KRISTINA R. GADDY
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Come in, the stacks are open.

Pestdoktor

3/25/2020

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Print of the linocut pest doctor.
     In an attempt to distract myself from devastating news about the federal mismanagement of the current covid-19 pandemic, I decided to make a linocut of a plague doctor. As if emerging from a nightmare as a cross between a crow and the grim reaper, the doctors wore long cloaks, a hood with a long beak, and eye protection. I searched for images to use for inspiration and a simple engraving print caught my eye. As I went to research more about the image, I realized it wasn’t just any plague doctor outfit, this was supposed to be an image of a real doctor, Ijsbrand van Diemerbroeck, who not only treated plague patients, but wrote a book of case studies in hopes of educating other doctors about symptoms and treatments. 
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Portrait of Van Diemerbroeck from Museum Het Valkhof in Nijmegen, the Netherlands.
     Just as we saw the novel coronavirus expanding from Asia, across Europe, and finally to North America, Europeans in 1347 began hearing about an incurable disease spreading across the continent. When it finally arrived in 1348, it killed thousands of people and became known as the Great Pestilence. For three hundred years, plagues and pestilences came and went in Europe every twenty to thirty years, devastating the population each time. No one understood germ theory, no one knew what caused the disease, and no one knew how to treat it. Their only real hope was containing the disease, which included quarantine and isolation for patients and having dedicated plague doctors. 

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God-fearing and Faithful Women

4/27/2017

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Midwife Problems, and Solutions, Part 3

This is part three of a series on midwifery in Sweden and the United States. To read part one, click here, to read part two, click here. 
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Johan Van Hoorn, 1662
​     1697 was a difficult year in Sweden. King Charles XI had died in April. Although he had expanded the Swedish empire, the last two years of his reign were characterized by a devastating famine that spread across the empire. King Charles XII ascended to the throne at only 15 years old. The aristocrats, who made up only a small portion of the population but had a majority of the wealth, now wondered whether the King, just a boy still, would continue consolidating power to the crown or whether they would get some power too. 
      And during all this uncertainty, Johan van Hoorn was hoping someone would listen to him and his talk of jordegumman. Van Hoorn had studied medicine in the Netherlands and Paris, and had returned to Sweden to practice medicine and ended up spreading his gospel of training the midwife.
      In Old English, midwife means with-woman, in Swedish jordemor (the jord comes from the Old Norse word for child or offspring) and barnmorska both mean child-mother. In Sweden at the end of the 1600s, most were untrained women known as jordegummor. Van Hoorn wanted to elevate their status, he wanted to make them barnmorskor. First, he put out the textbook called Then Swenske wäl-öfwade Jord-Gumman in 1697.  In 1715, he published The Twenne Gudfruchtige I sitt kall trogne Och therföre af Gudi väl belönte Jordegummor Siphra och Pua, a textbook of questions and answers for midwives. 

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Across the Atlantic

4/2/2017

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Midwife Problems, and Solutions, Part 2

This is part 2 of a series on the history of midwifery in the U.S. and Sweden. Click here to read part 1. 
     Like Hannah Karlen, Rosa Fineberg was alone when she had arrived in Baltimore in the 1890s. Fineberg had also been a midwife in her previous home, Russia, and planned to continued her work in the predominantly Jewish neighborhood of Jonestown.  
     Almost daily, she stepped out of her house carrying a large black leather bag. She walked by kosher meat markets and a butcher (who much to the dismay of the city health officials sometimes kept chickens in the basement), a kosher grocery store that advertised wares in Yiddish, and the Russische Shul where she attended temple. Every week, sometimes twice a week, and sometimes even twice in a single day she was called to deliver a baby. Her patients called her Tante Rosa and trusted her.  
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Rosa Fineberg around the turn of the 20th century, courtesy Jewish Museum of Maryland.
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Kosher butcher in Jonestown, with the basement chickens, from Janet Kemp's Housing Conditions in Baltimore, 1907.
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Rosa's daughter Sarah with her husband, Max Siegel in 1899, courtesy Jewish Museum of Maryland.
     Fineberg's daughter Sarah thought her mother had a special, healing power, that was at times unexplainable. When Sarah went into labor in 1901, she called her mother to deliver the baby. And if her mother hadn't been a midwife, she probably would have called another midwife and not a doctor. A midwife’s delivery fee was five to ten dollars, much less than a hospital or private doctor would ask for, and in a time before medical schools were regulated, being a doctor didn't necessarily mean anything. 
      In Baltimore city, over 150 midwives delivered over 4,000 babies a year, and in every city and town in the U.S., you could find a woman delivering a baby, calling herself a midwife. But just like there were no regulations for doctors, there were no regulations for midwives. Why didn't the U.S. regulate the medical profession? And what did that mean for the health and safety of babies and mothers? 

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Midwife Problems, and Solutions

3/19/2017

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(Hey! I'm trying something new here, with a series of short, interconnected posts based on research and archives I visited in the fall of 2015, relating to Swedish midwifery and comparing it to the U.S. Let me know what you think in the contact section.) 
     Hanna Karlen arrived in Boston on October 11, 1901 with four pieces of luggage. She was 36, traveling alone. On the ship's manifest, Karlen called herself a nurse, a statement that wasn't totally accurate. 
"The readers of Jordmodern might be interested in hearing something about their colleagues and our work across the Atlantic." 
     She had trained as a midwife in Sweden, and she must have already known that in the U.S., being a nurse was more respected than being a midwife. Karlen made her way to Elizabeth, New Jersey, a town just outside Newark. In the city directory, she also called herself a nurse.
     She assessed her professional situation quickly, and in 1902 wrote to the editors of the journal of the Swedish Midwives Association, Jordmodern. 

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A Treatment Meant to Save that Harmed

12/11/2016

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     Cancer is a spectre, and patients are often willing to try anything for a cure, for a chance at life. In the 1990s, tens of thousands of women underwent bone marrow transplants in hopes of curing their breast cancer. The harsh protocol was meant to eradicate cancer from their bodies, and bring them back from the brink of death with healthy bone marrow blood stem cells. The problem? The study that promoted the treatment as a success was completely fraudulent.
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William Halsted developed the radical mastectomy to try to remove as much breast tissue as possible before effective chemotherapy had been discovered. Once chemo entered the sphere of treatment, it was also just as radical through the 1990s. If you have a strong stomach, you can view the surgery in a 1930s instructional film here. 

Read the full article at OZY.com. 

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Dr. Doyen and the Hindoo Twins 

2/10/2016

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It's 1902. Two young girls are conjoined near the waist. A daring doctor decides to separate them and film it. 

     Yup, this is a story line in Season 2 of the Knick (y'all know I love it, check out my post about Season 1 here.)  If you know anything about the making of the show, it's that they do a really good job of being historically-medically accurate, thanks to their consultants at the Burns Archive. It's a story line, but it's based on a real operation done by Dr. Eugene-Louis Doyen in France on two conjoined twins named Radica and Doodica.
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     In a typical side-show cabinet card promotional photograph, Radica and Doodica stare just to the right of the viewer, no doubt very used to the fact that people paid to stare at them.
     Frederick Drimmer briefly describes the lives of Radica and Doodica in his book Very Special People. They were born in Orissa, India in 1888 and by the early 1890s, on display in Europe with circuses. For Radica and Doodica, it wasn't just the fact that they were conjoined twins that made them exotic, it was also that they were South Asian. The Victorian Era was a time of putting the exotic on display (including that time the Bronx zoo put a small Congolese man in a cage...), and Radica and Doodica were no exception, often dressed in "traditional clothing" during shows. 

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The Knick Returns

10/16/2015

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Spoilers and graphic images below... 

If you haven't watched The Knick on Cinemax, stop reading and start binging. (Then come back and read...)

The Knick stars Clive Owen as Dr. John Thackery at the Knickerbocker hospital in 1900 New York City, and it's good TV. He is based on the Johns Hopkins Hospital surgeon William Halsted, who was by all accounts a genius, but also addicted to cocaine with a bizarre personal life.

There are so many writing elements that make The Knick worth watching: characters with depth, good dialogue, a plot that moves and draws you in. And there are so many production elements that make it good: cameras that let in a lot of light so the set can have less lighting, making it feel more natural, and the extreme lengths the crew went to to make the streets of Manhattan and Brooklyn look like 1900 New York.

What I like the best is how historical the show is. I spent one day last fall locked in the Chesney Medical Archives of Johns Hopkins staring at early photographs of the hospital and reading descriptions of the patient rooms and surgical amphitheaters. I came home that night and watched an episode of The Knick and my jaw dropped. The photographs came to life in amazing detail. 
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From the Johns Hopkins Medical Archives. L: Nurse administering silver nitrate to a baby's eyes while a nursing student looks on c. 1902;
​R: The surgical amphitheater c. 1903. 

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    Come in, the stacks are open. 

    Away from prying eyes, damaging light, and pilfering hands, the most special collections are kept in closed stacks.  You need an appointment to view the objects, letters, and books that open a door to the past. 

    Here, pieces of material culture are examined in the light. The stacks are open. ​Read the stories behind objects and ephemera found in private collections, archives, and museums. 

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