Houghton Library Blog

Acupuncture Anesthesia

17 March 2016 adharris Uncategorized

This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items recently cataloged from the Julio Mario Santo Domingo Collection.

In the 1950s Chinese physicians in the People’s Republic of China began to wonder if acupuncture, which was typically used to treat pain, could actually be used to prevent pain during surgical procedures, which led to what we refer to here as acupuncture anesthesia. The volume Acupuncture Anesthesia was published by a division of Pfizer Pharamaceuticals during a closed-circuit symposium in 1974.

Most of the illustrations that are pictured in this volume come from the film “Acupuncture Anaesthesia” produced by the Shanghai Film Studio, which was telecast during the symposium. The stills shown to the left are from a craniotomy using acupuncture anesthesia. First they prepare the patient, then the neurosurgeon drills a burr hole before removing the bone flap, and the final image is after the surgery where they are testing cranial nerve function. Acupuncture needles are made of stainless steel and vary in both length and thickness. According to this volume one metal has never been proved superior to another so stainless steel is typically used because of the low cost. Besides a straight needle other types are often used by acupuncturists as well. In the image below are a few other examples, the triangular shaped points are used for releasing blood and the round needles for massage. One that I had never seen before is the mallet which has seven small needles clustered in the head and is typically used for children in a rapid, tapping movement.

To learn more about our views of acupuncture in the 1970s you can find Acupuncture anesthesia. New York : Pfizer, 1974. RD85.A25 A18 1974 in Countway’s collection.

Thanks to Alison Harris, Santo Domingo Project Manager, and Joan Thomas, Rare Book Cataloger at Countway for contributing this post.

Tags: Acupuncture, Julio Mario Santo Domingo Collection

Happy Saint Patrick’s Day

16 March 2016 4 responses Dana Gee Uncategorized

Houghton’s Historical Sheet Music Collections have a wealth of music about Ireland; many songs are American, whether adaptations of traditional Irish tunes, or songs from Tin Pan Alley, Broadway musicals or vaudeville. Here are some examples in honor of Saint Patrick’s Day.

SHEET MUSIC 337
Paddy’s Day
words by Frank Fogerty, music by James B. Mullen
1905

[chorus]
The minstrell boy to the war has gone, and bold Jack Donoghue
Gramachree, and the Cruiskeen Lawn, and bold Phelan Brady too
And if ever I return again, a welcome home to Bantry Bay,
The harp that once thro’ Tara’s Halls are the tunes we love to hear on Paddy’s Day.

Here is the tune. The lyrics here reference other Irish tunes: Thomas Moore’s The Minstrel Boy, Jack Donoghue, Gramachree, The Cruiskeen Lawn, The Bard of Armagh, Moore’s The Harp That Once Through Tara’s Halls.

(more…)

Tags: Irish songs, Saint Paddy's Day, Saint Patrick's Day, sheet music

Carlyle’s bequest

15 March 2016 houghtonmodern Uncategorized

Upon the death of the Scottish philosopher, novelist, historian, and mathematician Thomas Carlyle in 1881, a portion of his personal library was left to Harvard – the only public bequeathal in Carlyle’s will. The annual report of the President and Treasurer of Harvard College for that year quotes the relevant passage, which reads in part:

…I do therefore hereby bequeath the books (whatever of them I could not borrow, but had to buy and gather; that is, in general whatever of them are still here) which I used in writing on Cromwell and Friedrich, and which shall be accurately searched for and parted from my other books, to the President and Fellows of Harvard College, City of Cambridge, State of Massachusetts, as a poor testimony of my respect for that alma mater of so many of my Trans-Atlantic friends, and a token of the feelings above indicated towards the Great Country of which Harvard is the Chief School.

As the will explains, Harvard was in receipt of only the books Carlyle acquired for research for his Oliver Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches, and his History of Friedrich II of Prussia. Carlyle popularized the “Great Man theory”, a 19^th-century belief that the lives and actions of the eponymous great men are the principal shapers of history; and it was under that belief that he wrote on the lives of Cromwell and Frederick the Great. Carlyle’s books would later be transferred to Houghton Library, where they reside today. Work was recently undertaken to enhance the cataloging of these volumes and to better describe their provenance, prompting a new look at a long-standing collection.

“A certain symbolical value the bequest may have, but of intrinsic value as a collection of old books it can pretend to very little,” Carlyle claimed in his will. To a modern reader, however, the research value of the books has little to do with their rarity, and everything to do with Carlyle’s extensive annotations, which give us a portrait of a rigorous, cantankerous, and highly opinionated reader in active conversation with his texts. The example pictured here, from a 1758 biography of Frederick II’s grandfather, Frederick I, reads as follows:

There is nothing absolutely in this Book but blundering stupidities and misinformations; except what is copied (stolen) from poor Dilworth, I can recollect nothing deserving another character. T.C. (1858)

Such vehement disagreements pepper the margins of many of these volumes. At other times these annotations, too voluminous for endpapers and margins, are pasted in on sheets and scraps of paper, or tucked into envelopes. Part of the enhancement work done on these catalog records was to identify volumes with these annotations and inserted manuscript notes, and to provide reference images, particularly of the manuscript material, as part of the Scanning Key Content project. An example of the results may be seen here: http://id.lib.harvard.edu/aleph/006108565/catalog

Carlyle collection: Carl 3 – Carl 288

Thanks to rare book cataloger Ryan Wheeler for contributing this post.

Tags: Libraries

Three Hamlets film series

Dale Stinchcomb Events and Exhibitions

The Harvard Film Archive and Houghton Library are partnering to screen three critically acclaimed adaptations of Shakespeare’s most enduring play, beginning with Laurence Olivier’s 1948 classic on Monday, March 21 at 7pm.

Laurence Olivier on the set of Hamlet (1948). TCS 30

Join curators Dale Stinchcomb and Peter Accardo for a free pre-show tour of the exhibition, Shakespeare: His Collected Works at 6pm in Houghton Library’s Edison & Newman Room. On display will be Roger Furse’s Academy Award-winning set designs for the film.

Set design by Roger Furse for Scene I in charcoal and pastel, 1948. MS Thr 200

Publicity still, 1948. TCS 30

For more information about the series, visit the Harvard Film Archive. Tickets are available 45 minutes before show time at the cinematheque on the lower level of the Carpenter Center. Screenings are free for all Harvard students with ID.

Tags: Harvard Film Archive, Laurence Olivier, Roger Furse, Shakespeare on film, Shakespeare: His Collected Works

How Old Will You Be in 1984?

10 March 2016 irinarogova Uncategorized

This post is part of an ongoing series featuring items recently cataloged from the Julio Mario Santo Domingo Collection.

At the height of the Vietnam War, a time often remembered for the vigorous anti-war protests from young adults, particularly college students, Diane Divoky edited an anthology collection of pieces from underground high school newspapers from across the United States. From a time that holds the Kent State shootings as the result of young people striving to have their voices heard, to find a just society and avoid being forced into war, How Old Will You Be in 1984? pulls out the voices of those young people, collecting them into a barrage of protest.

Underground newspapers were neither new nor rare in 1969, as the counterculture movement depended upon the circulation of radical ideas to remain buoyant. Most often, high school teenagers were not the source of these papers. Yet in this text, Divoky unearthed a collection of newspapers functioning outside of the structure of the education system. Within them, high school students were able to analyze and antagonize the systems they found oppressive—whether it be their parents, teachers, school administrators, the police, or the federal government. They questioned the very systems intended to keep them safe, the war being fought for their future, and whether the hysteria around drug use and hippies was really worthwhile.

Divoky notes in her introduction that the student voices found in these papers varied greatly from the ones found in school administered newspapers and assignments. Here, teenagers were able to speak freely and with the overwhelming emotion that comes with adolescence: “Gut reactions, awareness, vibrations are the surest signs of reality in a world where rhetoric is phony, and ‘reason’ and ‘common sense’ become the weapons of the defenders of the status quo.”

Whether they discussed hair length and dress codes, or the desegregation of their schools and the prospects of being drafted, student voices in How Old Will You Be in 1984? speak to a very particular moment in time.

To learn more, How Old Will You Be in 1984?: Expressions of Student Outrage From the High School Free Press can be found in Widener’s collection: New York: Discus Books, 1969.

Thanks to Irina Rogova, Santo Domingo Library Assistant, for contributing this post.

Tags: Discus Books, Julio Mario Santo Domingo Collection, underground press