Obtaining and Sharing Medical Literature, 1780–1820

2020 ◽  
pp. 33-46
Author(s):  
Richard J. Kahn
Keyword(s):  
New England ◽  
New Hampshire ◽  
Medical Information ◽  
Medical Literature ◽  
The United States ◽  
Rural Physicians ◽  
Benjamin Rush ◽  
Boston Medical ◽  
Surgical Journal ◽  
Smallpox Inoculation

The quest for timely medical literature was a concern for elite as well as rural physicians in the United States, as evidenced by comments from Drs. Benjamin Rush of Philadelphia; Benjamin Vaughan of Hallowell, Maine; and Lyman Spalding of Portsmouth, New Hampshire. It was the focus of an 1800 correspondence about the new cowpox (vaccination) between Barker and John G. Coffin of Boston who, in 1823, would found and edit the Boston Medical Intelligencer, precursor to the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal, now the New England Journal of Medicine; smallpox inoculation is also discussed. Topics include obtaining and sharing medical books and journals, the importance of both personal correspondence and newspapers for dissemination of medical information, problems with and for booksellers, medical nationalism, and publishing by subscription.

Diseases in the District of Maine 1772 - 1820

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard J. Kahn
Keyword(s):  
New England ◽  
Medical Literature ◽  
Primary Source ◽  
First Century ◽  
Scientific Methods ◽  
Rural Physicians ◽  
Biographical Sketches ◽  
Benjamin Rush ◽  
Rural Physician ◽  
Epidemic Fever

This previously unpublished primary source allows modern readers to reimagine medicine as practiced two hundred years ago by a rural physician in New England through his case histories, correspondence, biographical sketches, and personal commentary. Throughout his fifty-year practice, beginning with a preceptorship in Hingham, Massachusetts, Jeremiah Barker documented his constant efforts to keep up with and contribute to the medical literature in a changing medical landscape, as practice and authority shifted from historical to scientific methods. He performed experiments and autopsies, became interested in the new chemistry of Lavoisier, risked scorn in his use of alkaline remedies, studied epidemic fever and approaches to bloodletting, and struggled to understand epidemic fever, childbed fever, cancer, public health, consumption, mental illness, and the “dangers of spirituous liquors.” He corresponded with luminaries such as Benjamin Rush, Samuel Mitchill, and Lyman Spalding, and he published several articles in the first US medical journal, the Medical Repository. Perhaps many rural physicians practiced at this level, but few such written records have survived. Barker’s rare transcribed manuscript, never before published, is presented in its entirety with extensive annotations, a five-chapter introduction to contextualize the work, and a glossary to make it accessible to twenty-first-century general readers, genealogists, students, and historians.

scholarly journals I’ll be dammed! Public preferences regarding dam removal in New Hampshire

Elem Sci Anth ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Natallia Leuchanka Diessner ◽  
Catherine M. Ashcraft ◽  
Kevin H. Gardner ◽  
Lawrence C. Hamilton
Keyword(s):  
New England ◽  
New Hampshire ◽  
Property Values ◽  
Dam Removal ◽  
The United States ◽  
Ecological Impacts ◽  
Public Preferences ◽  
The Public ◽  
Industrial History ◽  
Trade Offs

Decisions about dams, like other environmental conflicts, involve complex trade-offs between different water uses with varying human and ecological impacts, have significant impacts on public resources, and involve many stakeholders with diverse and often conflicting interests. Given the many upcoming dam decisions in New England and across the United States, an improved understanding of public preferences about dam decisions is needed to steward resources in the public interest. This research asks (1) What does the public want to see happen with dams? and (2) How do public preferences regarding dam removal vary with demography and politics? We address these questions using data from three random sample statewide telephone polls conducted in New Hampshire over 2018 that asked people for their preferences concerning dam removal versus maintaining dams for specific benefits—property values, hydropower generation, industrial history, or recreation. Respondent age, education, gender, and political party were tested among the possible predictors. We find that majorities (52% or 54%) of respondents favor removing dams rather than keeping them for industrial history or property values, and a plurality (43%) favor removal over keeping them for recreation. A plurality (46%) prefer keeping dams, however, if they are used to generate hydropower. Respondent background characteristics and political identity affect these preferences in ways resembling those for many other environment-related issues: women, young or middle-aged individuals, and political liberals or moderates (Democrats or independents) more often support dam removal. Education, on the other hand, has no significant effects. The results quantify levels of general public support for dam removal in New England, illustrating the use of public opinion polling to complement input from public meetings and guide decisions. More broadly, they contribute a new topic to existing scholarship on the social bases of environmental concern.

AN ELECTRICAL INFANT AS REPORTED IN 1870

PEDIATRICS ◽  
1982 ◽  
Vol 70 (4) ◽  
pp. 596-596
Author(s):  
T. E. C.
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Medical Literature ◽  
Case Reports ◽  
The Body ◽  
Medical Evidence ◽  
Pediatric Case ◽  
Electric Shocks ◽  
The World ◽  
Boston Medical ◽  
Surgical Journal

Nineteenth century medical literature abounds with strange pediatric case reports; none is more bizarre than the following, published in 1870 in the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal. AN ELECTRICAL INFANT—There is a wonderful account in all the French papers of an outstanding baby just dead, at the age of ten months, at St Urbain, near Lyons. The strongest medical evidence is said to be given that the child was so highly endowed with electricity that all the persons in the same room with him received constant electric shocks. Its end was apparently painless, but accompanied by still more astounding manifestations. At the instant of death luminous effluvia proceeded, it is affirmed by the doctors, from the body of the child, which continued for several minutes after its decease. The case is supposed to be quite unprecedented in the world of science.

United States: David A. Baldwin, Ed.: America in an Interdependent World: Problems of United States Foreign Policy. University Press of New England, New Hampshire, 1976, xix, 352p.

1978 ◽  
Vol 34 (3) ◽  
pp. 423-429
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Foreign Policy ◽  
New England ◽  
New Hampshire ◽  
Policy Research ◽  
The United States ◽  
American Enterprise Institute ◽  
United States Foreign Policy ◽  
Global Challenge ◽  
Public Policy Research

UNITED STATES: DAVID A. BALDWIN, Ed.: America in an Interdependent World: Problems of United States Foreign Policy. UNITED STATES: AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE FOR PUBLIC POLICY RESEARCH : The Japan-U.S. Assembly. UNITED STATES: LESTER MARKEL AND AUDREY MARCH: Global challenge to the United States.

Oil: A Volatile Past, An Uncertain Future

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael B. McElroy
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
New England ◽  
New Hampshire ◽  
Textile Industry ◽  
Industrial Revolution ◽  
Primary Source ◽  
The United States ◽  
Smelting Process ◽  
Uncertain Future

For thousands of years, wood was the most important source of energy for human societies. There were many applications for this resource. Arguably, the most important was its role as a source of charcoal, which, burned at a high temperature, made it possible to fashion tools and weapons from copper, tin, bronze, and later iron. When wood ran out, civilizations frequently collapsed, a pattern repeated many times over the course of human history. Coal replaced wood as the dominant source of energy in England in the early part of the eighteenth century. Benefitting from an advance by Abraham Darby, a Shropshire ironmaster, coal provided the motive force for the Industrial Revolution, which took root at about the same time. Darby’s innovation, in 1709, was the development of a pro¬tocol to remove impurities such as sulfur from coal that would otherwise have impeded the smelting process. Coke, produced from coal, replaced charcoal, formed from wood, as the critical industrial commodity. Countries rich in coal benefitted accordingly. Only in 1900, however, did coal replace wood as the primary source of energy in the United States, a tribute to the country’s abundant sources of timber and the access it enjoyed to a ready source of power available from the series of waterfalls that punctuated the flows of a number of rivers in the country’s northeast, notably the Charles River in Massachusetts and the Merrimack River in New Hampshire (including its lower reaches in Massachusetts). As discussed earlier, this latter resource played a pivotal role in the success of the early textile industry in New England. Oil supplanted coal as the critical global energy source for major industrial economies in the first half of the twentieth century. The roots of oil use extend deep into the past. Oil seeps were exploited in Mesopotamia as early as 5,000 BC to provide a source of asphalt and pitch that was used as mortar to construct the walls and towers of Babylon. Genesis records God’s instruction to Noah to “make yourself an ark of gopher wood: make rooms in the ark, and cover it inside and out with pitch.”

scholarly journals Leukemia and Background Radiation in Northern New England

Blood ◽  
1964 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 250-261 ◽  
Author(s):  
ASCHER SEGALL
Keyword(s):  
New England ◽  
New Hampshire ◽  
Background Radiation ◽  
The United States ◽  
Dose Response Relationship ◽  
Annual Dose ◽  
State Study ◽  
Significant Difference ◽  
Northern New England ◽  
The Difference

Abstract A survey of background radiation and mortality from leukemia was conducted in the states of Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont. The radioactivity in bedrock underlying each of 1,178 minor civil divisions was estimated on the basis of radiogeological analysis. Values were found to range from 5 parts per million equivalent uranium in the limestone areas of Vermont to 45 parts per million equivalent uranium in the Conway granite region of New Hampshire. Mortality records from the tri-state study area for the period 1925-54 were examined. One thousand nine hundred and seventy deaths from leukemia were identified and tabulated by minor civil division. An expected number of deaths by decade was calculated for each minor civil division using the tristate age specific rates for standardization. Minor civil divisions were grouped into four categories according to mean equivalent uranium concentration in underlying bedrock. The difference in annual dose rate from external background sources was estimated to be 14.65 mrads per year. No significant difference in exposure to internal emitters was noted. The observed and expected numbers of deaths were compared within each of the four radiogeological categories. No statistically significant association was observed between mortality from leukemia and radiogeological category either for the entire 30-year study period or within successive decades. These data do not allow rejection of the hypothesis that leukemia mortality varies with background radioactivity if the dose response relationship is of the order of that estimated from studies in humans at doses of 100 rads or greater. It seems unlikely that such a hypothesis could be adequately tested in the United States where geographic variation in background radiation is relatively small.

scholarly journals State Environmental Expenditures in New England and Their Relationship to Other Programmatic and Political Metrics

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 62
Author(s):  
Robert P. Blauvelt
Keyword(s):  
New England ◽  
Rhode Island ◽  
New Hampshire ◽  
Natural Resource ◽  
Political Party ◽  
State Level ◽  
The United States ◽  
Data Sets ◽  
Environmental Expenditures ◽  
Environmental Agencies

State environmental agencies have developed into one of the primary mechanisms by which public health and quality of life is managed and protected within the United States. This analysis attempts to provide some understanding of what economic and political factors may be influencing funding for state environmental agencies in six New England states: Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Vermont. The demographic makeup of New England, an area that is relatively well-off, highly educated, socially liberal, and diverse, make it the ideal place to test the relationships between state environmental agency spending and other key economic and political metrics.Financial data sets evaluated as part of this study include state spending on 11 common programmatic areas. Non-financial data sets in this analysis include the percentage of voters casting ballots by political party for Democratic presidential candidates, U.S. Senators, U.S Representatives, and Governors, as well as the composition by political party of the upper and lower houses of state legislatures. A Pearson’s product moment correlation coefficient was used to compare each state’s environmental expenditures with the 17 independent variable data sets.Natural Resource spending was positively correlated with Education spending in five states. Total (state) Expenditures also correlate positively with Natural Resource spending. General Revenues, similar to Total Expenditures, positively correlate with Natural Resource spending in five states, suggesting that state environmental agencies are effective bureaucratically in lobbying for and obtaining needed funding. State environmental agencies funding correlated positively with the percent of the electorate voting for the Democratic Presidential candidate in Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island. This correlation is similar to those noted by other researchers, but the remaining state-level political data sets were less useful in establishing potential relationships.

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