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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...

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Event and Gallery Opening! From Ether to Epidural by Jacqueline Wolf

Anesthesia: it calls to mind surgeries, treatment of shock--the rendering of a patient unconscious and free (temporarily) from pain.  But anesthesia has played an enormous role in the shifting ideas surrounding labor and birth in America generally--and right here in Cleveland. It's more than a knock-out; it's an ever-changing history! On Thursday, November 19th at 6:00pm, Dittrick will share this fascinating story through a gallery opening (Childbirth in America, 1840-1940) and a talk by celebrated author and historian Jacqueline Wolf. Reproduction, birth, and women's health in the 19th century shaped the way we practice obstetrics today. One of the biggest...

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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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Living (and Breathing) Museum Research

When the museum receives donations from the community, sometimes little surprises find their way into unexpected collections. Frequently, we classify artifacts based on the donor's description and our expectations. Until we dig into their stories for an exhibit, these unexplored artifacts sit on shelves among surgical sets, microscopes, and pharmaceuticals, waiting to be discovered. One such specimen found its way into our work space as we pulled items for a recent installation on Obstetrical Anesthesia from 1850 to 1890. We were familiar with the Bennett Inhaler (Fig. 1), a handheld device intended to be filled with chloroform for laboring women to self-administer...

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