Wisconsin Public Television University Place Wednesday Nite at the Lab  Micaela Sullivan-Fowler The Making of Seaworthy  January 11, 2012 UP 670  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. 

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