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Touch and Go: Cars, Health and Cleveland's First Traffic Signals

Today's Google doodle reminds us of the innovation and order brought by Garrett Morgan's creation of the traffic signal. Cleveland became the first city to install these devices on August 5th, 1914 at the bustling Euclid Avenue and E. 105th St. intersection -- on the current campus of Cleveland Clinic, just down the street from CWRU and our museum . The traffic signal became a necessary fixture in light of alarming statistics about the dangers of automobiles and their fatal accidents in the early 20th century. From when the U.S. Census Bureau began collecting information in 1906 to 1914, the number...

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Embracing Digital History: How Medicine Became Modern

Brandy L. Schillace What was it like to be sick 50 years ago? 150 years ago? What medical innovations most changed American lives? How did Cleveland rise to importance as a medical city? In other words: How did we get here? The Dittrick Medical History Center and Museum, in collaboration with design partners and funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, presents: How Medicine Became Modern, an innovative new way to explore the artifacts, people, and stories behind the great innovations of our age! Museums nationally and internationally are reaching new audiences—while retaining and engaging present ones—through the medium of digital technology. The Philadelphia Museum...

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By the Light of the Fever-, Gout- and Plague-Inducing Moon: Lunar Medicine

Today, July 20th, is Moon Day! To commemorate the day humans first walked on the moon in 1969, the Dittrick Museum looks at how centuries of scholars considered the movements of the moon and planets as having a great impact on health. Athanasius Kircher, a 17th-century polymath priest, created an astrological chart know as a "Sciathericon" in his treatise on optics and light called Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae (1671). This chart (Fig. 2) connected the zodiac with parts of human anatomy, types of health conditions, and the medications that could be used to treat these bodily complaints. For example, the...

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Are We Running Out of Bodies? Dissection and Medicine

I've spent a surprising number of hours unearthing the unusual history of anatomy, dissection, and yes--body snatching. That story links early anatomists like Vesalius (Fabric of the Human Body) to murderers Burke and Hare, to the grave-robbery that supplied bodies to a growing medical community. Here at the Dittrick Museum, we have a comprehensive collection of dissection photography as a rite of passage in American medicine 1880-1930, and curator James Edmonson and John Harley Warner put together an entire pictorial book of them. Between my work on the history of medicine and my research for Death's Summer Coat (US...

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