cc
everyone, to Wednesday Nite at >> Tom Zinnen: Welcome,
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
Participatory Learning and Association, and PLATO,
thanks for coming to Wednesday Nite at the Lab.
We do this every Wednesday
Tonight, I'm delighted to be night, 50 times a year.
Micaela Sullivan-Fowler. able to introduce to you
sciences librarian here Sat UW-Madison's Ebling Libraryh
for the past 13 years.
Department of Medical History and Bioethics within the School
of Medicine and Public Health.
undergraduate students helping She also works with graduate and
electronic worlds when using them to navigate the print and
research papers. primary material for their
Association, Micaela's own Formally at the American Medical
history of alternative medicine reseaand on the historyn the
of Plymouth Colony therapeutics.
both in connection with UW's Her most recent exhibits were
Or is it Go Big Red? "Go Big Read" initiative.
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
on Medicine's Pursuit Cof Beneficial Knowledge,"s
honored Rebecca Skloot's book entitled "The Immortal Life
of Henrietta Lacks."
primary goals are to highlight In designing exhibits, Micaela's
collections and to create thematic pathways between
seemingly disparate subjects
seaside health resorts and like those of whaling and
sickness. She hails originally from then
east and west coast.
I'll explain. >> I thought a pause there might
be appropriate, in appreciation of her parents.
So the opportunity to do
conjunction with a traveling art an exhibit, this time in
of the Sea," on the sea, exhibit called "Beyond the Edge
Please join me in welcoming Micaela to Wednesday Nite.
at the Lab. [APPLAUSE]
Micaela Sullivan-Fowler:
of housekeeping because I'll Okay, I have a bit
that is that I did actually fobring some of the rare booksd
that are supposed to be in the
brought them out so that you display cases right now, but I
welcome to come up afterward and could see them, and you're
And also I brought a bit of what take a peek.
which is some posters from the youngsters called swag,
posters from the Beyond the Edge the Seaworthy exhibit and some
So the only thing that doesn't of the Sea exhibit.
bands which you can use for the fit here isposters. of rubber
And also my wonderful colleague Amanda Lambert and I put
together some quotes about the
and the sea as little bookmarks, importance of the environment
those as well. so you're welcome to have one of
I'm going to actually do a small So let's start.
but mostly I hope to just be bit of reading as we go along,
stories, so bear with me because extrapolating and telling
packed with information that I some of these cases are so jam
points, and I'm afraid I won't want to give you the salient
So the background. do that without a few notes.
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
expeditionary illustrator named iKaren Jacobsen who was drivena
around at two miles below the surface of the ocean by an
oceanography named Cindy Lee
came to us. Van DIt's still here.hibit
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
the land-locked Micaela in the perfect opportunity by which I,
on one of her favorite things middle which was the sea.d work
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
So this is as close as I could Marineland of the Pacific.
And also as Tom mentioned, I had get to that.
last two years, which were the done these thematic exhibits 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
what are called primary material, and I'll talk a little
bit about that as we go.
and it sort of dates me is if Wyou recall the PBS special byd
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
story on its own. So by using books, journals,
newspaper clippings, advertising
discover and share connections and artifacts, I hope to
or thought of before. I'm looking for that a-ha moment
very often when people are
And from a librarian's looking at my exhibits.
these are singular items with a perspecsingular voice.lso am,
You have a book, it tells a story.
As a historian, I hope to unveil
materials and other disciplines, their relationship to other
this exhibit. aSo, 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,
health of sailors, decompression whaling, the middle passage, the
cucumbers, I try to find tables, the harvesting of sea
science subjects and the world connections between those health
a little bit about. atNumber four, the revisionistlk
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
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
the Navy to adopt the use of at is why it took so long for
scurvy, that sort of thing. I'm interested in the bigger
story for the most part.
too, is the books that you see And the one thing I should say,
MadCat catalog at UW. hSo these are easy to finde
online. Anybody can come look at them.
And I also am very big on including pieces from other
libraries on campus, and the
Steenbock which is the ones that I often use are from
Wendt which is the engineering agriculture and vet med library,
amount of medical pieces in it, and Memorial Special Collections
with Robin Rider. So that serves a double purpose
of highlighting other people's
inclusive in terms of the bbreadth of my subjects.e
And I do invite you to ask as we
time for questions and answers go along, although I'll save
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
that's what we're going to talk while I about today.at, and
I'm going to tell you what I
studied more or what other found, what I think I could have
the discoveries I made led to pethe theme of exploration andow
exploitation which is basically what frames this entire exhibit.
You can't see this quite because
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
title of Seaworthy: A History of up with when I came up with my
and the important thing to Maritime Health and Medicine,
that you need to know how to notice here is, first of all,
crab when you're doing these draw a little tiny horseshoe
And the second is that I really stuck to this quite a bit,
although, as Robin will tell
audience, the curator at Special you, who's also here in the
exhibition, it's best to get Collections, whenever you do an
actually going to fit in the about 50% more than what is
And it's better to have that cases.
it is to install an exhibit on problem with having to edit than
find out that you don't have the day before its opening and
So what I didn't do was oil riggers, and I didn't do very
much on shipwrecks, and I didn't
O'Brian with his stories about get to the books by Patrick
were some things that people the surgeon Steven Maturin which
But everything else I pretty wanted me to look at.
So you'll see what that means in much fit in there.
And actually this white board is a minute.
around from room to room so that huge, and I would carry it
was trying to do. I wIt became quite helpful.s I
So into the exhibit.
cases, and these are four books This in the first casefirst
by Ambroise Pare. And I won't trouble you by
reading the same quotes you're
earliest works that we have in reading, but it's some of the
them up in a chronological the exhibit, and basically I set
earliest to most modern, fashion, so it sort of goes from
overlap with this subject. although there's an awful lot of
Ambroise Pare, who lived from 1510 to 1590, was a celebrated
French army surgeon who informed
medicine. That's how most people know
about him.
congenital anomalies in his H"On Monsters and Marvels."n
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
Pallister suggested that Pare awas engaged in scientifican
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
allegorical or astrological ideology, and searched for the
teratological causes of why the normal form had failed to occur.
These books were published
Ebling's collection goes back to between 1579 and 1641.
Robin's goes back even further. the mYay, Robin.tury.
Each one is different in terms
illustrations and the emphasis of the layout of the
compilation. on critical text within the
to show you was because it And the reason I included this
things about the rare book speaks to two other important
One is that we have incredibly collections at UW.
us books over the years. generous donors who have given
one, this was donated by Hans One of the onRisa. believe this
I don't know if that name resonates for everyone but he
was a very big patron of the
And so the donorship of books to Ebling Library.
is very important at UW. add to our scholarly collections
books as artifacts, not just And the other one is just about
what they are as a piece in and whaof themselves, as a book. but
And these are very important, the four that are in this case
if you come visit.
German and two are in French. And each copy is completely
differently laid out. And such copies represent one of
the reasons why original
Google Books, of rare books are mcritical to the study of, say,n
renaissance scholarship because somebody could just study those
four books and see how they were
publisher was, who the laid out differently, who the
So when you're looking at an lithographer was, etc.
story it tells, but it's about exhibit, it's not just about the
included in this case. the books as artifacts that are
from the case. And I just included one more
Prodiges by Pare, there's also So within this Des Monstres et
chapter on sea monsters thisincluding the ray.hole
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
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
At least 25? by the photo you showed?
From the heading I saw on the last slide, does that mean that
there were at least 25 volumes
It says the 25th book on top in the series?
I don't know where you're looking.
On the very top.
I don't know. I don't know.
Robin, do you know? Robin.
In fact, books of this era
called books but they're, arin fact, more like sections.re
Sullivan-Fowler: Right. That's what it's referring to.
Thank you.
I got confused. You tooIt's okay.cript.
So the second case is on the
of, of slaves during the middle passage which was the trip from
Africa to the Americas and back,
mid-1800s. mainly between 1654 and the
8,000 to 10,000 Africans per And there were approximately
crossing the middle passage. year who were aboard the ships
reaching a peek somewhere around The number grew steadily
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
Of this number, some two to four million.
the Americas. Historians argue about how manyd
perished, what diseases they
treatment was like aboard the suffered ship. what the
They don't argue about the
hundreds of men, women, and children in the hold of a ship
for a two- to four-month voyage.
is an entire case. The primary material here, this
include where, and I don't I think it's the only one I
but I expect you to come visit. eSo this is meant to incite you,
to come see.
ranging from 1737 to 1860, The primary material here,
nutrition on board slave ships. deIt includes a piece by shipnd
surgeon Alexander Falconbridge
aboard two slave ships, and this who, after witnessing life
this case was I was wondering whether or not there was ever a
ship surgeon on a middle passage
commodity he was traveling with. ship who had "cared" about the
subject because the slaves were And thia commodity.complex
The question is why they put
There were usually between so many slaves on a ship.
that called, the bottom part? 400 to 600>> The hold.he, what's
Thank you.
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
and he succeeded in passing something called the Slave Trade
Act in 1807, but it took another
half centutruly ended.e practice
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.
space of six feet by one foot 454four inches for one man. a
Less for a woman, lesser still
Some slave traders carried as many as 609 at one time even
though there was the restrictive
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.
about the entire case was that I But what I want to tell you
one book to the next about the found conflicting evidence from
and the sailors, there's a very rgood book by Emma Christophers
about the history of sailors on these ships, and there was sort
of a competition going between
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
in no cases, as I previously they were allowed exercise, but
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
a photograph, a lithograph, etc, book, a journal, a song, a play,
histories of a subject with evidence like this that they use
to tell their stories.
Robin's Special Collections at This is another example, also in
This is it by Thomas, excuse me, Memorial.
And the reason I kept it was John Atkins.
couldn't have told this piece of just an example of how I
from another library as well. aAnd in this, he has a sectiong
which describes the vagaries of trading with the Africans who
could be as arguably nefarious
terms of who they sold and as the traders themselves in
in good health when they were whether or nosold.se slaves were
So there's a lot of information in this case about a very
interesting subject.
intestinal flux and small pox, And finally, this treatise on
of what it says about the amazing things that we have in
these collections.
Dayle Delancey, who's doing a We hbook on the history ofpus,
vaccinated slaves in
century. Philadelphia in the 18th
which is one of the major all encompassing academic catalogs.t
I don't think it was even in
It's a tipped in insert so the MadCat.
the individual pamphlets in it whole book was cataloged but not
And this was only nine pages but in this case.
the fact that slaves, even more than sailors, were vaccinated in
Africa before they were put on
to, in some fashion, make sure the ships because they wanted
small pox. they made it without getting
of the book that she's now And this is pivotal to a piece
So this discovery of sources doing.
just been hanging out in the might not have happened had I
together this collection I vault, as it were, but putting
with her. dScurvy, you've all heard aboutt
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.
limitations of food preservation Because of the difficulties in
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
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 great medical and Tsociomilitary advances of that
era.
there was a lot of confusion But, as you'll see in the case,
medical theory behind it, ainternational politics behindhe
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.
proved, empirically that fresh They knew, and James Lind
ascorbic acid could prevent and citruscure scurvy.rms of
But it was not until the early
C was the essential nutrient and 1930s that we knew that vitamin
prevention. Lind couldn't initially convince
the military that fresh fruit was the answer, but after
navigator James Cook, who many
promoted the practice of feeding of you have heard about,
sauerkraut and lime juice and hhad shorter voyages wherel
provisions could be replenished which was actually a key to a
lot of this, the British Royal
rations to their fleets, hence Navy finally provided lime juice
British sailors. the term limey which referred to
from a man named McBride who Also within this case is a book
W-O-R-T, which was a fermented developed something called wort,
He believed that wort defused the scurvy which he believed was
due to bad air and putrefaction.
within this case thought that in And another commission report
cleanliness, good humor and light reading, that could also
combat scurvy, or perhaps it was
behave. just a wWho knows. sailors
So those are some of the other
But the tiny little piece, which pieces that are in this case.
finding tiny little pieces, is is why I get so passionate about
there was a footnote about a that within one of these books
understood that fresh fruits and Danish ship surgeon who
affect on preventing scurvy, vegetables seemed to have an
vitamin C paradigm, and he had though he didn't know the
the ships. kitchen gardens on the bow of
Company. He was with the Dutch Trading
the bow of the ship meant that The problem was that being on
bow of the ship, and often all the waves came over on to the
whatever the crops were that of that saltwater then killed
I found two other references were centered there.
ships, but I don't know that to bringing kitchen gardens on
whole agriculture and scurvy and anyone has really studied that
So that would be something that a graduate student should do
something on. [LAUGHTER]
And that's why these are
So we go to whaling. so much fun to do.
case was because this, too, is The reason I did the whaling
This is like a Robin fest for some of the books that we have
here. I looked at the whaling from
three different aspects.
stone that's formed in the Ambergris which is a sort of
vomit it out at particular bowels of a whale, and they
why. points of time, nobody is sure
water or they come up on to the Tbeaches in Australia where
they're worth about, a thing now
big often is worth about of ambergris which is about this
husband that's our new $30,000, which I said to my
look for ambergris, but he's not retirement fund seeking is to go
[LAUGHTER] on board yet.
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
more, they're all smiling. much, Robin might have looked
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
don't add our modern whaling, he insists that we
the book about all of the things sensibilities when we're reading
not killing whales and whales at that we think about whales and
But in all of these books, mammals, etc.
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
chapters are all about all the whales, and then the next
them, etc, etc. myriaAnd there's just this skin
interesting juxtaposition between that.
The other thing is with books like this is studying them not
just for the content but who did
lithographs, who were the thpublishers, how were thee
bindings done, and that's the kind of thing that Robin teaches
on and often looks at in Special
So there are many different ways Collections.
are within an exhibit. that you can look at things that
was interested in was the intersection between the baleen
industry and the corset industry
And if you've learned anything in the late 19th century.
learned anything about corsets about corsets, yes, you've
they were incredibly popular for or know anything about corsets,
medical profession was very much over 250 years even though the
1800s and this is the reason against them from the early
On the left is a normal waist, why.
constricted by corsets. They also did this with their
young children, with women for
They had lots of effects because decades.
Breathing problems, broken ribs, of them.
There were no good reasons to have them over than they were
driven by fashion.
And this iimportant.e that is
The literature that I found that
although in all of these cases I was un-mined, as it were,
to see if somebody else has dalready done these things, buty
they weren't things that I knew about.
I don't think you can read it,
I'll just read you this one little paragraph.
The corset season has a very
This is 1903. The only product entering into
the manufacture of a corset that
whale bone. But even that is control for the
season as manufacturers have
advanced orders. protected themselves by placing
not come pretty soon, whale bone If a change for the better does
be used only in the finer grades will become very scarce and can
make it practically prohibitive in the modern grades where it is
now needed to some extent.
paragraph that I could then match up with what was going on
with the medical profession, but
I don't think has been mined the literature I was looking at
You can't really see it but it's very much at all.
notions. called notions, sewing goods and
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
lot of health related tidbits in you read this there's an awful
fashion industry and the it that have to do with the
So I think there could be some healthcare industry.
could come out of looking at the very interesting stories that
which you wouldn't think to look fashions and notions literature
And also just notice, again, the at immediately.
The other thing I haven't seen a corset up in the left-hand way.
at is artists' rendering of women during that period withg
and without corsets.
interesting and provocative information I found on that
as well.
this, it wasn't really the And the only thing that changed
really the doctors telling women whaling industry and it wasn't
corsets, it was a French that they should avoid the
should really be a little more designer who decided that women
with his corset, which let you Rubenesque, and when he came out
then no corset at all, women breathe a little bit more, and
from then on. chaSo it wasn't really aboutset
health, it was about fashion.
The next case is on...
a casehealth of sailors.neral
And I'm just going to read you
There were hundreds of thousands a brief thing.
who went to sea either on merchant ships, military ships,
war ships, ships bound for the
They were often "pressed" into colonies or slave ships.
Navy, ie. if they had not been service by the British Royal
have chosen a different kidnapped profession. they would
Those men had the same health issues as people on land:
skin ailments, tooth aches, headaches, broken bones,
injuries, burns, addictions,
What they didn't have while at venereal diseases and dysentery.
surgeon, usually there was just one, effective remedies for what
ailed them, until usually well
hospital in which to recuperate. after World War II, and a
where proper hygiene and They were often on filthy ships
public health concerns and some nof these voyages took years.
So the mind boggles at the
longevity would have engendered. health concerns that such
cots for the treatment of This isfractures at sea.e of the
Just imagine trying to
recall, unless you're at port, convalesce on a ship because
quiet. and even at port, you're never
So that was something they had It's always moving.
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
sick, they would just have delineated for the care of the
on the ship wherever it was people that whandy.ck everywhere
So here they're trying to keep
there. someone, forgive me, anchored
it wasn't only sailors, slaves Keep in mind that at that time
by sea during this era, but also and militia that were traveling
people who were looking for work families who were emigrating,
the remedies were what we think in of as herbal remedies fort of
everything from pneumonia to
eye problems, and this was syphilis, from broken bones to
until I did this even though something that I didn't discover
decade. This is an 1864 Mariner'sa
Medical Guide and tipped into it
hand-calligraphied calligraphic was thlist.o-sided
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
Therein lies what another historian might do an entire
thesis or piece on is try to
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.
Yes. >> Could you read it down.
Olive or sinnette oil Stoughton's elixir,.
I don't know what that is.
Tincture of Arnica, which is a Sassafras.
Hot drops. homeopathic remedy.
Some sort of injection. CoSilver.ps.
Oil of cloves.
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
So that's the mariner's guide. recognize some of them.
fish, or cod case, and as with This is the beginning of the cod
there was a book recently called the popular scurvy and salt,
the cod fishing industry. This one is a little different
from that.
Special Collections. Again, this is from Memorial
have these things for a while. Robin's very gracious to let me
quick thing. And I just want to read you a
fisherman brought a cod to the On Midsummer's Eve in 1626, a
When it was cut in preparation market in Cambridge.
tiny book printed in decimo sexto was discovered wrapped ina
canvas in the depth of the maw
The book was brought to the vice-chancellor, who took
special notice, and whereupon by
leaves of the book were Dcarefully washed and cleansed.
The book proved to contain three
the treatises were determined to treatises bound together, and
John Frith, an early protestant be three dmartyr.al works by
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
say, preservation of the works miraculous, they were careful to
became known. inAlluding to the religiousod
contestations of their own day, James Boler and Robert Milbourne
published Vox Piscis to deliver,
from the belly of the whale. as they explained, Jonas' words
as was Robin, and it looks So I'm very excited about this,
It's kind of small but look at stunning in the case.
Isn't he awesome. Substantial cod.
So this is just one physician who was in Newfoundland who
attended to all of the cod
The medical profession as well fishermen.
Cod liver oil was all the rage as the culinary world loved cod.
thought to prevent any number of in 19th and early 20th century,
Along the grand banks of illnesses.
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
to any number of illnesses and extremely deadly trade and prone
Wilfred Grenfell came to this remote inlet in the early 1900s
and built a hospital operation
fishing season. His presence and that of the
societe des oeuvre de mer, which
fishermen offshore in hospital initiated in France, helped
fishermen and families well into ships, and they all helped the
And the way I found this was the 20th century.
bottom part is some postage from that I found this, which the
an article in the Journal of the the oeuvre de mer, and there was
chiding American practitioners American Medical Association
fishermen the way the French for not taking care of cod
just anchored offshore in the were north banks up alongship
Newfoundland, and whenever any
had free healthcare there. cod fishermen needed it, they
that somebody has recently done Soa history of it, actually.nd
And the other thing, while I was
in all of this, was a couple looking for interesting tangents
cases which are any artifacts I ocan find and a little 3-D andhe
2-D and a lot of visual interest
cases, and in this case we have goa bottle of cod liver oilhe
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
thing, we could probably get a into eBay and that sort of
collect these bottles, pretty penny for because people
fisherman with a big cod on his eback, which some of you a
recognize.
which I'll get to with another And then also another thing,
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
advertising. with African American
my other cases as well, my other And I've done a lot on that on
I'm going to run through these a exhibits as well.
So the next case is on little bit.
know lots of things about Ellis imIsland and immigration.you
There are a number of books in
The one thing that I was not the case about immigration.
photographs like this, this is a really aware of was these
people coming into Ellis Island where they're all at the top of
the ship and usually the
immigrants were stowed on the deck of the ship with no room,
couldn't sleep, etc.
the reason they were all on the Oship was because they had justt
gotten into port and they wanted
Liberty. to all see the Statue of
decks where they had generally So they all came up from below
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
And I think, yeah, the quote up wthere 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
Museum of Jewish History, four it's something like the America
museum I've been in in a long storitime, and they have annary
extraordinary room where you can
immigrant that goes up to the line to have this medical work
done. And the artifacts they have
there and the oral histories
ceiling are incredibly moving that and very interesting.gh the
Mine are a little less high tech
I've got paper in the case. But it's indicative as well of
what they had to go through.
incidence was of people actually >> Do you know what the
these reasons? being refused entry for any of
but not overwhelming >> Percentage-wise I don't,
Yes. but significant.
I do not but the guy who Tina, would you?
to California coming into the wwest coast in epidemics, whose
name I'm also forgetting, there's probably some
information in there if you know
But it was their greatest whofear.an.
You get all that way, takes you three to six to eight weeks, you
finally made it all that way and
which I can't imagine the tpsychological part of that.me
But also, and this is one of the
are welcome to look at, that it smwasn't just immigrants inyou
massive ways in the late 19th and early 20th century but
emigrants who went to India,
volume, which I also didn't know Africa, etc, and this little
this, is medical hints for we have until I was looking for
the ship and then when you get taking care of yourself on board
going. to the country where you were
poor Darwin. Seasickness, Darwin,
water; 18 months of it he was He spent fsick.ears on the
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.
other and bolt off the minute Thaone has done eating, etc.ach
And he suffered terribly from sea sickness,
as did many, many people.
I think I'm going to just show
Few cures for seasickness worked you this one.
grandly as did the Bessemer salon, brain child of Henry
Bessemer of steel making fame.
Balance the salon on pivots so His idea?
vessel rolls around. that it stays level as the
the ship. But his sa[LAUGHTER] more than
After two channel crossings in 1873 the idea died.
[LAUGHTER]
But iThat's great.ssful?
And then another reason that we pick things for exhibits, and
Robin can speak to this as well,
visual elements. is just looking for attractive
It's incredible. Look at that font.
when you're looking at the It's another point of engagement
And this type and illustration piece.
travel that was going on in of indWorld War II.e vital
Even look at the airplane and the train.
They're just like bombing out.
germane to that time period. And this kind of graphic is very
interesting information as well. And it's full of some
Wisconsin connection. I know this is hard to read.
This is a gentleman...
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
They tried to train them not to had to dobe seasick.lization.
And then there's things about the horizon, there's things
about when you should eat, but
yet according to what I was nobody's looking at.red it out
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
This Illinois trained ophthalmologist developed a mask
to go snorkeling with.
your attention to is one of the Treasons he wanted to develop
this was because many valuables remain lost in our lakes,
especially the tourist lakes
[LAUGHTER] like those of Wisconsin.
of sending for a diver who, with an elaborate apparatus,
has air pumped to him to see and
he gets there, the valuables breathe by, and also by the time
So he was trying to sell this. are covered.
further research. I looked him up a little bit and
I wondered if it was patented,
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,
whether or not anything became and I haven't followed up
This is probably my most of the invention.
were, and that is this whole favorite piece in here, as it
of decompression tables and the tNavy and the fact that theynt
would try and save sailors who
And this is from World War I. hIt's a very poignant, very.
dramatic and tragic situation.
survive that were in the None of these sailors did
So this book is from the Navy, submarine.
these divers, and where the talittle red part is lists thef
divers by name, which very often
publications anymore. Case reports don't name people
anymore.
All the different amounts of They're all named in here.
bottom, etc. time they could stay at the
and this speaks to another While I was looking for 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
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
And I found this little article. them.
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
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
we used to do microfilm and talooking through old records,n
etc, etc. It's much easier to make these
sort of serendipitous connections when you have this
much extraordinary resource at
So that was one of my favorite your disposal.
Yes. pieces that I found.
the failure of these experiments >> Do you think it was due to
of the Thresher or the Scorpion, that later on, like in the case
to rescue? they didn't even make any effort
Those ships were so deep. >> Yeah, I think it has to do
with that.
They were much, this was Yeah.
I see. actually not that deep.
I'm talking about. >> So this is the serendipity
also about helping build the And then there's a piece in here
disease and the hyperbaric Brooklyn Bridge and caissons
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
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
divers and submarine crews safe.
My hero.
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
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.
basically, white middle-class And I thoupursuit.hat as a,
And when you start going through
you find out that there was a black scuba diving association.,
The other incredibly interesting
American surgeon, this is '64, piece of this was an African
valve machine so ostensibly could have gone great guns as a
medical professional, took a
he wanted to spend his life deep diving lesson and decided that
had one of the most successful sea diving and excavating and
companies in California in the deep sea diving excavating
So those are little pieces that you only get by sitting down
with old magazines, or digitized
connections between things. The other thing is, has anybody
been to the Planet Earth film series that Gregg Mitman does on
campus periodically?
sides when it came to Jaenvironmental sensibilitiesrk
early on. And I'll leave it at that.
I talk about it in the display
He used dynamite, for example, case.
mammals. where there were large sea
Can you believe it? JacquesRemember SEALAB?member?
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
sea than it was being on the much harsher it was being in the
And there's a lot of moon travel.
been done on all of them psychological studies that have
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
mapping that can be matched with have incredible neurological
they're studied now for a number human neurological mapping, and
they have all those eggs. So people who study fertilitye
are studying sea urchins. We have somebody on campus named
Pupa Gilbert, who is highlighted
is studying their teeth, and in the case, who a physicist who
are made of microcrystals and she'sshe's hoping that withteeth
nanotechnology and biomedical technology we could develop
surfaces that are as hard as the
to sharpen a knife again and urchin teeth so you'd never have
implications for biotech they might have some
kind of stuff. hip replacement, all of that
and new science that is talked So there's a lot of old science
Sea cucumbers is another one about in the cases.
could save the world but they thatneed to be saved first.sted
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
are depleted. I know I'm running out of time.s
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.
fascinating, you see the quote I found the horseshoe crab
Growing up in New England, there.
favorite creatures. hA smallish, prehistoric tanky
committed to minding its own
medical professionals have been minding its business since the
late 1950s when Frederick Bang
blood forms clots when bacteria discovereare present.shoe crab
In '64 he and Jack Levin
clotting agent was an discoveamoebocyte.e blood
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
endotoxins with the LAL test. I think a lot of you might have
seen this on the History
And LAL is the standard test for Channel.
contamination. bacterial endotoxin
ever had, including our Ainfluenza shots, have been run
through the LAL blood most
Anyone who's had surgery, taken an antibiotic, been screened for
hip replacement has had LAL used
the process. to screen for bacteria during
is no wonder that researchers are working on replenishing the
population of horseshoe crabs as well as finding an equally
accurate alternative for
And we found it here at UW screening of endotoxins.
His name is Nicholas Abbott. campus last year.
right-hand corner. He's up there in the tiny
was in the '20s there were And the reason I included these
"New York Times" again, about arthe fear of depletingty,
horseshoe crabs, because
fertilizer in tons. aTons and tons and tons wereor
harvested from the bay where
La Guardia, and this group was they were going to build
depleted. fAnd then the lower article isbe
from recently, like the last
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
contamination ability. it has this same endotoxin
It's the blue blood >that you saw.?
It's the blue blood that
They figure about 15% of the they harvest from the crabs.
die during the harvest. Most of the other ones are
actually put back, and there are
who are commissioned by this horseshoe crab harvesters
And they attempt pharmaceutical company.
And they were also used as, did I say fertilizer?
Yes.
And it's a bit of whimsy So there's Nick.
I mean, really, who would make that I discovered.
of a horseshoe crab? a kite in the shape
it was 1918. But somebody did in, I believe,
Google Books. This was not part of our
collection. The beauty of primary material,
and we'll end.
Hyderabad. This is a ship called the
given to us by stamp collectors, We have a collection that was
I don't know if you came to, Annette Yonke and Gerald Estes.
ago, an exhibit on the history we had a collection three years
papers from this ship that was a of stamps, and they gave us the
II, and it has all the letters medical ship during World War
If you wanted to look at those, you could come and look at
those.
one hour after eating. Never go swimming until at least
This is a big one. [LAUGHTER]
it actually might be true, even though it was disproven in 1967,
but for different reasons.
environmental sensibility. And then the patron saint of
health of oceans, I felt like we Even though this isn't about the
because the other exhibit is needed to do this too,
and she did The Edge of the Sea, Beyond the Edge of the Sea,
And we have all of her original "New Yorker" articles that were
published about Silent Spring.
you can ask me anything, how we Sdo this on a budget, you cant
come and look at things.
[APPLAUSE]