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Hahvud
01/20/2009 23:08
Drove down to Harvard today, to look at the Norman Himes papers at the Countway Medical Library Special Collections. The Library isn’t in Cambridge, it’s in Boston on Shattuck Street, between about five hospitals. Oddly, I was just reading an 1811 letter from Nathan Smith to Dr. George Shattuck last night. The reading room I was in was called Holmes Hall, which I assume is for Oliver Wendell Holmes, but I didn’t ask. It’s a nice, wood-paneled room, lined on three sides with books. Not ancient medical texts, but lots of reference books: Who was who, National Biography, that sort of thing. The entire wall behind the librarian’s desk was a card catalog. Luckily, I didn’t have to use it. They had a nicely-bound finding aid that had been typed up by someone on a grant from Ortho Pharmaceuticals in 1973. That was about the time Mary Lee Esty was writing her biographical essay on Knowlton for them, too.
The archive has 133 boxes of Himes papers. I asked for four, and they appeared in minutes. There was no one else there today, though. Maybe it’s still break at Harvard. Or everybody was out watching the inauguration. The notes Himes took on Knowlton didn’t reveal any major secrets. There was a copyright date for the first edition of the Fruits of Philosophy in Rhode Island, which supports the story that Knowlton spent some time there in 1831. But the majority of the notes covered things I’ve already learned at Ashfield, Deerfield or online. It’s a lot easier, now that I can find all the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal articles on Google Books.
In the future, my research trips will probably be more focused on primary sources. I really need to read all the Boston Investigators from the 1830s, while Kneeland was in Boston. And I have to find out where Knowlton appeared and spoke at Free Enquirers’ conventions and meetings. I suspect he did a lot more of that than even Himes suspected. One interesting connection, that Laura Lovett at UMass suggested to me last fall, is that Himes was researching connections between the birth control movement and eugenics. I don’t think it went back to the 1830s, but the utopians like Owen and Wright may have contributed ideas to the early eugenicists, even if they weren’t thinking along those lines themselves. Maybe a topic for a paper someday.
The archive has 133 boxes of Himes papers. I asked for four, and they appeared in minutes. There was no one else there today, though. Maybe it’s still break at Harvard. Or everybody was out watching the inauguration. The notes Himes took on Knowlton didn’t reveal any major secrets. There was a copyright date for the first edition of the Fruits of Philosophy in Rhode Island, which supports the story that Knowlton spent some time there in 1831. But the majority of the notes covered things I’ve already learned at Ashfield, Deerfield or online. It’s a lot easier, now that I can find all the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal articles on Google Books.
In the future, my research trips will probably be more focused on primary sources. I really need to read all the Boston Investigators from the 1830s, while Kneeland was in Boston. And I have to find out where Knowlton appeared and spoke at Free Enquirers’ conventions and meetings. I suspect he did a lot more of that than even Himes suspected. One interesting connection, that Laura Lovett at UMass suggested to me last fall, is that Himes was researching connections between the birth control movement and eugenics. I don’t think it went back to the 1830s, but the utopians like Owen and Wright may have contributed ideas to the early eugenicists, even if they weren’t thinking along those lines themselves. Maybe a topic for a paper someday.
