JF Ptak Science Books

Beef Fat, Bones, and the Flu (1918)

JF Ptak Science Books

Riding the last waves of wear into the public conscience and pocketbook come these two ads, published in a very large full-page format in the Illustrated London News in August 1918, just a few months before the end of WWI.  Yes, no doubt there was a public "nervousness" about the affairs of the self/state/world in general, and yes there was a problem at this point with the beginning of flu season (which would soon develop into a world-wide pandemic that killed millions), and I guess the makers of Sanatogen and Oxo thought that they could make a positive impact on these things.  Considering that Sanatogen was a tonic and both a relaxing and a vitalizing agent, and made of 95% milk protein, probably would not make much of an impact in anyone's nervous system. Same deal too to Oxo--apart from water the major ingredients were flour, beef fat, and dried beef bone, and probably whatever beefy thin might have fallen to the floor at the slaughterhouse.  Certainly there was no good to come of treating a deadly influenza with beef fat--except of course that the manufacturer would do well distributing dietary supplement made of the stuff that has almost no value of any sort. 

So, I guess I'll need to check out Oxo for the winter of 1918/19 and see how often this ad appears--it wouldn't be until the fall of 1918 that the pandemic would begin, killing about as many people who were killed in the just-ended war. Combating infectious disease with left-over stuff from a beef killing floor was probably not a hope-filled thing.  

H.L. Mencken and Beer

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I found this nice association copy of an unusual pamphlet¹--the work is on the Lowenbrau brewery in Munchen (with a nice bird's-eye view of the massive works), and it was given once upon a time to the Library of Congress by none other than the Bard of Baltimore, H.L. Mencken (1880-1956), who was known to enjoy his suds.  As a matter of fact, here's a sort of quietly iconic picture of the man from the Baltimore Sun, legally enjoying his drink in Baltimore in 1933, right after the repeal of prohibition (1920-1933).

And this, gifting the pamphlet seven years earlier:

But what I really liked was this photo of the cooper works, dozens of folks working on the barrels to be filled with beer, an entire industry dedicated to packaging liquid and grain, all gone now:

 

Notes:

1. Aktienbrauerei zum Lowenbrau in Munchen,  which was probably published by the brewery, and printed pre-WWI, ca. 1910 or so.  

Sandbags, Helmets, and the End of WWI

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This extraordinary image was found in the November 21, 1918 issue of Illustrated London News--a strong vision celebrating the newly-signed armistice ten days earlier ending WWI.  It shows one of the statues at Tulieres--this at the entrance to the garden. Like many statues and buildings and churches, this structure was protected by sandbags--and in this case, the sandbags were decorated with war trophies of German helmets.  

 

Infographic on the Invasions of Great Britain and Ireland (1914)

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This piece of cartographic propaganda appeared in the fifth month of the war in the Illustrirte Zeitung (Leipzig) on Christmas Eve, 1914--it was in its way a vision of hope for the popular audience that this German equivalent of Life magazine reached. Perhaps it was a comfort to read that Great Britain and Ireland had been invaded before--many times--and that it might happen yet again; perhaps it was a comfort at a time when  the realization dawning on tens of millions of people that This War would be over by Christmas, but it had really just only begun.  Not much comfort though can be had in a piece of paper. 

A detail:

 And the full image:

Pistol- and Rifle-Cameras, 1884

JF Ptak 

There is an origin certainly for the reference to "shooting" fil or "shooting" a movie and such, and I think that it is fair to say that the following two illustrations of photographic innovations will explain that origin.  The first is E. Enjalbert's "photo-revolver", a woodcut and explanation of which appeared in Scientific American (""A Photographic Revolver for Amateurs" ) May 17, 1884.  It really is an ingenious thing:  the lens of the camera was located in the barrel (#2) with the camera apparatus in section "H"; the photo-sensitive plates (life sized at #3), are both pushed forward and down with the action of the trigger/hammer.  It is a snappy design. On the other hand I don't think I'd want to actually use the thing in an urban environment, as there might not be time for an explanation that "this is a ....". 

 

(From the signature at bottom right of teh wood engraver this was no doubt published earlier in La Nature.)

 

And then there's the great Etienne Marey's "Fusil Photographique", as it appeared in La Nature in 1882, which was an early and significant step in the development of cinematography, though again a highly problematic and time-invasive explanation out in public might escape the user:

If there was any debate on the origin of the above-mentioned phrase, this might sway it.  

A City on a Mis-named Martian Moon, 1927.

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This fine image from Popular Mechanics (January 1927) imagines the Martian moon "Ganymeade", mentioning that it is only 7 miles around, and could hardly host a large city, which the artist imagined in this free-for-all concept piece.  I like the idea of putting the size of the moon in perspective like this--I must say that I've never seen one quite like this. But first, the magazine identifies the Martian moon as "Ganymede", which is actually a Jovian moon. The moons of Mars are Phobos and Deimos (the names meaning panic/terror and terror/dread), and they are 13.8 miles and 7.8 miles, respectively. They were discovered in 1877 by Asaph Hall at the National Observatory, and there wasn't a "Ganymede" between them--weirdly and wonderfully, though, their existence was imagined by non other than Jonathan Swift, who had his Laputan astronomers discover two moons in Gulliver's Travels in 1726. But no  Ganymede.   As it turns out, Ganymede is the largest moon in the solar system, and is nearly the size of Mars, so maybe that is where the confusion started.  

Anyway, this is a great image: 

The Salvation Army as an Emigration Agent (1920)

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post   History of Goodbye series

 I had no idea that the Salvation Army was responsible for sending out a quarter million immigrants into the world in just a couple of dozen years. This is a substantial travel program, and a dissemination of potential proselytizers into the far reaches of the Empire's domain.  And as it turns out, the Salvation Army HQ in London was destroyed during the Blitz, along with the records of this great migration--very little remains of any official records regarding this long effort.

"The Salvation Army was the United Kingdom’s largest voluntary migration society in the first half of the twentieth century, helping around 250,000 people to emigrate from the British Isles to the British Empire Dominions. Given the wide-reaching impact of this work and the considerable resources The Salvation Army dedicated to it, it is surprising how little evidence and knowledge of it there is now."--http://www.salvationarmy.org.uk/history/blog12

 

 

 Empire reconstruction. The work of the salvation army, migration - colonization department, 1903-1919 and after. (35x22cm, 12pp, with 12 photographs. Provenance: (Leland) Stanford (Junior) University, from prof. E(phraim).D(ouglas) Adams, then to the Library of Congress, then to me, Only one copy is located in the WorldCat/OCLC, at the Bibliotheque de documentation internationale contemporaine Nanterre).

 

The History of Obviousness, Part 455(b): Guard Post in a Tree

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The part about The History of Obviousness that is so wonderful is that sometimes the obviousnesses aren't evident, or apparent, until they are established--and then of course there is no ghostly memory of their formative semi-hidden natures. Sometimes things are best hidden in plain sight, and sometimes one doesn't realize that is is raining men-in-bowler-hats until Rene Magritte points it out.  This may be one of those cases where something is so obvious that its extreme nature just blends into the surroundings, even when there aren't any.

[Source: Illustrirte Zeitung, December 31, 1914.]

So, in the picture above, we have not only a guard/observation station built in a lonely tree, but there's also a small lean-to at the bottom, with of course a soldier standing next to (but not inside)  it. 

On Kindness to Prostitutes (1878)

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In this pamphlet¹ Dr. Gerrish writes with kindness and compassion, and conviction, on the perils of the moral/ethical/medical life of a prostitute. He believed that prostitutes should be given as great a care as any and even more so to prevent the spread of communicable disease; and that understanding and empathy be extended to them from the medical profession as a way of building their self-esteem and perhaps on this strength be able to leave the profession. He was pissed that brothel owners, Johns, and prostitutes were arraigned differently and (usually) separately, and that they should all be arraigned together, as it wasn't just the fault of the prostitute that the law was broken. He made the case that prostitution was a fixable societal problem, and it must be addressed, in spite of what he saw was its massiveness.  He claimed that slavery wasn't abolished --it simply went by the name of "prostitution" ("... that slavery has disappeared from European civilization. This is an error. It exists always ; but it weighs only on woman, and is called prostitution").

Read it in full at Hathi Trust: https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015011655837;view=thumb;seq=6

Notes:

1. Frederic Henry Gerrish, The duties of the medical profession concerning prostitution and its allied vices : being the oration before the Maine Medical Association of its annual meeting, 12th of June 1878. Portland (Maine), Loring, Short & Harmon, 1878.  First edition (a second edition appeared in 1879 with the same pagination, and a third of 39pp appeared in 1886). 23x15 cm  WorldCat/OCLC--surprisingly, only three print copies of the first edition are found. 

 

World War I: Prisoners at the End of December, 1914

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I don't know what the fates were of Serbian taken prisoner in WWI.  I do know that Serbian military and civilian losses were extraordinarily high as percentages. It has been shown that more than a quarter of the Serbian population (civilian and military) were lost during the war, with about the same percentage of soldiers being lost (relative to France at 17%, Germany at 15%, and Russia at 11%).  So for these 'glassy-eyed" Serb prisoners appearing in this photo in Illustrirte Zeitung for December 4, 1914 the war was over--what happened to them over the next four years of captivity, I don't know.  

 

When There is More Text on the Cover Than in the Text--and the End Result is Nothing (1877)

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It happens now and then that I unearth interesting bits from the pamphlet collection here that instantly create their own categorization--this in spite of already having a hundred sculpted categories. Works like this demand a deeper inspection to sustain their uncommon non-bond with other similar but not-so works. On the face of it, Fairchild's Nature's Laws... looks like just another quack medical remedy/cure/belief system (or suspension thereof), except that on closer inspection there is more text regarding the product on the pamphlet's covers than in the work itself.  The thing does wind up being 36pp long, but it is most testimonial and promise--after all, you can't say all that much abut secret ingredients for the "liver patch" that you were supposed to wear, and you couldn't say much about the medical inventiveness and foundation behind it because there wasn't any. So I guess you fill space with words that aren't necessarily connected to anything and that collectively had no value, much like a year's worth of Trumpian nothingness. Anyway, there's a lot going on on teh covers of this pamphlet, and much like what is going on inside of it, it all adds up to chicken scratches. 

D.W. Fairchild. Nature's Laws; New Ideas Concerning Them. A Medical Lecture Delivered in Wesleyan Hall, Boston, on Friday Evening, March 30, 1877...Illustrating the Principles of Absorption, as Developed in the Holman Liver Pad...copied from the Boston Daily Globe of Saturday, March 31st, 1877. 22x14.5cm, 36pp. Printed by the Holman Liver Pad Company, 1877.  WorldCat/OCLC locates only two print copies and many others in microform.  

A Single-Page DSM? (1886)

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At the end of the 19th century it was recognized that international data collected on mental illness would be highly useful. Unfortunately there was no real possibility of applying a series of great common denominators to the vast majority of  mental illnesses--the classification of mental diseases lacked general consensus and clarity for not understanding the pathology of the disease, therefore having to fall back on classification according to symptology, which is open to interpretation, and individual experience, and occasional faith, with the apparent mental conditions judged by exterior behavior and appearance. This pamphlet below is the sum of the efforts of international institutions to come up with a plan for this classification that might make disparate data more refined and so more useful to communities around the world.  It seems as though this was done with a simplicity that was also useful, as there was a common language to describe those conditions that are marked for classification.  

Full text can be viewed of Yale's copy, here:https://archive.org/details/39002086346195.med.yale.edu   

Clark Bell. Report on Classification of Mental Diseases as a basis of international statistics of the insane, made to the Belgian Society of Mental Medicine. 23x15cm,  14pp. Wrappers. Provenance: Library of Congress Smithsonian Deposit (received in 1886) from Dr. Bell (with a tiny 1.5cm embossed stamp bearing his name and address at top-center front page).  I suspect that this is a separate printing of this article that appeared the Medico-Legal Journal, volume 4, 1886, as it has the same exact appearance--Bell was also the editor of that journal.  

And the classifications, which appeared on the last two pages of the document:

 

 

 

The Distance-to-Hospital Usage Law (1866)

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 Dr. Edward Jarvis (1803-1884) conducted a study¹ in 1866 to determine how much a factor distance from an "insane hospital" was in regards to people using the facility. It sounds like an obvious-enough question with a probably-obvious answer, but these things are really never so until someone actually looks at the data and extracts an answer. And so Dr. Jarvis performed this function, answering the question once and for all that yes, indeed, the further away you are from a facility the less likely you are going to be to use it, and thus we have Jarvis' Law.

"Mental health researchers have long considered the importance of distance on psychiatric service use. Systemic analyses regarding the relationship between distance and the use of mental health care can be traced back to the mid nineteenth century, when Edward Jarvis identified inverse associations between home-to-hospital distance and the rates of admission to Oneida County Hospital of New York and the Kentucky Lunatic Asylum in Fayette County. He claimed that people living near psychiatric hospitals send more patients there for admission than do those living far away (Jarvis’s law).The study also revealed urban–rural differences in the prevalence of insanity, and high admission rates to psychiatric hospitals among people residing near the city center. Jarvis’s law has been identified in numerous studies since the mid-twentieth century."--Kuon-Chiao Tseng, et al, "Travel Distance and the Use of Inpatient Care among Patients with Schizophrenia", Adm Policy Ment Health. 2008 Sep; 35(5): 346–356, published online 2008 May 30

Notes:

1. Edward Jarvis, M.D.  "Influence of Distance from and Nearness to an Insane Hospital on its Use by the People."  Published by Separately printed from the American Journal of Insanity, XXII, January 1866, pp 361-406. This publication paginated 1-46. (1866).  

"A Most Delicate Monster"--the "Alpha" Robot of 1932

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I bumped into this robot in the pages of Illustrated London News for August 27, 1932. The idea of mechanical people had been around at least since the early 19th century, and by the time this one appeared i its gleaming glory in 1932, the word "robot" was around for a dozen years, invented in 1920 by Karel Capek for his book on the future called R.U.R.  Actually the human-like forms created by Capek in this early scifi work were biotech, and not fully mechanized.) The form of the robot stretches back hundreds of years, in a way--if not the exactly the idea of a robot, but at least with the appearance of one. "Alpha" was anthropomorphic, but hardly what you'd call bio-mechanical, or even pretending to be so. It was created by Harry May of London, and was evidently 6'4" tall and weighed a ton (or two, perhaps), and was supposed to entertain and answer questions from the crowd when unveiled at the London Radio Exhibition of 1932.  Mr. May kept the details of his creation secret, though no doubt the robot was operated offstage by confederates, the voice supplied by wireless. Still, Alpha was a major attraction, and kept people entertained, if not confused.  In any event, it looked frightening as a vision of a possible 1930's future-vision.  

 

 

[Source: http://davidbuckley.net/DB/HistoryMakers/Alpha1932.htm  This is a very interesting blog by David Buckley, including a long chronological section on the developments of robots--Alpha appears on this list, which includes six or so good links for contemporary stories about the robot's appearance.]

The Dome of Creation, San Marco, Venice

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 2625

I'm in the midst of making several posts relating to a group of large (27x21") chromolithographs of the mosaics in San Marco (sumptuously published by Ferdinand Ongania in Venice in 1886.  The main part of this image is the story of creation, starting in the innermost circle of images, where we find the creation of light (and darkness),  and the rest, followed by the larger concentric circle showing the starry realms, the creation of the birds and fishes, then the land-based animals, and then (around "12 o'clock" on the second circle) comes the creation of life in Adam, where it all seems to go downhill.  In the outer ring we see the creation and presentation of Eve, the various temptations, the nakedness realizations and then the banishment--not all together a happy ending.  But the artwork is lovely, highlighted in gold. 

• [Creation Myth] Chromolithographic image from  Basilica di San Marino du Venezia, published by the prolific Ferdinand Ongania in 1886, 27x21", 68x53cm. Very good condition. Ongania's work is an exhaustive study of the iconic building, the publication being known chiefly I think for its very large and sumptuous chromolithographs of the building's architecture, art, and endless detail. It forms two volumes of an overall monumental 12-volume epic, though these were complete in themselves.