Ophthalmological observations made during the mid-19th-century European encounter with Africa

European travelers in Africa in the mid-19th century encountered environments quite unlike those of their native lands. These provided many new and unanticipated health challenges. The ophthalmological consequences of exposure to such climates, as recorded incidentally in travelogues, are of potential interest. In this article, the almost contemporaneous narratives of 3 travelers with considerable medical training, David Livingstone and his sometime companion John Kirk, who journeyed in southern Africa, and Gustav Nachtigal, who traveled in northern Africa, are examined for information on ophthalmological problems, both observed and personally experienced. This affords an opportunity to compare observations made in Saharan and sub-Saharan Africa.

Thomas Hodgkin's journey through Spain in 1863 and 1864

In 1863 and 1864, Thomas Hodgkin travelled to Morocco, accompanying his close friend Sir Moses Montefiore, who stopped in Madrid on the way there and back to attend an audience with the Queen of Spain. Thomas Hodgkin's impressions of Spain were recounted in his book Narrative of a Journey to Morocco. The book reveals new aspects of Hodgkin's personality as well as his capacity for observation. It also describes Spain in the second half of the nineteenth century. Thus Thomas Hodgkin was a witness to one of the most vivid periods of the history of the country. The paper considers both aspects of Hodgkin's commentaries on Spain.

Greek medicine and Babylonian wisdom: circulation of knowledge and channels of transmission in the archaic and classical periods

This paper considers questions of transmission and circulation of knowledge between Greeks and Babylonians, and in particular within the medical sphere. It compares evidence for the extensive exchange of goods and ideas with the Near East in the archaic period and considers the channels and means of transmission involved. It suggests, however, that the evidence of Hippocratic medicine and of Herodotus implies that interaction in the medical sphere followed the main areas of contact through trade and colonisation, and above all Egypt, rather than Mesopotamia. Contact with Babylonian wisdom was to reappear only in the late classical and Hellenistic period.

Gender and the economy of health on the Santa Fe Trail

Correspondence surrounding the death from consumption of a New England woman on the Santa Fe Trail in 1857 demonstrates how gender roles and economic network influenced health travel and the search for healthy places in the nineteenth century United States. Women did travel seeking healing or relief from sickness - sometimes, as here, in arduous, overland trips - but in ways subtly different from male health seekers: family attachments, as well as their own health concerns, impelled and justified women in their decisions to take journeys. Yet for women as for men, decisions about health travel were also bound up with the economic considerations that shaped their families' lives.

[On the position of the travel reports Ocean und Mittelmeer (1848) in the work of the zoologist, geologist, educator and politician Carl Vogt (1817-1895)]

The German-Swiss natural scientist, politician and emigrant Carl Vogt was a pioneer of science education of the public in the nineteenth century. Among his most important popular writings are his travel reports, Ocean und Mittelmeer (1848), in which he dealt with his research into marine biology in France and Italy (1844-1846) as well as with art, culture and science in these two countries. His travel reports illustrate the considerable interest in biological education in the contemporary literary public and the growing educational value of the natural sciences, which became a firm element of Wilhelmine culture. Vogt studied the "physiology of the lower animals" and searched--similar to the functionalist view of organisms in Georges Cuvier and his sponsor Henri Milne-Edwards--for a causal link between the morphological structure and the physiological functions, the "vital mechanics" ("Lebensmechanik"), of animals. Vogt's travel reports were influential for the contemporary popular "seaside studies".

[Thomas Lindley: a traveler tells of disease and how it was handled in the early nineteenth century]

Thomas Lindley, an English businessman , was arrested for smuggling in Bahia at the beginning of the nineteenth century. He was mistaken gor a doctor and ended up serving as one while there. Upon returning to England, he published his diary. This study takes a close look at this references to how settlers back then and there experienced disease and medical treatment.

M. du Bois-Reymond goes to Paris

This article examines the science of electrophysiology developed by Emil du Bois-Reymond in Berlin in the 1840s. In it I recount his major findings, the most significant being his proof of the electrical nature of nerve signals. Du Bois-Reymond also went on to detect this same 'negative variation', or action current, in live human subjects. In 1850 he travelled to Paris to defend this startling claim. The essay concludes with a discussion of why his demonstration failed to convince his hosts at the French Academy of Sciences.

On the tracks of trauma: railway spine reconsidered

The nineteenth-century medical condition known as "railway spine" has recently received considerable attention from medical historians, particularly historians of psychiatry and related fields. An historical interpretation has developed which traces the origins of "modern" psychodynamic medicine to the responses of nineteenth-century medical practitioners to railway spine. This interpretation characterizes the debates over railway spine as being between adherents of "soma" (i.e. constrained by "traditional" Victorian medical thought) and "psyche" (i.e. looking forward to "modern" psychological approaches). This article argues that this conflict is too sharply drawn and produces a teleologically-driven and misleading impression of the real significance of railway spine. This condition was seen from first to last as an organic disorder, and medical/medico-legal debates over its nature were concerned with the character of the organic processes at work, not with seeking to overturn organic explanations altogether. This has important consequences for historical understanding of the place of railway spine in the emergence of twentieth-century conceptions of traumatic disorder.

[A Danish nurse serving in Rome and Paris during the post-war years after World War I]

In letters to her aunt a Danish nurse, sister in law to the Danish medical historian professor dr.med Evd. Gotfredsen, describes her life, professionally and as a tourist, in Rome and Paris. In 1920 she lived in Rome at the Dinesen Pension, established around the change of the century by a Danish lady. The pension developed into the favorite resort for many Scandinavian Visitors to Rome, some of them famous. During her stay in Paris 1920-26 she had close relations to the nursing bureau established under the auspices of the Danish Council of Nurses (D.S.R). For one and a half years she was the private nurse of the famous ethnologist Roland Bonaparte, grandson of Napoleon's brother Lucien, during his terminal bladder cancer.

Harvey Cushing's Canadian connections

During his surgical career between 1896 and 1934, Harvey Cushing made eight visits to Canada. He had a broad impact on Canadian medicine and neurosurgery. Cushing's students Wilder Penfield and Kenneth McKenzie became outstanding leaders of the two major centers in Canada for neurosurgical treatment and training. On his first trip to Canada, shortly after completing his surgical internship in August 1896, Cushing traveled with members of his family through the Maritime Provinces and visited hospitals in Quebec and Montreal. Eight years later, in February 1904, as a successful young neurosurgeon at the Johns Hopkins Hospital, he reported to the Montreal Medico-Chirurgical Society on his surgical experience in 20 cases of removal of the trigeminal ganglion for neuralgia. In 1922, as the Charles Mickle Lecturer at the University of Toronto, Cushing assigned his honorarium of $1000 to support a neurosurgical fellowship at Harvard. This was awarded to McKenzie, then a general practitioner, for a year's training with Cushing in 1922-1923. McKenzie returned to initiate the neurosurgical services at the Toronto General Hospital, where he developed into a master surgeon and teacher. On Cushing's second visit to McGill University in October 1922, he and Sir Charles Sherrington inaugurated the new Biology Building of McGill's Medical School, marking the first stage of a Rockefeller-McGill program of modernization. In May 1929, Cushing attended the dedication of the Osler Library at McGill. In September 1934, responding to the invitation of Penfield, Cushing presented a Foundation Lecture-one of his finest addresses on the philosophy of neurosurgery-at the opening of the Montreal Neurological Institute. On that same trip, Cushing's revisit to McGill's Osler Library convinced him to turn over his own treasure of historical books to Yale University.

[Pictures and documents from the journey of the count palatine Ottheinrich to Cracow and Berlin in 1536/37]

Just in time for teh 500th anniversary of the count palatine and later elector Ottheinrich (1502-1558) in April 2002, it became known that to this Renaissance rule we owe the earliest pictures of towns and residences from Upper Bavaria, Franconia and the Upper Palatine, from Bohemia, Silesia, Poland, Brandenburg and Saxonia. These pictures are the first series of town views after the wood engravings of the Schedel World Chronicle of 1493. Fifty plates in the size of about 30 x 40-86 cm show seventy town views, of which before only the cities of Breslau, Neisse, Prag and Eichstätt were reproduced in the work of 1493. For centuries the genesis of these pen-and-ink-drawings, coloured with watercolour and opaque water colour and ornamented with heightened gold, lay in obscurity. We only knew that they came from the monastery of Ebrach to the university library of Wurzburg in the course of teh secularisation in the year 1803. Lately these pictures, that show no signatures, but only the names of towns in the banderoles, could be identified as picture documents of a rather unknown journey of the Count Palatine Ottheinrich to Cracow and Berlin. The reason for Ottheinrich's journey was to discharge the unpaid promissory note of the marriage portion of his grandmother, the Polish Princess Hedwig who had married George the Rich of Bavaria-Landshut in 1475. The examination of hte pictures and their genesis, made by Angelika Marsch together with ten German, Polish and Czech scientists, also led to the finding of hitherto unknown documents proving that Ottheinrich's ride to his great-uncle King Sigismund the Elder had been successful. These documents also show by whom Ottheinrich was accompanied and why he didn't choose the direct way back from Cracow to Neuburg, but via Berlin. These journey pictures of Ottheinrich date fom the early times of the depiction of real towns. At the same time the first handed down picture documentation of a principal journey is of great interest for different fields of cultural history. The pictures are of special interest for the depicted towns, since they show views of buildings elsewhere not handed down, e.g. the living tower of the "Piasten" in Oberglogau or the cathedral of suburbia of Liegnitz which was laid down four later because of the refortification of the town. The artist of the pictures could not be clearly traced down, but probably belonged to the circle around Albrecht Dürer. It is assumed that it was Mathias Gerung, who also illustrated the Bible for Ottheinrich and made sketches for tapestry carpets. The artist accompanying Ottheinrich can only have made sketches during the journey, which he converted later to our plates in the size of up to 76 cm in width.

[Aldo Castellani (1874-1971). A century-long scientific travel]

Aldo Castellani is an international scientist, well known for his essential contribution to the aetiological researches on sleeping-sickness. During his career, that took him to many parts of the world, he studied a number of tropical diseases and he obtained important results, like the discovery of new therapies and some fundamental laboratory techniques. His academic career lasted about seventy years, during which he increased thanks to his works the scientific knowledge of Italian and foreign universities. Basic in his life is the period in which he headed the Institute of Tropical Medicine at the University of Rome, making important choices for Italian public health: for instance, during the Italian-Ethiopian War he proved to be an "additional weapon" for the Italian Army. He spent the last part of his life travelling, but he remained personal physician to the former Italian king Umberto II, exiled in Cascais and professor in the Tropical Medicine Institute of Lisboa. The aim of the authors, in homage to Aldo Castellani's memory, is to emend, as far as possible, the occasional errors in the papers dedicated to him.

Howard A. Kelly's development as an academician: some insights from his letters to Robert P. Harris

Howard Atwood Kelly (1858-1943), Professor and Gynecologist in Chief at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, is widely known as an innovator in operative gynecology, urology, and abdominal surgery. He was also a first-rate naturalist and bibliographer. Less is known, however, about his formative years as a young surgeon in Philadelphia. During a four-month period, from May to September 1886, while on a trip to Europe, Kelly wrote his senior colleague and friend Robert Patterson Harris (1822-1899) almost three dozen letters. These letters trace the development of Kelly's ideas as he visited a number of medical luminaries in the major medical centers of Germany, England, Scotland, and France. Overall, the letters give considerable insight into the development of Kelly as a young physician (age 28), inspired by what he saw in the German Frauenkliniks to build a program of excellence in the treatment of diseases of women in America. In addition, the letters help to illustrate the role Harris played in the development of this icon of contemporary medicine, who, with others, worked to place the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine at the forefront of medical education and research in this country and the world.

[Hygiene and medicine of saharian nomadic tribes: Tuareg and Tubu compared]

Environment, climate and habits of many saharan nomadic and partially nomadic tribes are similar: and diseases they suffer from are consequently similar. An outline is presented of two of these tribes, Tuaregs and Tubu, the most interesting because of their historical and anthropological features. The first are mainly settled in the mountain ranges of central Sahara (Tassili, Hoggar, Iforas and Air) and in the huge plain at the north of the Niger river. The Tubu people are originally from the Tibesti mountains, but are now spread farther afield and tend to be found in small number in other areas of Tchad and in oases of eastern Niger desert. The medical system that these tribes developed before the colonial presence is a mixture of logic and effective practical conduct with superstitious and ineffective spells. The use of natural drugs and the treatment of traumatic events are similar, but the hygienic customers are totally different.