Read More

Color Our Collections: History takes a new shade

It's time to get coloring! In 2014, the New York Academy of Medicine offered a coloring book featuring brilliant historical images--and invited the community to get involved! Now, in 2016, the Dittrick joins NYAM, Biological Heritage Library, and others in a week-long special collections coloring fest: #ColorOurCollections! We post a PDF "coloring book" and invite you, our readers and visitors, to color your own and then share on social media! WHEN: Feb 1-Feb 5 WHAT: Post your hand-colorations to social media using the #ColorOurCollections hashtag and @DittrickMuseum Special collections provide excellent possibilities. Why? Because many early illustrated books were intended to be colored...

Read more

Read More

Condoms, Pills and More: The Contraceptive Historian’s Playground

Guest Post by Jessica Borge If you worked in the North American birth control industry in the latter half of the twentieth century, you would have likely encountered Percy Skuy’s museum of contraceptive curiosities. Percy was a marketing man for the Canadian arm of Ortho Pharmaceutical, a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson dealing in contraceptives and gynaecological care. Percy would go on to become president of the company. He began amassing contraceptive devices in 1965, and the collection soon attracted interest from far and wide. It was the time that family planning was gradually becoming an acceptable topic for open...

Read more

Read More

Recent Acquisition! Tea-cups, Princess Charlotte, and the History of Birth

Recent acquisition! This cup and saucer set c. 1818 commemorates the death of Princess Charlotte after giving birth. The heir to the throne of England labored for 50 hours without intervention before delivering a large, stillborn son in 1817. Charlotte's physicians came from the non-interventionist school of #obstetrics, meaning they used no forceps to assist or hasten the child's stalled birth. Further, no destructive instruments (those that would have sacrificed the child to spare Charlotte) would have been used because of infant's royal status. In fact, physicians attempted to resuscitate the stillborn baby, thinking he was in a state...

Read more

Polio Prepared: Treatment before Vaccines

"No single event impressed me more than what happened on April 12, 1955, the day the results of the evaluation of the 1954 poliomyelitis vaccine field trials were announced. As I was making my rounds that afternoon, I was taken aback to find a banner stuck on the doors of the respirator wards that read: 'POLIO VACCINE WORKS.' The patients had asked the volunteers, who published an in house newsletter entitled 'The Toomeyville Gazette,' to spread the good news." Robert M. Eiben, MD; 1955; Toomey Pavilion, Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio Polio. Once one of the most feared of diseases, today...

Read more

«‹7891011›»