156

Haller, Wolfgang, 96

Hammer, Edwin W., 220, 220–23

Hanaoka, Seishu, 200

Hardgrave, Richard, 72

harelip, 140

Harewood General Hospital, 182

Harman, Hugh, Productions, 174, 174, 175
238 inde x inde x 2 3 9

Kahn, Fritz, 160

Kaishi Hen (Kawaguchi), 80, 80–83

Kaitai Shinsho, 80, 84, 84, 85

Kanjur editions, 76

Kawaguchi, Shinnin, 80, 80–83

Kepler, Johannes, 26

Key, Axel, 214–16, 214–17

Kiggelaer, Frans, 34

Kircher, Athanasius, 26, 28; China Illustrated, 64–66, 

64–67

Kirkbride, Thomas, 176

Kirk [Church?], Edward C., 151

Klinkenberg, G. W., 98–100, 98–103

Korean War, germ warfare in, 198, 198, 199

Kulmus, Johann Adam, 80, 84

Ladd, Anna Coleman, 188, 189

Lambertus de Monte, 14, 14–17

Lamson, Mary Swift, 134, 134, 135

Langenburg Manuscript, 30, 30–33

Langenheim, William and Frederick, 176, 177

Lapieruz, Agata, 118, 119

Layne, George S., 176

Levy, Kate, 11

Library of the Surgeon General’s Office, 8–9

Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, 70

Ligdan Khan, Mongol ruler, 76

Linnaeus, Carolus, 34

Locke, John, 176, 206

Lovell, Joseph, 10

Lu Gwei-Djen, 38

Lundberg, Theodor, 214

lupus vulgaris, 124

Luther, C. J., 156

MacArthur, Douglas, 172, 196

Mack, Frank, 172, 172, 173

Madeley, George, 50

Maeno, Ryôtaku, 80, 84

Mafeisan, 200

magazines: of military hospitals, 190, 190, 191; Scope, 

210, 210–13

magic lanterns, 26, 28, 29; displayed for mental 

patients, 176, 176–77, 177

malaria pinup calendars, 172, 172, 173

Man and Sunlight (Surén), 156, 156, 157

manikins, physiological, 58, 58, 59

Mansurov, Nikolai Porfir’evich, 112–15, 112–15

Mans.u�r’s Anatomy, 36, 36, 37

Mao Zedong, 40, 162, 168

Martineau, Harriet, 142

Marvels of Things Created (al-Qazwini), 78, 78, 79

mastectomy, 44, 48

Materia Medica Animalia, A (Good), 204, 204, 205

Matsuzawa, Ken, 200, 200, 201

Matthaei, Heinrich, 152, 153

Mayerle, George, 136, 136, 137

Mechanics of the Human Walking Apparatus

(W. E. Weber and E. Weber), 154, 154, 155

mechanism, 154

Medical Adviser and Complete Guide to Health and Long 

Life, The, 42, 42, 43

medical trade cards, 208, 208, 209

mental illness: magic lantern displays and, 176, 

176–77, 177; schizophrenia, 110, 110, 111

Merian, Matthäus, 226

Mersenne, Marin, 94

Mesmerism Scrapbooks (Purland), 142, 142–45

Mess Kit, The, 190, 191

Micheluzzi, Martino, 116–18, 117

midwife dolls, 56, 56, 57

midwives, training of, 56, 96

military hospital magazines, 190, 190, 191

Mitchell, S. Weir, 224

modernism, 160

moles, pigmentary, 128, 129

Mongolian Buddhist texts, 76, 76, 77

Moninckx Atlas, 34

Monstra (Klinkenberg), 98–100, 98–103

monstrosities. See oddities and anomalies

Montgomery, Martha Alberta, 190

More Letters of Charles Darwin, 69, 70

Morell, Theodor, 194

Morton, William J., 220, 220–23

Moscow University Medical School, 112–15

motion pictures, 90; Easy to Get, 180, 180, 181; Page’s 

Symptoms in Schizophrenia, 110, 110, 111; Plastic 

Reconstruction of the Face, 188, 188, 189. See also

cartoons, animated

Movements and Habits of Climbing Plants (Darwin), 70

Mulder, Willem, 98

Murer, Jos, 96

musk, 66

Naidenov, Dmitrii, 114

Nakagawa, Jun’an, 84

Name of the Rose, The (Eco), 14

National Institutes of Health, 11

National Library of Medicine (NLM), 7–11, 8–11; 

previous names of, 9

natural selection, 70

Navy, U.S., Commandments for Health cartoon series 

for, 174, 174, 175

Nazis, 130, 156, 158

Needham, Joseph, 38

Nelmes, Sarah, 120

neoclassical ideal body, 44

nervous system, 88; anatomy of, 26, 36, 37, 58, 161, 

214–16, 214–17

Newton, Isaac, 26, 28

Nicol, G. & W., 74

Nightingale, Florence, 184, 184, 185, 208

Nirenberg, Marshall W., 152, 152, 153

Nitschwitz, Walter von, 30, 30–33

Nogi, Maresuke, 192

Purland, Theodosius, 142, 142–45

puzzle blocks on health and hygiene, Chinese, 162, 

162, 163

Qazwini, al-, 78, 78, 79

Quatremère de Quincy, Antoine Chrysostome, 44

Rainforth, Selden Irwin, 128, 128, 129

Ranieri, Prince, 116, 118

recipe book (Strachey), 206, 206, 207

Rennell, James, 74

Retzius, Gustaf, 214–16, 214–17

rhinoplasty, 140, 141

rhubarb, 66

Ricord, Philippe, 112

Riebicke, Gerhard, 156

ringworm, 128, 129

Rodney, 158, 158, 159

Romanticism, 44

Röntgen, Wilhelm, 220

Royal Society of London, 38, 120, 206

Rueff, Jakob, 96, 96, 97

Russian medical texts, 112–15, 112–15

Russo-Japanese War (1904–05), 192, 192, 193

Ruysch, Frederick, 34

Sakai, Tadamochi, 80

Sakurai, Tadayoshi, 192

Salk, Jonas, 178, 179, 208

Sarcomatosis cutis, 128, 129

Sattler, Carl Hubert, 130, 130, 131

scarlet fever, 178

schizophrenia, 110, 110, 111

Schott, Caspar, 26, 94

Scope, 210, 210–13

Scott, Sir Walter, 74

Seaman, Louis L., 192

S ̧ehzade Mustafa, 78

senses, Aristotelian ideas about, 14, 14

Servetus, Michael, 86

“Seven Jewels” (ink), 76, 76, 77

sheep with two heads, 100, 103

shingles (Herpes zoster), 124, 128, 129

Shukuya Aoki, 80

Siamese Twins (Chang and Eng Bunker), 104, 104–7

Silver Chev’, The, 190, 190

Sinhalese medical manuscripts, 60–62, 60–63

six-fingered hands, 148, 148

skin diseases. See dermatological conditions

“skin horns,” 115

slides: Chinese public health, 168, 168, 169. See also

magic lanterns

slip slides, 176, 176

smallpox, 120, 128, 178, 178

Smith, Elias, 140, 140, 141

Sokolov, Ivan M., 113

Solvyns, Balthazar, 72, 72, 73

Sperino, Casimiro, 112

Spratt, George, 50, 50, 51

Stars and Stripes, 172

Stereoscopic Pictures for Cross-Eyed Children (Sattler), 

130, 130, 131

Stereoscopic Skin Clinic (Rainforth), 128, 128, 129

Stewart, Dugald, 74

strabismus, 130, 130, 131

Strachey, Elizabeth, 206, 206, 207

Strim, Domenica, 116

Studies in the Anatomy of the Nervous System and 

Connective Tissue (Key and Retzius), 214–16, 214–17

Sugita, Genpaku, 80, 84

sunlight, exposing naked body to, 156, 156, 157

Surén, Hans, 156, 156, 157

surgical cards, from Civil War era, 182, 182, 183

Su ̄tra of Great Liberation, The, 76, 76, 77

Symptoms in Schizophrenia (Page), 110, 110, 111

syphilis, 112, 114, 115, 115, 128, 129, 140; Corky the 

Killer and, 164, 165

Tagliacozzi, Gaspare, 140

Tang Xuezheng, 40, 40, 41

tattoos, 122, 122–24, 123

Tegni (Galen), 22

telescope, 26–28

Ten Rhijne, Willem, 38

Thamm, W., 160

Theophilus, 23

Thorpe, Burton Lee, 148, 151

three-breasted woman, 100, 102

Three Stooges, 146

Tibetan Buddhist texts, 76

Todten-Tanz (Chovin), 226, 226, 227

tongues, 14, 15, 38

topographic anatomy, 90, 90–93

trade cards, medical, 208, 208, 209

Traité complet de l’anatomie de l’homme (Bourgery), 44, 

44–49

Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa (Park), 74, 74, 75

triangular bandages, 186, 186, 187

Truman, Harry S., 196

tuberculosis prevention campaigns: in China, 166, 

166, 167, 168; Huber the Tuber, 164, 164, 165; 

Rodney, 158, 158, 159

twins. See conjoined twins

Upjohn Co., 210, 210, 211

urines, diagnosis by, 22, 23

Use Your Head, 174, 175

nose-forming surgery, 140, 141

nudism, 156, 156, 157

Number 10 Shanghai Toy Factory, 162, 162, 163

nurses: postcards of, 52, 52, 53; uniforms of, 54, 54, 55

Obstetric Tables (Spratt), 50, 50, 51

Odano Naotake, 84

oddities and anomalies, 96, 96–109, 98–100; 

conjoined twins, 97–100, 98–100, 104, 104–7; 

headless pig fetus, 100, 101; hermaphrodites, 

108, 108, 109; “monsters,” 96, 96, 98; sheep with 

two heads, 100, 103; six-fingered hands, 148, 148; 

three-breasted woman, 100, 102

On the Motions of Animals (Borelli), 154

On the Origin of Species (Darwin), 68, 70

Ooddoobahoo, 72, 73

ophthalmology: Berliner’s Biomicroscopy of the Eye, 

132, 132, 133; strabismus, 130, 130, 131

optometry, 136, 136, 137

Ôtsuki, Gentaku, 84

Packard, Elizabeth and Rev. Theophilus, 224

Page, James D., 110, 110, 111

palmistry, 148, 151; Praetorius’s writings on, 94, 94, 95

palm-leaf manuscripts, 60–62, 60–63

Park, Edwards, 134

Park, Mungo, 74, 74, 75

Parran, Thomas, 202

Pastrana, Julia, 113

Pavlov, Ivan, 130

Pennsylvania Hospital for the Insane, 176

Perkins Institution for the Blind, 134

Personal Cleanliness, 174, 175

Pestalozzi, Johann Heinrich, 42

Philadelphia Centennial Exposition (1876), 182, 214

Philip, Prince, 18

Phipps, James, 120

photography, 138; “behind the blackboard,” 152, 153; 

Civil War surgical cards, 182, 182, 183; Darwin 

and, 68, 70; Doyen’s Atlas and, 90, 90–93; in 

Mansurov’s Collection, 112, 113–15; Russo-Japanese 

War album, 192, 192, 193

physiognomy, 94, 148

Plastic Reconstruction of the Face, 188, 188, 189

poliomyelitis, 164, 178, 178, 179

pollution, 170, 171

polydactyly, 148, 148

Pompeius, Nicolaus, 94, 95

postcards, of nurses, 52, 52, 53

Power of Movement in Plants, The (Darwin), 68

Praetorius, Johann, 94, 94, 95

Private Snafu, 172, 174

Prognostics (Hippocrates), 22, 22, 24–25

public health campaigns: on cancer, 202, 202, 203; 

disease warning signs, 178, 178, 179. See also

Chinese public health campaigns

Public Health Service, U.S., 11, 202

vaccination: coining of term, 120; official 

encouragement of, 178, 179; against 

tuberculosis, Chinese slides on, 168, 169

Vallenzasca, Giuseppe, 116–18, 116–19

Valverde de Amusco, Juan, 84

variolae vaccinae, 120, 120, 121

veneral disease: “Easy to Get” campaign against, 180, 

180, 181. See also syphilis

Vesalius, Andreas, 18, 18–21, 50, 84, 208

vision. See eyes; ophthalmology

“visual reasoning,” 210

Vroede, Franciscus de, 34

Waesberge, Johann Jansson van, 64

walking, mechanics of, 154, 154, 155

Wallace, Alfred Russel, 142

Wang Shuhe, 38

Watson, James, 152, 218, 218, 219

Weber, Wilhelm Eduard and Eduard, 154, 154, 155

White’s Physiological Manikin, 58, 58, 59

Whitslar, Will H., 148, 148–51

whooping cough, 178, 178

Wilkins, Maurice, 218

Willan, Robert, 122

Willis, Thomas, 26

Wilmer, Harry A., 164, 164, 165

Winckelmann, Johann Joachim, 44

Wonders of Creation (al-Qazwini), 78, 78, 79

Wood, Francis Derwent, 188, 189

World War I, 11, 52, 53, 160; reconstruction of faces 

destroyed in, 188, 188, 189

World War II, 11, 52, 54, 90, 130, 146, 158; Hiroshima 

bombing in, 196, 196, 197; U.S. Army’s malaria 

pinup calendars in, 172, 172, 173; U.S. Navy’s 

Commandments for Health in, 174, 174, 175

Wunder in uns (Günther), 160, 160, 161

X-rays, 53, 158, 166; in cancer treatment, 202, 203; 

Morton’s book on, 220, 220–23

Yamawaki, Toyo, 80

Zahn, Johann, 26–28, 26–29

Zhou Enlai, 198

Zhu Lian, 40

Zimmerman, Eugene, 151

Zoshi (Yamawaki), 80
hidden treasure: the national library of medicine

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page 1: Detail, Charles Bell, Drawings of Arteries, ca. 1797, pl. 9, fig. 2

pages 2– 3: Dorsal view of walking skeleton, from John Fotherby, Anatomy, 

England, bound manuscript on paper, ca. 1730. Ink on paper, 74 x 53 cm

pages 4– 5: Detail, Axel Key and Gustaf Retzius, 

Studies in the Anatomy of the Nervous System and Connective Tissue, 1875– 76

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Hidden treasure : the National Library of Medicine / edited by Michael Sappol ; 

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