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Exhibitions > Health in History
Health in History
Drawing on material from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries from across the collections at Senate House Library, this exhibition takes a sweeping look at health in history. Here you will find a medieval cure for a bad stomach, sixteenth-century germ theory, examples of alchemical and home remedies, medical statistics, and items relating to military and mental health, and to the creation of public parks for healthy recreation.
This display was produced to support the Anglo-American Conference 2011: Health in History at the Institute of Historical Research, 29 June – 1 July 2011. The material matches some of the themes and subjects covered by the conference. Please click on the images to enlarge them.
Book of Hours
(Paris? Early 15th century)
MS 906
In addition to the usual Latin prayers, psalms and litany found in Books of Hours, this fragmentary example, written and illuminated in northern France in the early fifteenth century, contains some interesting medical recipes added in by a later English owner. As well as ‘A soverayne medsyn for ye sietica’ and a recipe ‘To make aqua vite’, the medically-minded owner added this recipe ‘For hym that hath no stomake’. It reads:
Take an hanfull of horhownd and an hanfull of rossmay and an hanfull of sage and an handfull of rew & take the crome of rye bred and temper hyt with wyte veneger and boyll yt well and make a playster and ley hyt to yow stomake iiii days & iiii nygthys and yow shall be holl.
Hieronymi Fracastorii Veronensis Opera Omnia
Girolamo Fracastoro
Venice: Heredi di Lucantonio Giunta, 1584
No [Fracastoro] SR
Fracastoro (1478-1553) was a Veronese physician, astronomer and poet, and a colleague of Copernicus at the University of Padua. This volume contains his collected works, listed here on the left hand page. The most significant is De contagionibus (‘On contagion, contagious diseases and their cure’), in which Fracastoro proposes that contagious diseases are caused by different types of rapidly multiplying minute bodies, transferred from infector to infected by direct contact, by carriers such as clothing and linen, and through the air. This scientific germ theory of disease predates Louis Pasteur by more than 300 years. The other work of note here listed is Syphilis sive Morbus Gallicus (‘Syphilis or the French disease’), a verse account of the disease Fracastoro named.
A Choice Collection of Rare Secrets and Experiments in Philosophy: as also Rare and Unheard-of Medicines
Sir Kenelm Digby, edited by George Hartmann
London: for the author, 1682
*P [Digby]
This work by the natural philosopher and courtier Sir Kenelm Digby (1603-1665) is a nice example of what might be called alchemical medicine. Towards the end of his life Digby lived in a house in Covent Garden equipped with a laboratory. This volume, edited by George Hartmann from Digby’s records of experiments, contains two parts, the first devoted to alchemical recipes and processes, and the second comprising medical and cosmetic recipes. The left hand page shown here gives directions for producing Elixir Rubrum, ending with the confident statement that ‘The said red powder being infused in wine over night, and drank in the morning, cureth most diseases in mans body’.
The Diseases and Casualties this Week
[London, 1686]
[G.L.] 1686
This bill of mortality details the number of casualties recorded in London parishes between 22 and 29 June 1686. The biggest killers were convulsion (tetanus), fever, consumption (tuberculosis), griping in the guts (diarrhoea and dysentery), smallpox (highly contagious among the closely packed population), and teeth (which probably refers to teething infants). In an age when even the medical profession had trouble defining a disease, such bills are of course only a rough guide to public health at the time. Venereal disease was considered a social disgrace and it is possible that more died of French-Pox than the one recorded on the bill. Notice that the number of burials exceeds the number of christenings (in this case by over 2 to 1). This was typically the case in seventeenth-century London, even when the plague was absent.
Every Man his Own Physician: being a Complete Collection of Efficacious and Approved Remedies, for Every Disease Incident to the Human Body
John Theobald
3rd edn
London: W. Griffin, 1764
[G.L.] 1764
This volume is a nice example of home medicine from the eighteenth century, compiled by Dr John Theobald at the instigation of the Duke of Cumberland. The author prefaces his work by remarking that ‘although publishers of receipts have been always very numerous, yet it has so happened that the least able have hitherto undertaken this task’. Theobald’s collection was intended ‘chiefly for the use of persons residing in the country’ without easy access to a physician or apothecary.
Ten Minutes' Advice to Labourers
4th edn
London: Hatchard and Son, 1838
[G.L.] B.838
This anonymous work provides medical and other advice for the poor ‘at a price well adapted to their means’ (6d) and in ‘language plain and intelligible’. The writer gives practical tips on treating such common ailments as colds, rheumatism, ear and tooth ache, and corns, recommending leeches for blood letting. The pages displayed here give some examples of ‘cookery for the sick’ and a list of recommended drugs, with the very modern-sounding footnote ‘All medicines should be kept out of the reach of children’. The writer also discusses religion and temperance.
A Narrative of the Proceedings at the Laying of the First Stone of the New Buildings at Bethlem Hospital
Peter Laurie
London: for the Governors of Bridewell and Bethlem Hospitals, 1838
[G.L.] B.838
Bethlem was the first asylum for the insane in England and one of the first in Europe. Founded in 1247 as a priory for the Order of the Star of Bethlehem, it was given to the City of London in 1547 by Henry VIII as a hospital for the insane. Bedlam, as it was also known, came to be used colloquially for an uproar and the hospital became infamous for the brutal ill-treatment meted out to its patients. In 1815 it moved to St George’s Fields in south west London. This work includes a plan of the extension to the hospital built from 1838. The author, Peter Laurie, was president of the hospital and encouraged the adoption of humane methods of treatment such as those he had witnessed at the Quaker Retreat near York.
England and France before Sebastopol, Looked at from a Medical Point of View
Charles Bryce
London: J. Churchill, 1857
[MS Anderson] 1857 – Bryce
Dr Bryce’s analysis of the sanitary state of the English and French camps in the Crimea and of the allies’ hospitals on the Bosphorus is partly a defence of the British Army Medical Service, which was frequently compared unfavourably with its French counterpart. Bryce toured the allies’ hospitals in 1855 and 1856, working as a surgeon with the French. Here Bryce gives returns for Scutari hospitals, which Florence Nightingale worked so hard to improve. They hint at the scale of loss experienced by the British due to disease and inadequate medical care: out of 94,000 men sent to war, while 4000 died of wounds, 19,000 died of disease and 13,000 were invalided.
Opening of Peckham-Rye Park by Mr. John Hutton, Chairman of the Council, on Whit-Monday, May 14, 1894
London: London County Council, 1894
Burns 685
During the reign of Queen Victoria a multitude of parks and gardens were opened to the public, and the link between parks and health was explicitly made. Peckham-Rye Park, shown here, is described in this pamphlet as affording ‘healthy recreation to thousands upon thousands whose life is principally spent amidst city smoke or overbuilt suburbs’. Another item within this volume speaks of Whitefield Gardens, opened in February 1895, as an ‘addition to the lungs of London’.
