Medical History from Midcoast Maine

Medical History from Midcoast Maine Patricia G. Kahn (bio) and Richard J. Kahn (bio) In a rule well worth remembering, Edwin Wolf II (1911–91), librarian of the Library Company of Philadelphia from 1953 to 1984, commented that the librarian should help the researcher, but should not be asked to do the research. 1 Does the Web make this easier for long-distance researchers? For the past twenty-five years we have lived in rural South [End Page 299] Union, Maine (not to be confused with metropolitan downtown Union). Our nearest major medical research libraries are in Boston, 180 miles away. Telephone calls, letters, and our yearly “fix” at the AAHM and the American Osler Society meetings have been our main contact with the outside world of medical history. Richard Wolfe at the Countway/Boston Medical Library, Thomas Horrocks at the College of Physicians of Philadelphia (now at the Francis A. Countway medical library in Boston), and Toby Appel at Yale, to name a few, have always been most helpful—but frequently we find ourselves asking them to do some of the work in their libraries that we would like to be doing ourselves. Locating and checking resources is a major part of most medical history projects. For the past five years, for example, we have been working on an annotated transcription of an unpublished manuscript written in Portland, Maine, between 1797 and 1831: Diseases of the District of Maine, 1735–1820, and Continued to the Present Time, by Dr. Jeremiah Barker. Barker refers to more than one hundred books, journals, and newspaper and magazine articles, and we wanted to verify all cited references. After exhausting our own small stock of medical reference material, we began by searching the National Library of Medicine and the Yale and Harvard University Library collections via Telnet. 2 Late one night, frustrated at being unable to find a particular eighteenth-century British travel diary in any U.S. libraries, we finally found the complete citation through the Internet at the Bodleian Library at Oxford. 3 It is hard to imagine being able to do that from our house in Maine even five years ago, “pre-Web.” That project led to a paper on the first medical journal in the United States. 4 In 1795, Dr. Barker began a long correspondence with Sam Latham Mitchill in New York. Mitchill, who taught at King’s College (now Columbia University), was a founder and editor of the Medical Repository, [End Page 300] the first medical journal indigenous to the United States (published from 1797 to 1824). Barker published ten articles in that journal between 1797 and 1808, mostly relating to diseases and epidemics in the District of Maine. After some early help from the Countway Library by telephone and mail, we found some of the information we needed online at the New York Academy of Medicine and Columbia University libraries. 5 Specifically, we wanted to know who subscribed to this new journal. Our microfilm copy of the first six years of the journal included only one subscription list, 1797–98. We searched a number of library catalogs without success, looking for additional subscription lists, but we did find a great deal of relevant primary and secondary source material. Then, a meeting in Philadelphia this past spring allowed one of us (RJK) to spend a day in the library of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia. 6 In preparation for this short visit, we searched their online catalog. In addition to a complete run of the Medical Repository, we found at least ten other relevant primary and secondary sources. The list of requested material was faxed to the College of Physicians, where the staff was able to locate it at their convenience. The material was laid out, ready for use, and the entire day at the library was spent working with the literature itself, rather than with the catalog. We have also found that online databases can make Web searching relatively quick and easy. Hypertext links move the searcher effortlessly from one library to another. A great innovation in the aforementioned Library Company of Philadelphia’s WolfPAC (see n. 1) is the link between each subject heading in

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