cc >> Tom Zinnen: Welcome,
everyone, to Wednesday Nite at the Lab.
I'm Tom Zinnen. I work here at the UW Madison
Biotechnology Center. I also work for UW Extension
Cooperative Extension, and on behalf of those organizations
and our other partners, including Wisconsin Public
Television, Wisconsin Alumni Association, and PLATO,
Participatory Learning and Teaching Organization,
thanks for coming to Wednesday Nite at the Lab.
We do this every Wednesday night, 50 times a year.
Tonight, I'm delighted to be able to introduce to you
Micaela Sullivan-Fowler. She's been the history of health
sciences librarian here at UW-Madison's Ebling Library
for the past 13 years. She is the liaison to the
Department of Medical History and Bioethics within the School
of Medicine and Public Health. She also works with graduate and
undergraduate students helping them to navigate the print and
electronic worlds when using primary material for their
research papers. Formally at the American Medical
Association, Micaela's own research has centered on the
history of alternative medicine and on the history
of Plymouth Colony therapeutics. Her most recent exhibits were
both in connection with UW's "Go Big Read" initiative.
Or is it Go Big Red? >> Read.
Thank goodness. The first, "It's Good for You,"
was in conjunction with Michael Pollan's "In Defense of Food,"
and last year's "Informing Consent: Unwitting Subjects
on Medicine's Pursuit of Beneficial Knowledge,"
honored Rebecca Skloot's book entitled "The Immortal Life
of Henrietta Lacks." In designing exhibits, Micaela's
primary goals are to highlight books in the Ebling's
collections and to create thematic pathways between
seemingly disparate subjects like those of whaling and
seaside health resorts and the study of the decompression
sickness. She hails originally from the
east and west coast. [LAUGHTER]
I'll explain. >> I thought a pause there might
be appropriate, in appreciation of her parents.
So the opportunity to do an exhibit, this time in
conjunction with a traveling art exhibit called "Beyond the Edge
of the Sea," on the sea, was truly a labor of love.
Please join me in welcoming Micaela to Wednesday Nite
at the Lab. [APPLAUSE]
Micaela Sullivan-Fowler: Okay, I have a bit
of housekeeping because I'll forget to do it at the end, and
that is that I did actually bring some of the rare books
that are supposed to be in the display cases right now, but I
brought them out so that you could see them, and you're
welcome to come up afterward and take a peek.
And also I brought a bit of what the youngsters called swag,
which is some posters from the Seaworthy exhibit and some
posters from the Beyond the Edge of the Sea exhibit.
So the only thing that doesn't fit here is the box of rubber
bands which you can use for the posters.
And also my wonderful colleague Amanda Lambert and I put
together some quotes about the importance of the environment
and the sea as little bookmarks, so you're welcome to have one of
those as well. So let's start.
I'm going to actually do a small bit of reading as we go along,
but mostly I hope to just be extrapolating and telling
stories, so bear with me because some of these cases are so jam
packed with information that I want to give you the salient
points, and I'm afraid I won't do that without a few notes.
So the background. Why I did Seaworthy, Tom alluded
to it a little bit. We had this traveling exhibition
called Beyond the Edge of the Sea which came in from William
and Mary College, and it's illustrations from the deep sea
expeditionary illustrator named Karen Jacobsen who was driven
around at two miles below the surface of the ocean by an
oceanography named Cindy Lee Van Dover, and the exhibit
came to us. It's still here.
It's here till the end of January.
Some extraordinary water colors of life at two miles down.
And I found that to be the perfect opportunity by which I,
the land-locked Micaela in the middle of Wisconsin, could work
on one of her favorite things which was the sea.
And I was raised in Fall River, Massachusetts, and
near San Diego, California, near Marineland.
So my heroes were Jacques Cousteau, Sea Hunt, Flipper and
all the people who ran Marineland of the Pacific.
So this is as close as I could get to that.
And also as Tom mentioned, I had done these thematic exhibits the
last two years, which were the In Defense of Food and the
Rebecca Skloot exhibit, which were very popular, so I thought
I'd try and do another thematic approach.
I was trained as a public historian which basically means
sort of conveying history to the public through artifacts and
what are called primary material, and I'll talk a little
bit about that as we go. What usually is brought to mind
and it sort of dates me is if you recall the PBS special by
James Burke and his book called Connections where he sort of
took gun powder to warfare to mining to environmental impacts,
that sort of thing. I like to look for connections
between things. And I like to weave a narrative
theme between the cases, as well as to have each case tell a
story on its own. So by using books, journals,
newspaper clippings, advertising and artifacts, I hope to
discover and share connections that visitors haven't discovered
or thought of before. I'm looking for that a-ha moment
very often when people are looking at my exhibits.
And from a librarian's perspective, which I also am,
these are singular items with a singular voice.
You have a book, it tells a story.
As a historian, I hope to unveil their relationship to other
materials and other disciplines, and that's what the point is of
this exhibit. So, it's not just the medicine
or the diagnosis but also the social, cultural, etc.,
realities of that era that I'm looking for.
So with something like scurvy, whaling, the middle passage, the
health of sailors, decompression tables, the harvesting of sea
cucumbers, I try to find connections between those health
science subjects and the world at large which I'm going to talk
a little bit about. Number four, the revisionist
history of the late '70s. Basically, that is that my cases
and usually history as now done isn't about famous people or big
discoveries, but it's about the world or issues that surround
those famous people or discoveries.
And that's sort of what this is about, and you'll see things
like James Lind and scurvy. I talk about him a little bit
but what I really want to look at is why it took so long for
the Navy to adopt the use of limes and lemons to avoid
scurvy, that sort of thing. I'm interested in the bigger
story for the most part. And the one thing I should say,
too, is the books that you see here are all catalog in the
MadCat catalog at UW. So these are easy to find
online. Anybody can come look at them.
And I also am very big on including pieces from other
libraries on campus, and the ones that I often use are from
Steenbock which is the agriculture and vet med library,
Wendt which is the engineering library which has an amazing
amount of medical pieces in it, and Memorial Special Collections
with Robin Rider. So that serves a double purpose
of highlighting other people's books and also being more
inclusive in terms of the breadth of my subjects.
And I do invite you to ask as we go along, although I'll save
time for questions and answers at the end too.
So after thinking about a subject, in this case maritime
health and medicine, historians look for evidence in the
resources that I mentioned, the books and journals, to flesh out
a historical narrative. And I found the bits and pieces
of countless research projects while I was doing that, and
that's what we're going to talk about today.
I'm going to tell you what I found, what I think I could have
studied more or what other people could study more, and how
the discoveries I made led to the theme of exploration and
exploitation which is basically what frames this entire exhibit.
You can't see this quite because it's very difficult to get a
photograph of a white board because all the light beams off
of it whenever I took it. But this is my story board.
Essentially, this is what I came up with when I came up with my
title of Seaworthy: A History of Maritime Health and Medicine,
and the important thing to notice here is, first of all,
that you need to know how to draw a little tiny horseshoe
crab when you're doing these kind of major productions.
And the second is that I really stuck to this quite a bit,
although, as Robin will tell you, who's also here in the
audience, the curator at Special Collections, whenever you do an
exhibition, it's best to get about 50% more than what is
actually going to fit in the cases.
And it's better to have that problem with having to edit than
it is to install an exhibit on the day before its opening and
find out that you don't have enough.
So what I didn't do was oil riggers, and I didn't do very
much on shipwrecks, and I didn't get to the books by Patrick
O'Brian with his stories about the surgeon Steven Maturin which
were some things that people wanted me to look at.
But everything else I pretty much fit in there.
So you'll see what that means in a minute.
And actually this white board is huge, and I would carry it
around from room to room so that I would remember what it was I
was trying to do. It became quite helpful.
So into the exhibit. This is in one of the first
cases, and these are four books in the first case
by Ambroise Pare. And I won't trouble you by
reading the same quotes you're reading, but it's some of the
earliest works that we have in the exhibit, and basically I set
them up in a chronological fashion, so it sort of goes from
earliest to most modern, although there's an awful lot of
overlap with this subject. And a bit of reading.
Ambroise Pare, who lived from 1510 to 1590, was a celebrated
French army surgeon who informed the field of battlefield
medicine. That's how most people know
about him. He also attempted to explain
congenital anomalies in his "On Monsters and Marvels."
If we find these images unsettling, imagine how sailors
felt observing unidentified sea life and how a mother reacted
upon seeing her newborn Siamese twins.
Originally considered as merely an illustrated encyclopedia of
curiosities of monstrous human and animal births, historian
Pallister suggested that Pare was engaged in scientific
inquiry aimed at the search for causes rather than the purpose
or meaning of these monsters. Pare believed that animal and
human deformities were connected with reproduction, including
allegorical or astrological ideology, and searched for the
teratological causes of why the normal form had failed to occur.
These books were published between 1579 and 1641.
Ebling's collection goes back to the mid-15th century.
Robin's goes back even further. Yay, Robin.
Each one is different in terms of the layout of the
illustrations and the emphasis on critical text within the
compilation. And the reason I included this
to show you was because it speaks to two other important
things about the rare book collections at UW.
One is that we have incredibly generous donors who have given
us books over the years. One of the ones, I believe this
one, this was donated by Hans Risa.
I don't know if that name resonates for everyone but he
was a very big patron of the Ebling Library.
And so the donorship of books to add to our scholarly collections
is very important at UW. And the other one is just about
books as artifacts, not just what they include as content but
what they are as a piece in and of themselves, as a book.
And these are very important, the four that are in this case
if you come visit. One is in Latin, one is in
German and two are in French. And each copy is completely
differently laid out. And such copies represent one of
the reasons why original multiple copies, not one copy on
Google Books, of rare books are critical to the study of, say,
renaissance scholarship because somebody could just study those
four books and see how they were laid out differently, who the
publisher was, who the lithographer was, etc.
So when you're looking at an exhibit, it's not just about the
story it tells, but it's about the books as artifacts that are
included in this case. And I just included one more
from the case. So within this Des Monstres et
Prodiges by Pare, there's also this one which has a whole
chapter on sea monsters including the ray.
There's one on a whale hunt and kill.
There are big turtles, flying fish, and often the scale is
much bigger than the boats themselves which we know
probably wasn't true but that was the sensibility they had at
the time. >> So there were at least 25
volumes of this series judging by the photo you showed?
At least 25? Say that again.
From the heading I saw on the last slide, does that mean that
there were at least 25 volumes in the series?
It says the 25th book on top there.
I don't know where you're looking.
On the very top. >> Oh.
I don't know. I don't know.
Robin, do you know? Robin.
In fact, books of this era are often divided into what were
called books but they're, in fact, more like sections.
Sullivan-Fowler: Right. That's what it's referring to.
Thank you. You took me off script.
I got confused. It's okay.
So the second case is on the health, or relative lack there
of, of slaves during the middle passage which was the trip from
Africa to the Americas and back, mainly between 1654 and the
mid-1800s. And there were approximately
8,000 to 10,000 Africans per year who were aboard the ships
crossing the middle passage. The number grew steadily
reaching a peek somewhere around 1750 when the annual numbers
stabilized at about 70,000. Estimates on the total number of
Africans who were forced to undergo the middle passage run
between nine million to twelve million.
Of this number, some two to four million died before they reached
the Americas. Historians argue about how many
perished, what diseases they suffered from, what the
treatment was like aboard the ship.
They don't argue about the dreadful reality of placing
hundreds of men, women, and children in the hold of a ship
for a two- to four-month voyage. The primary material here, this
is an entire case. I think it's the only one I
include where, and I don't expect you to able to read this,
but I expect you to come visit. So this is meant to incite you
to come see. The primary material here,
ranging from 1737 to 1860, details the state of health and
nutrition on board slave ships. It includes a piece by ship
surgeon Alexander Falconbridge who, after witnessing life
aboard two slave ships, and this is what I was looking for in
this case was I was wondering whether or not there was ever a
ship surgeon on a middle passage ship who had "cared" about the
commodity he was traveling with. And this is a very complex
subject because the slaves were a commodity.
The question is why they put so many slaves on a ship.
There were usually between 400 to 600 slaves in the, what's
that called, the bottom part? >> The hold.
Thank you. The hold of the ship.
And historians suggest that the reason there were so many was
because they knew they were going to lose a certain
percentage by the time they got to the Americas.
But Falconbridge became an abolitionist, the ship surgeon,
and he succeeded in passing something called the Slave Trade
Act in 1807, but it took another half century before the practice
truly ended.
So this was the stowage compartment in the slave ship
Brooks, about 1788. Again, it's very hard to get a
good rendition of this, but basically, I know I'm moving,
Bruce, sorry, each one of these little dark lines is a slave.
The image portrays slaves arranged on the ship's lower
planking and poop deck in accordance with the regulated
Slave Trade Act of 1788. 454 slaves, each were given a
space of six feet by one foot four inches for one man.
Less for a woman, lesser still for children.
Some slave traders carried as many as 609 at one time even
though there was the restrictive contract.
So probably rather difficult to stay well in a situation like
this. This is one of the details in
the case. This is the Wildfire which was
a slave bark; a slave bark is a three-masted ship.
And the reason I'm showing this is just to show that there is a
particular piece in this case. But what I want to tell you
about the entire case was that I found conflicting evidence from
one book to the next about the relationship between the slaves
and the sailors, there's a very good book by Emma Christopher
about the history of sailors on these ships, and there was sort
of a competition going between the slaves and the sailors
because the sailors weren't treated much better than the
slaves in many cases, the Africans that sold the slaves,
what the slaves ate, whether they were allowed exercise, but
in no cases, as I previously mentioned, was anything
described that suggested they were treated well even though
they were a commodity to be sold.
So this case is illustrative of why historians look at so many
sources, both primary, which is the written or oral evidence of
the time either in a clipping, a book, a journal, a song, a play,
a photograph, a lithograph, etc, or secondary sources which are
histories of a subject with evidence like this that they use
to tell their stories. This is another example, also in
Robin's Special Collections at Memorial.
This is it by Thomas, excuse me, John Atkins.
And the reason I kept it was just an example of how I
couldn't have told this piece of a story without using something
from another library as well. And in this, he has a section
which describes the vagaries of trading with the Africans who
could be as arguably nefarious as the traders themselves in
terms of who they sold and whether or not those slaves were
in good health when they were sold.
So there's a lot of information in this case about a very
interesting subject. And finally, this treatise on
intestinal flux and small pox, I've included this one because
of what it says about the amazing things that we have in
these collections. We have a professor on campus,
Dayle Delancey, who's doing a book on the history of
vaccinated slaves in Philadelphia in the 18th
century. And this book is not in WorldCat
which is one of the major all encompassing academic catalogs.
I don't think it was even in MadCat.
It's a tipped in insert so the whole book was cataloged but not
the individual pamphlets in it in this case.
And this was only nine pages but it includes information about
the fact that slaves, even more than sailors, were vaccinated in
Africa before they were put on the ships because they wanted
to, in some fashion, make sure they made it without getting
small pox. And this is pivotal to a piece
of the book that she's now doing.
So this discovery of sources might not have happened had I
just been hanging out in the vault, as it were, but putting
together this collection I discovered it and then shared it
with her. Scurvy, you've all heard about
it. It's a terrible disease.
Scurvy was nasty. Lots of studies on it, including
popular historian Stephen Bown. And I'll read you just a little
bit. Because of the difficulties in
limitations of food preservation on ships and elsewhere, scurvy,
caused by a deficiency of ascorbic acid, reached epidemic
proportions during the age of sail which is roughly the late
16th century to the mid-19th century.
Bown suggests, although or very own Tom Broman in History of Med
disputes this, that millions of men died horribly during the
centuries of seafaring, destroyed either directly by
scurvy or indirectly when the weakened crews could not handle
storms running aground or defending themselves from
pirates. The defeat of scurvy was one of
the great medical and sociomilitary advances of that
era. But, as you'll see in the case,
there was a lot of confusion about where it came from and the
medical theory behind it, international politics behind
it, a European class structure, military necessity, they needed
these sailors on the ships, and unusual quirk of human biology
often thwarted a quick cure. They knew, and James Lind
proved, empirically that fresh citrus or other forms of
ascorbic acid could prevent and cure scurvy.
But it was not until the early 1930s that we knew that vitamin
C was the essential nutrient and could be synthesized for disease
prevention. Lind couldn't initially convince
the military that fresh fruit was the answer, but after
navigator James Cook, who many of you have heard about,
promoted the practice of feeding his crew the most wonderful
sauerkraut and lime juice and had shorter voyages where
provisions could be replenished which was actually a key to a
lot of this, the British Royal Navy finally provided lime juice
rations to their fleets, hence the term limey which referred to
British sailors. Also within this case is a book
from a man named McBride who developed something called wort,
W-O-R-T, which was a fermented liquid of malt and barley.
He believed that wort defused the scurvy which he believed was
due to bad air and putrefaction. And another commission report
within this case thought that in addition to lime juice,
cleanliness, good humor and light reading, that could also
combat scurvy, or perhaps it was just a way to make sailors
behave. Who knows.
So those are some of the other pieces that are in this case.
But the tiny little piece, which is why I get so passionate about
finding tiny little pieces, is that within one of these books
there was a footnote about a Danish ship surgeon who
understood that fresh fruits and vegetables seemed to have an
affect on preventing scurvy, though he didn't know the
vitamin C paradigm, and he had kitchen gardens on the bow of
the ships. He was with the Dutch Trading
Company. The problem was that being on
the bow of the ship meant that the waves came over on to the
bow of the ship, and often all of that saltwater then killed
whatever the crops were that were centered there.
I found two other references to bringing kitchen gardens on
ships, but I don't know that anyone has really studied that
whole agriculture and scurvy and sailing sort of connection.
So that would be something that a graduate student should do
something on. [LAUGHTER]
And that's why these are so much fun to do.
So we go to whaling. The reason I did the whaling
case was because this, too, is from Robin.
This is like a Robin fest for some of the books that we have
here. I looked at the whaling from
three different aspects. Ambergris which is a sort of
stone that's formed in the bowels of a whale, and they
vomit it out at particular points of time, nobody is sure
why. They can be floating in the
water or they come up on to the beaches in Australia where
they're worth about, a thing now of ambergris which is about this
big often is worth about $30,000, which I said to my
husband that's our new retirement fund seeking is to go
look for ambergris, but he's not on board yet.
[LAUGHTER] But the reason this is curious
is another thing about studying books like those books by Pare.
And that is that all of the whales in all of these sections,
and I haven't looked at this much, Robin might have looked
more, they're all smiling. And the interesting thing is
that the Leviathan author, Eric Dolin, it was on the "New York
Times" Best Seller List for a couple of years, the book
Leviathan about the history of whaling, he insists that we
don't add our modern sensibilities when we're reading
the book about all of the things that we think about whales and
not killing whales and whales at mammals, etc.
But in all of these books, they're smiling, they greatly
honor the social construct of whales themselves, talk about
baby whales with their mothers, etc, and there's this kind of
benevolent approach to the whales, and then the next
chapters are all about all the myriad ways you kill them, skin
them, etc, etc. And there's just this
interesting juxtaposition between that.
The other thing is with books like this is studying them not
just for the content but who did the engravings, who did the
lithographs, who were the publishers, how were the
bindings done, and that's the kind of thing that Robin teaches
on and often looks at in Special Collections.
So there are many different ways that you can look at things that
are within an exhibit. Besides the ambergris, what I
was interested in was the intersection between the baleen
industry and the corset industry in the late 19th century.
And if you've learned anything about corsets, yes, you've
learned anything about corsets or know anything about corsets,
they were incredibly popular for over 250 years even though the
medical profession was very much against them from the early
1800s and this is the reason why.
On the left is a normal waist, on the right is a waist
constricted by corsets. They also did this with their
young children, with women for decades.
They had lots of effects because of them.
Breathing problems, broken ribs, lack of growth.
There were no good reasons to have them over than they were
driven by fashion. And this is the piece that is
important.
The literature that I found that was un-mined, as it were,
although in all of these cases I didn't do enough secondary study
to see if somebody else has already done these things, but
they weren't things that I knew about.
I don't think you can read it, but bear with me.
I'll just read you this one little paragraph.
The corset season has a very bright outlook.
This is 1903. The only product entering into
the manufacture of a corset that has a disturbing element is
whale bone. But even that is control for the
season as manufacturers have protected themselves by placing
advanced orders. If a change for the better does
not come pretty soon, whale bone will become very scarce and can
be used only in the finer grades of corsets, as the price would
make it practically prohibitive in the modern grades where it is
now needed to some extent. So that was but one little
paragraph that I could then match up with what was going on
with the medical profession, but the literature I was looking at
I don't think has been mined very much at all.
You can't really see it but it's called notions, sewing goods and
notions. And this is an example of how
good the Internet can be. We don't have this publication
on campus but it has been digitized by Google books in an
extraordinarily long run, and if you read this there's an awful
lot of health related tidbits in it that have to do with the
fashion industry and the healthcare industry.
So I think there could be some very interesting stories that
could come out of looking at the fashions and notions literature
which you wouldn't think to look at immediately.
And also just notice, again, the corset up in the left-hand way.
The other thing I haven't seen a lot on that bears some looking
at is artists' rendering of women during that period with
and without corsets. And there was some very
interesting and provocative information I found on that
as well. And the only thing that changed
this, it wasn't really the whaling industry and it wasn't
really the doctors telling women that they should avoid the
corsets, it was a French designer who decided that women
should really be a little more Rubenesque, and when he came out
with his corset, which let you breathe a little bit more, and
then no corset at all, women changed and eschewed the corset
from then on. So it wasn't really about
health, it was about fashion.
The next case is on... a case that I have on general
health of sailors.
And I'm just going to read you a brief thing.
There were hundreds of thousands of mariners, sailors and seamen
who went to sea either on merchant ships, military ships,
war ships, ships bound for the colonies or slave ships.
They were often "pressed" into service by the British Royal
Navy, ie. if they had not been kidnapped or cajoled, they would
have chosen a different profession.
Those men had the same health issues as people on land:
skin ailments, tooth aches, headaches, broken bones,
injuries, burns, addictions, venereal diseases and dysentery.
What they didn't have while at sea was more than one ship
surgeon, usually there was just one, effective remedies for what
ailed them, until usually well after World War II, and a
hospital in which to recuperate. They were often on filthy ships
where proper hygiene and nutrition were but two of the
public health concerns and some of these voyages took years.
So the mind boggles at the health concerns that such
longevity would have engendered. This is an example of one of the
cots for the treatment of fractures at sea.
Just imagine trying to convalesce on a ship because
recall, unless you're at port, and even at port, you're never
quiet. It's always moving.
So that was something they had to contend with.
There's also a couple of pieces in there about the development
of sick bays because until they really developed a particular
part on the ship that could be delineated for the care of the
sick, they would just have people that were sick everywhere
on the ship wherever it was handy.
So here they're trying to keep someone, forgive me, anchored
there. Keep in mind that at that time
it wasn't only sailors, slaves and militia that were traveling
by sea during this era, but also families who were emigrating,
people who were looking for work in other countries, and a lot of
the remedies were what we think of as herbal remedies for
everything from pneumonia to syphilis, from broken bones to
eye problems, and this was something that I didn't discover
until I did this even though I've been there for over a
decade. This is an 1864 Mariner's
Medical Guide and tipped into it was this two-sided
hand-calligraphied calligraphic list.
And those preparations were not part of the preparations in the
book. So what I say here is if only we
knew who wrote the addendum to Folsom's list.
Therein lies what another historian might do an entire
thesis or piece on is try to follow up and find out where
this list came from or how it compares to other lists from the
time, that sort of thing.
Question. >> Yes?
That list was an herb list? >> It was a number of
preparations. Oil of cloves, glycerin, various
tinctures, various oils. >> Could you read it down.
Yes. Elixir of something.
Olive or sinnette oil Stoughton's elixir,
I don't know what that is. Sassafras.
Tincture of Arnica, which is a homeopathic remedy.
Hot drops. Cough drops.
Some sort of injection. Silver.
Oil of cloves. Chokeberry.
Glycerin. Tincture of...
Oil bergamot. Sulfate of iron.
Puff-a-luff-a-baba-baba-bing. [LAUGHTER]
Some sort of styptic. Another sulfur.
Something else and then tannin. So all things that are somewhat
recognizable, although I don't recognize some of them.
So that's the mariner's guide. This is the beginning of the cod
fish, or cod case, and as with the popular scurvy and salt,
there was a book recently called "Cod," which was about
the cod fishing industry. This one is a little different
from that. Again, this is from Memorial
Special Collections. Robin's very gracious to let me
have these things for a while. And I just want to read you a
quick thing. On Midsummer's Eve in 1626, a
fisherman brought a cod to the market in Cambridge.
When it was cut in preparation for sale, as was the practice, a
tiny book printed in decimo sexto was discovered wrapped in
canvas in the depth of the maw of the fish.
The book was brought to the vice-chancellor, who took
special notice, and whereupon by Daniel Boys, a book-binder, the
leaves of the book were carefully washed and cleansed.
The book proved to contain three treatises bound together, and
the treatises were determined to be three devotional works by
John Frith, an early protestant martyr.
In the course of the next year, two London booksellers reprinted
the treatises, of which this is one, prefaced by a description
of the marvelous, though not miraculous, they were careful to
say, preservation of the works in the Book-Fish, as that cod
became known. Alluding to the religious
contestations of their own day, James Boler and Robert Milbourne
published Vox Piscis to deliver, as they explained, Jonas' words
from the belly of the whale. So I'm very excited about this,
as was Robin, and it looks stunning in the case.
It's kind of small but look at that cod.
Isn't he awesome. Substantial cod.
So this is just one physician who was in Newfoundland who
attended to all of the cod fishermen.
The medical profession as well as the culinary world loved cod.
Cod liver oil was all the rage in 19th and early 20th century,
thought to prevent any number of illnesses.
Along the grand banks of Labrador and Newfoundland in
some of the richest cod fishing in the world, cod fisherman went
out in little dories to catch fish nearly as big as they were.
They were isolated, playing in extremely deadly trade and prone
to any number of illnesses and injuries.
Wilfred Grenfell came to this remote inlet in the early 1900s
and built a hospital operation for the brief but rich cod
fishing season. His presence and that of the
societe des oeuvre de mer, which initiated in France, helped
fishermen offshore in hospital ships, and they all helped the
fishermen and families well into the 20th century.
And the way I found this was that I found this, which the
bottom part is some postage from the oeuvre de mer, and there was
an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association
chiding American practitioners for not taking care of cod
fishermen the way the French were who had literally a ship
just anchored offshore in the north banks up along
Newfoundland, and whenever any cod fishermen needed it, they
had free healthcare there. So that was a nice little find
that somebody has recently done a history of it, actually.
And the other thing, while I was looking for interesting tangents
in all of this, was a couple other things I like to do in the
cases which are any artifacts I can find and a little 3-D and
2-D and a lot of visual interest going on hopefully within the
cases, and in this case we have a bottle of cod liver oil
resting on a bench. And this is from, I don't know
if you know about it, but there's a wonderful museum and
resource on campus called the American Institute of the
History of Pharmacy with Greg Higby, and he loaned me the
glass bottle which, if we were into eBay and that sort of
thing, we could probably get a pretty penny for because people
collect these bottles, especially the ones with a
fisherman with a big cod on his back, which some of you
recognize. And then also another thing,
which I'll get to with another case, is the mining of
healthcare advertising in different groups besides just
Good Housekeeping, etc, which generally has, as you'll see on
the left, the Caucasian centric advertising and Ebony, which is
in the middle from the 1960s with African American
advertising. And I've done a lot on that on
my other cases as well, my other exhibits as well.
I'm going to run through these a little bit.
So the next case is on immigration, and many of you
know lots of things about Ellis Island and immigration.
There are a number of books in the case about immigration.
The one thing that I was not really aware of was these
photographs like this, this is a very famous photograph done of
people coming into Ellis Island where they're all at the top of
the ship and usually the sensibility is that all of the
immigrants were stowed on the deck of the ship with no room,
couldn't sleep, etc. One historian has suggested that
the reason they were all on the ship was because they had just
gotten into port and they wanted to all see the Statue of
Liberty. So they all came up from below
decks where they had generally paid between $5 and $10 for a
berth, and they did have some room and they could hang out on
the deck during the day and get sun, etc, but then they had to
come into Ellis Island and go through the medical services
lines to see whether or not they would get to stay in America.
And I think, yeah, the quote up there pretty much covers it.
And those were the forms. Just as a side bar, if you're
ever in Philadelphia, there's a brand new museum, whose name
just went out of my head but it's something like the America
Museum of Jewish History, four stories, the most extraordinary
museum I've been in in a long time, and they have an
extraordinary room where you can essentially pretend to be an
immigrant that goes up to the line to have this medical work
done. And the artifacts they have
there and the oral histories that they have piped through the
ceiling are incredibly moving and very interesting.
Mine are a little less high tech than that.
I've got paper in the case. But it's indicative as well of
what they had to go through. >> Do you know what the
incidence was of people actually being refused entry for any of
these reasons? >> Percentage-wise I don't,
but not overwhelming but significant.
Yes. Tina, would you?
I do not but the guy who wrote the book about immigrants
to California coming into the west coast in epidemics, whose
name I'm also forgetting, there's probably some
information in there if you know who I mean.
But it was their greatest fear.
You get all that way, takes you three to six to eight weeks, you
finally made it all that way and then you might have to go home
which I can't imagine the psychological part of that.
But also, and this is one of the small books I brought that you
are welcome to look at, that it wasn't just immigrants in
massive ways in the late 19th and early 20th century but
emigrants who went to India, Africa, etc, and this little
volume, which I also didn't know we have until I was looking for
this, is medical hints for taking care of yourself on board
the ship and then when you get to the country where you were
going. Seasickness, Darwin,
poor Darwin. He spent five years on the
water; 18 months of it he was sick.
And this is a quote from him. I do not think I have ever given
you an account of how the day passes.
We breakfast at 8:00. The invariable maxim is to throw
away all politeness. That is, never to wait for each
other and bolt off the minute one has done eating, etc.
And he suffered terribly from sea sickness,
as did many, many people.
I think I'm going to just show you this one.
Few cures for seasickness worked but none flopped quite so
grandly as did the Bessemer salon, brain child of Henry
Bessemer of steel making fame. His idea?
Balance the salon on pivots so that it stays level as the
vessel rolls around. But his salon rolled more than
the ship. [LAUGHTER]
After two channel crossings in 1873 the idea died.
[LAUGHTER] But isn't that blissful?
That's great.
And then another reason that we pick things for exhibits, and
Robin can speak to this as well, is just looking for attractive
visual elements. Look at that font.
It's incredible. It's another point of engagement
when you're looking at the piece.
And this type and illustration of indicative of the vital
travel that was going on in World War II.
Even look at the airplane and the train.
They're just like bombing out. And this kind of graphic is very
germane to that time period. And it's full of some
interesting information as well. I'm always looking for a
Wisconsin connection. I know this is hard to read.
This is a gentleman... Yes?
Is there any explanation as to why some people get seasick
and others don't? >> There are many different ones
but they still haven't really figured it out.
The most recent study is, I think it's French sailors,
no, Japanese sailors, and it had to do with visualization.
They tried to train them not to be seasick.
And then there's things about the horizon, there's things
about when you should eat, but nobody's really figured it out
yet according to what I was looking at.
And there's things in the cases about the history of the
development of Dramamine, which is really quite interesting if
you're interested in the history of pharmaceuticals.
This Illinois trained ophthalmologist developed a mask
to go snorkeling with. The piece that I want to draw
your attention to is one of the reasons he wanted to develop
this was because many valuables remain lost in our lakes,
especially the tourist lakes like those of Wisconsin.
[LAUGHTER] Because of the expense
of sending for a diver who, with an elaborate apparatus,
has air pumped to him to see and breathe by, and also by the time
he gets there, the valuables are covered.
So he was trying to sell this. Again, another chance for
further research. I looked him up a little bit and
I wondered if it was patented, that's a historical thread that
you could look at, but it turns out that he became a missionary
in China. Right?
Who knew. And he did a lot of work there,
but I haven't followed him up, and I haven't followed up
whether or not anything became of the invention.
This is probably my most favorite piece in here, as it
were, and that is this whole thing is about the development
of decompression tables and the Navy and the fact that they
would try and save sailors who had been sunk in submarines.
And this is from World War I. It's a very poignant, very
dramatic and tragic situation. None of these sailors did
survive that were in the submarine.
So this book is from the Navy, talks about sending down all of
these divers, and where the little red part is lists the
divers by name, which very often you don't even get in
publications anymore. Case reports don't name people
anymore. They're all named in here.
All the different amounts of time they could stay at the
bottom, etc. While I was looking for this,
and this speaks to another wonderful thing about this
university, is all of the databases we have of newspapers.
And so I threw in the name of the submarine, just the name of
the submarine, and came up with all these articles in the
"New York Times" about trying to salvage this ship, trying to get
divers out to Hawaii in time, trying to develop the tanks that
were on the little row boats. People were at the bottom of the
sea and they were trying to save them.
And I found this little article. "Diver Quits Bride
to Fathom Pacific." And his name was Drellishak.
Drellishak marries before going to dive for sunken submarine at
Honolulu. And it goes into this poignant
story about how he had to leave his new bride to go and try and
help the people on the F-774. His name is up there.
He's one of the ones, and he had a little trouble.
They had to let him up. They had to put him in the
hyperbaric chamber a couple times, etc.
There's a whole thesis in there somewhere.
This kind of detail that would take you weeks to find out when
we used to do microfilm and looking through old records,
etc, etc. It's much easier to make these
sort of serendipitous connections when you have this
much extraordinary resource at your disposal.
So that was one of my favorite pieces that I found.
Yes. >> Do you think it was due to
the failure of these experiments that later on, like in the case
of the Thresher or the Scorpion, they didn't even make any effort
to rescue? >> I don't know.
Those ships were so deep. >> Yeah, I think it has to do
with that. Yeah.
They were much, this was actually not that deep.
I see. >> So this is the serendipity
I'm talking about. And then there's a piece in here
also about helping build the Brooklyn Bridge and caissons
disease and the hyperbaric chambers that were used.
And the overarching thing for this case is the world for
deep sea diving, caisson work and submarine rescue is a world
we were not physiologically designed to inhabit.
Making that world viable, livable and less dangerous is
what science and medicine has been doing for hundreds of
years, becoming increasingly technologically driven.
Like many advances in medicine, deep sea technologies were often
honed during wartime, and paradoxically, the more they
learned in accidents like the fate of the USS F-4, the more
they could eventually help. The evolution of decompression
tables, regulators, tanks and buoyancy compensators continued
to evolve, helping to keep sailors, oil riggers, salvage
divers and submarine crews safe.
My hero. [LAUGHTER]
The only thing I'm going to say about scuba, because there's
a lot, is why I chose to do the piece that's up in the
left-hand corner which is an "Ebony" article.
Because what I started doing was wondering how the press got to
know, how the press transferred information about scuba diving,
which was a very scientific French Navy kind of thing, to
all of these people that wanted to be like Bridges and Flipper,
and all of that. And I thought of that as a,
basically, white middle-class pursuit.
And when you start going through "Ebony" magazines from the '60s,
you find out that there was a black scuba diving association.
The other incredibly interesting piece of this was an African
American surgeon, this is '64, I believe, who invented a heart
valve machine so ostensibly could have gone great guns as a
medical professional, took a diving lesson and decided that
he wanted to spend his life deep sea diving and excavating and
had one of the most successful deep sea diving excavating
companies in California in the 1970s.
So those are little pieces that you only get by sitting down
with old magazines, or digitized magazines, and finding those
connections between things. The other thing is, has anybody
been to the Planet Earth film series that Gregg Mitman does on
campus periodically? Jacques Cousteau had a few dark
sides when it came to environmental sensibilities
early on. And I'll leave it at that.
I talk about it in the display case.
He used dynamite, for example, where there were large sea
mammals. Jacques did, can you remember?
Can you believe it? Remember SEALAB?
There were one, two, three, four.
The reason this is in here, and that photograph on the lower
right, it says something about, and the occupants of the SEALAB
are all cynically tilted to the left because that's how they
were in the SEALAB the entire time they were there.
And also they talk about how much harsher it was being in the
sea than it was being on the moon travel.
And there's a lot of psychological studies that have
been done on all of them together for so long.
And there's some really interesting stuff about SEALAB
also. I'll run through these.
This is about sea urchins and sea urchins were studied in the
late 19th century because they have incredible neurological
mapping that can be matched with human neurological mapping, and
they're studied now for a number of reproductive issues because
they have all those eggs. So people who study fertility
are studying sea urchins. We have somebody on campus named
Pupa Gilbert, who is highlighted in the case, who a physicist who
is studying their teeth, and she's figured out that the teeth
are made of microcrystals and she's hoping that with
nanotechnology and biomedical technology we could develop
surfaces that are as hard as the urchin teeth so you'd never have
to sharpen a knife again and they might have some
implications for biotech hip replacement, all of that
kind of stuff. So there's a lot of old science
and new science that is talked about in the cases.
Sea cucumbers is another one that some people have suggested
could save the world but they need to be saved first.
They're harvested in huge numbers illegally in places
within the world. And for the Asian market mainly
for medicinals. And they have all kinds of
properties that scientists would like to study before the species
are depleted. I know I'm running out of time.
These are my favorites, the horseshoe crabs.
And here I'm just going to read you a little bit and then I can
take some questions. I found the horseshoe crab
fascinating, you see the quote there.
Growing up in New England, horseshoe crabs were one of my
favorite creatures. A smallish, prehistoric tank
committed to minding its own business, but researchers and
medical professionals have been minding its business since the
late 1950s when Frederick Bang discovered that horseshoe crab
blood forms clots when bacteria are present.
In '64 he and Jack Levin discovered that the blood
clotting agent was an amoebocyte.
Between '68 and '71, scientists discovered that an endotoxin
causes blood clot reaction in horseshoe crabs and the method
for preparing and standardizing LAL, or limulus amoebocyte
lysate, from horseshoe crab blood was developed.
By '87, the FDA replaced the standard rapid test for
endotoxins with the LAL test. I think a lot of you might have
seen this on the History Channel.
And LAL is the standard test for bacterial endotoxin
contamination. Any vaccine that any of us have
ever had, including our influenza shots, have been run
through the LAL blood most likely.
Anyone who's had surgery, taken an antibiotic, been screened for
hip replacement has had LAL used to screen for bacteria during
the process. At $15,000 per quart for LAL it
is no wonder that researchers are working on replenishing the
population of horseshoe crabs as well as finding an equally
accurate alternative for screening of endotoxins.
And we found it here at UW campus last year.
His name is Nicholas Abbott. He's up there in the tiny
right-hand corner. And the reason I included these
was in the '20s there were articles in New York City,
"New York Times" again, about the fear of depleting
horseshoe crabs, because at the time they were used for
fertilizer in tons. Tons and tons and tons were
harvested from the bay where they were going to build
La Guardia, and this group was fearful that the supply would be
depleted. And then the lower article is
from recently, like the last five years, because the
pharmaceutical companies were depleting the horseshoe crab
which was depleted the Red Knot population, for any of you who
are bird watchers, which were very important.
So there's this rich cycle of life going on.
So, of course, the Red Knot would be glad of a consistent
horseshoe crab population for they count on their eggs for
survival. And what Nicholas Abbott has
done has developed a liquid crystal that might actually
replace the need for LAL because it has this same endotoxin
contamination ability. >> What is LAL?
It's the blue blood that you saw.
It's the blue blood that they harvest from the crabs.
They figure about 15% of the crabs that they harvest
die during the harvest. Most of the other ones are
actually put back, and there are horseshoe crab harvesters
who are commissioned by this pharmaceutical company.
And they attempt to not have them die.
And they were also used as, did I say fertilizer?
Yes. So there's Nick.
And it's a bit of whimsy that I discovered.
I mean, really, who would make a kite in the shape
of a horseshoe crab? But somebody did in, I believe,
it was 1918. This, too, was from
Google Books. This was not part of our
collection. The beauty of primary material,
and we'll end. This is a ship called the
Hyderabad. We have a collection that was
given to us by stamp collectors, Annette Yonke and Gerald Estes.
I don't know if you came to, we had a collection three years
ago, an exhibit on the history of stamps, and they gave us the
papers from this ship that was a medical ship during World War
II, and it has all the letters from the surgeon in it.
If you wanted to look at those, you could come and look at
those. Never go swimming until at least
one hour after eating. [LAUGHTER]
This is a big one. And the latest evidence is that
it actually might be true, even though it was disproven in 1967,
but for different reasons. And then the patron saint of
environmental sensibility. Even though this isn't about the
health of oceans, I felt like we needed to do this too,
because the other exhibit is Beyond the Edge of the Sea,
and she did The Edge of the Sea, Silent Spring.
And we have all of her original "New Yorker" articles that were
published about Silent Spring. So, I know I'm really late but
you can ask me anything, how we do this on a budget, you can
come and look at things. Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]