Library of Congress's Blog, page 130

Pic of the Week: Music Makers

Monica

On Tuesday, the Library hosted the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) Foundation for its annual “We Write the Songs” concert, featuring the songwriters performing and telling the stories behind their own music.

Featured performances were by Brian McKnight, Monica, Brett James, MoZella, Priscilla Renea, Randy Goodrum, Desmond Child and Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Jennifer Higdon.

Priscilla Renea and Brett James

 

 

 

The Library is home to the ASCAP collection, which includes music manuscripts, printed music, lyrics (both published and unpublished), scrapbooks, correspondence and other personal, business, legal and financial documents, scrapbooks, and film, video and sound recordings.

Brian McKnight

 

Established in 1914, ASCAP is the first United States Performing Rights Organization (PRO), representing the world’s largest repertory of more than 10 million copyrighted musical works of every style and genre from 525,000 songwriter, composer and music-publisher members.

You can find videos of previous “We Write the Songs” concerts on the Library of Congress YouTube channel. 

All photos by Amanda Reynolds

Page from the Past: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

(The following is a story featured in the May/June 2016 issue of the Library of Congress Magazine, LCM. You can read the issue in its entirety here. The story was written by August and Clare Imholtz, who have been collecting “Alice” books for more than 30 years. Clare is also a volunteer in the Library’s Rare Book and Collections Division.)

This illustration by John Tenniel depicts Alice and the Cheshire Cat.

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland”— a book that has never been out of print since its original publication 150 years ago—did not get off to a good start.

The classic tale about a little girl who falls down a rabbit hole into a fantasy world populated by an odd cast of characters was first published in Oxford during the summer of 1865. Displeased with the quality of the printing, illustrator John Tenniel persuaded the author, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (1832-1898)—who would become famous under his pen name, “Lewis Carroll”—to recall that edition of 2,000 copies, except for about 50 copies that had already been distributed to friends. The still unbound sheets of the 1865 “Alice” were sold to the American firm of D. Appleton and Co., which published the work in New York in 1866 with a new title page. A copy of the “Appleton Alice” came to the Library in the personal book collection of Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, following his death in 1935.

Even rarer than the Appleton edition of “Alice” is the Library’s copy of the first approved edition of “Alice,” published in November 1866 in London by Macmillan & Company. The Library’s copy, which it purchased in 1924, has two original pencil drawings by Tenniel (sketches of the “Seven and Five of Hearts” and “Alice, the Duchess, and the Flamingo”) tipped in. These drawings most likely were commissioned from Tenniel subsequent to the book’s publication.

“Alice” grew out of a fanciful tale that Carroll told the three daughters of Henry Liddell, Dean of Christ Church, Oxford, during a boat trip in the summer of 1862. Several years later, he presented one of the daughters—Alice—with his handwritten and self-illustrated manuscript copy of the story titled “Alice’s Adventures Under Ground,” which she had urged him to put in writing for her. Purchased by Eldridge Reeves Johnson, inventor of the Victor Talking Machine, the manuscript was exhibited at the Library of Congress from October 1929 to February 1930. After Johnson’s death in 1945, the manuscript was purchased at auction by a group of Americans led by Lessing Rosenwald, A.S.W. Rosenbach and Librarian of Congress Luther Evans. On Nov. 13, 1948, Evans presented the manuscript to the British Museum as a gift to Great Britain from a group of anonymous Americans in gratitude for Britain’s heroic efforts in holding Hitler at bay until the United States entered World War II.

When the Alice books were published, they were copyright protected for 42 years after the first publication or seven years after the author’s death, whichever was longer. Thus, the work itself entered the public domain in 1907, thereby inspiring numerous illustrated editions, comic books and adaptations for film, stage and television over the past century. Most notable are the 1951 Disney film and Tim Burton’s 2010 film. Most recent is an online version with annotations from 12 Carroll scholars offered by The Public Domain Review to mark the 150th anniversary of the timeless tale.

LEWIS CARROLL SCRAPBOOK

This frontispiece from the earliest editions of “Alice’s Adventures in
Wonderland” is by John Tenniel.

Perhaps the rarest Carroll treasure owned by the Library is a scrapbook he kept from 1855 to 1872. Carroll spent his whole adult life at Christ Church, Oxford—first as an undergraduate and later as a mathematics lecturer. The scrapbook consists of more than 100 items, mostly of clippings from newspapers and periodicals, which offer an interesting window into Carroll’s mind.

They include reviews of his own published works, pages from the humor magazine “Punch,” clippings on Oxford and British politics, theater reviews, poetry, major news events of the day and cartoons that evidently appealed to Carroll’s sense of humor and his fascination with nonsense and the absurd. A review of his “Formulae of Plane Trigonometry” from the Athenaeum of July 27, 1861, shared a page in the scrapbook with a memorial poem on the death of Prince Albert from “Punch.”

Frederic Louis Huidekoper, an American undergraduate at Christ Church, purchased the scrapbook at a sale of Carroll’s effects shortly after his death in 1898. Col. Huidekoper, who distinguished himself in World War I and was awarded the Chevalier de Legion of Honor, became a respected and prolific military and naval historian. In 1934, he donated Carroll’s scrapbook to the Library just six years before his death in a trolley car accident in Washington, D.C.

Pic of the Week: American Artists View WWI

“World War I: American Artists View the Great War” is on view through May 6, 2017. Photo by Shawn Miller.

On Saturday, the Library of Congress opened the new exhibition, “World War I: American Artists View the Great War,” highlighting how American artists galvanized public interest in World War I.

Drawn from the Library’s Prints and Photographs Collections, the works on display reflect the focus of wartime art on patriotic and propaganda messages—by government-supported as well as independent and commercial artists.

Many of the artists featured in the exhibition worked for the federal government’s Division of Pictorial Publicity, a unit of the Committee on Public Information. Led by Charles Dana Gibson, a preeminent illustrator, the division focused on promoting recruitment, bond drives, home-front service, troop support and camp libraries. Many images advocated for American involvement in the war and others encouraged hatred of the German enemy. In less than two years, the division’s 300 artists produced more than 1,400 designs, including some 700 posters.

Heeding the call from Gibson to “Draw ‘til it hurts,” hundreds of leading American artists created works about the Great War (1914–1918). Although the United States participated as a direct combatant in World War I from 1917 to 1918, the riveting posters, cartoons, fine art prints and drawings on display chronicle this massive international conflict from its onset through its aftermath.

Among those who heeded the call were James Montgomery Flagg (best known for his portrayal of Uncle Sam), Wladyslaw Benda, George Bellows, Joseph Pennell and William Allen Rogers. In contrast, such artists as Maurice Becker, Kerr Eby and Samuel J. Woolf drew on their personal experiences to depict military scenes on the front lines as well as the traumatic treatment of conscientious objectors. Finally, cartoonists offered both scathing criticism and gentle humor, as shown in Bud Fisher’s comic strip “Mutt and Jeff.”

Photography also provided essential communication during the First World War. The selected images detail the service of soldiers, nurses, journalists and factory workers from the home front to the trenches. American Red Cross photographs by Lewis Hine and others employ artful documentation to capture the challenges of recovery and rebuilding in Europe after the devastation of war.

The exhibition is made possible by the Swann Foundation for Caricature and Cartoon, and is the first in a series of events the Library is planning in connection with the centennial of the United States’ entry into World War I. With the most comprehensive collection of multi-format World War I holdings in the nation, the Library is a unique resource for primary source materials, education plans, public programs and on-site visitor experiences about The Great War, including exhibits, symposia and book talks.

Happy 180th Birthday to Col. Nathan W. Daniels

(The following is written by Michelle Krowl, a historian in the Library of Congress Manuscript Division.)

On May 10, 1867 Colonel Nathan W. Daniels celebrated his 31st birthday. He noted in his diary, “Learned to day that I had been recommended and nominated by Chief Justice Chase as Register under the Bankrupt Act for the 4th Dist of Louisiana and my name sent on to the District Judge for confirmation.” After erroneously recording his age as 32, he commented that his new position made “a very acceptable birthday present.” “So now we are off for Louisiana and prosperity I trust,” he wrote.

This would not be the first time Louisiana played an important role in the diaries kept by Nathan W. Daniels, which are now online as part of the Nathan W. Daniels Diary and Scrapbook, 1861-1867.

Colonel Nathan W. Daniels (left) and Major Francis E. Dumas (right), officers of the 2nd Regiment of Louisiana Native Guard. From vol. 1 of the Nathan W. Daniels Diary. Manuscript Division.

Born in New York on May 10, 1836, Nathan W. Daniels had moved to Louisiana prior to the Civil War. After the capture of New Orleans by United States forces in 1862, Union general Benjamin F. Butler allowed the enlistment of Native Guard units comprised of “free men of color” and former slaves. Loyal to the Union and holding abolitionist sympathies, Daniels became the colonel of the 2nd Regiment of the Louisiana Native Guard. As was the case with many African-American regiments formed later in the war, most of the officers of the 2nd Regiment were white men like Daniels, but Daniels recommended African-American planter Francis E. Dumas for the rank of major. Perhaps as an indication of his respect for Major Dumas, they were photographed together and Daniels pasted a print of the photograph into his wartime diary.

Daniels acquired the first volume of his three-volume diary when he confiscated it from the New Orleans home of cotton merchant Hamilton McNeil Vance and his wife Lizzie Luckett Vance. They left the partially-used diary behind when they fled New Orleans in 1862, and Daniels found the volume in November 1862 and appropriated it for his own use. His first entries listed “suspicious characters” among captured prisoners, but he soon began using the volume to record the activities of the 2nd Regiment after it was posted to Ship Island, off the coast of Mississippi. The 2nd Regiment saw action at the battle of Pascagoula in Mississippi in April 1863, which Daniels recorded in diary entries from April 9 –12, 1863. Although the unit was ultimately forced to retreat, Daniels wrote a laudatory address to his soldiers. “You have tested the question of your nations valor, and demonstrated to its fullest extent the capacity—the bravery—the endurance and nobility of your race….”

Even more valuable historically than Daniels’s descriptions of the 2nd Regiment’s time on Ship Island are the rare photographs taken on the island, prints of which Daniels pasted into his diary. The photographs include structures built on the island, the terrain, the men in the regiment, an ambulance wagon, a battery constructed by Daniels’s troops, as well as images of Daniels and his fellow officers.

“Picture presented me by the Capt of ‘Company C,’ Capt Chase of my Regiment,
not very good still well for Ship Island.” From vol. 1 of Nathan W. Daniels Diary. Manuscript Division.

After essentially being forced out of the army in August 1863, Daniels moved to Washington, D.C. that fall and many of the observations recorded in his diary document aspects of the nation’s capital during the Civil War. In addition to meeting with President Abraham Lincoln and Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, Daniels watched workmen installing the Statue of Freedom on the Capitol dome. On Jan. 9, 1864, he mentions the prevalence of smallpox in the city, although he happily notes that in the process of vaccinating his friend Jeanie Foster he “had the pleasure of seeing her beautiful white plump arm.”

In Washington Daniels enjoyed an active social life, and participated in local Spiritualist circles. On Christmas Day 1863 he noted having attended a séance at which the medium Nettie Colburn presided. In March 1865 he described a gathering at the White House attended by First Lady Mary Lincoln and Daniels’s Spiritualist friends.

At some point in 1865 Daniels courted the noted Spiritualist Cora L. V. Scott Hatch (1840-1923), whom he married in Washington on Dec. 8, 1865. Thereafter both husband and wife often contributed to entries in Daniels’s diary. In some instances, Daniels recorded the substance of Cora’s séances, during which a spirit guide would speak through her. On Feb. 21, 1866, for example, Daniels described a gathering that included Clara Barton and Frances Gage, and at which Cora Daniels channeled the spirit of Theodore Parker, who answered questions about the current political situation. “Parker” predicted “difficulty between The President & Congress & ‘ere long war will exist”; not an inaccurate portrait of the relationship between President Andrew Johnson and Republicans in Congress.

The Daniels frequently lectured on Spiritualism and the rights of African Americans. They traveled the Spiritualist circuit for Cora’s demonstrations, and Nathan wrote newspaper reports and editorials of a largely political nature both with his own name and under the pseudonym “Viator.” A number of Daniels’s articles are preserved as newspaper clippings in a scrapbook included in the online collection.

But what of Daniels’s new job as register in Louisiana that served as his birthday present on May 10, 1867? Daniels’s last diary entry, May 29, 1867, recorded that he and his family had reached New Orleans that evening. “Darling wife is delighted with the country & I trust now that health and prosperity may be accorded to us.” It was not to be. A “Viator” article in the June 19, 1867 issue of the Rochester (New York) Express mentioned cases of cholera in New Orleans, and a fear that “the extremely filthy and unclean condition of our canals and suburbs, will generate an epidemic of yellow fever and cholera together.” Yellow fever did in fact break out in New Orleans that fall. Col. Nathan W. Daniels died of yellow fever on Oct. 2, 1867, and his young daughter Henrietta (born Sept. 27, 1866) died shortly after her father. Cora too became ill, but survived.

Cora Daniels married Col. Samuel F. Tappan (1831-1913) in 1869, but divorced him in 1876 to marry William Richmond, a member of her First Society of Spiritualists congregation in Chicago, Illinois. Cora must have forgotten, however, that Nathan Daniels’s diaries and scrapbook remained in the attic of the Tappan home in Manchester, Massachusetts. They were later discovered by C. P. Weaver, the great-granddaughter of Samuel Tappan’s sister. In 1998, Weaver published “Thank God My Regiment an African One: The Civil War Diary of Colonel Nathan W. Daniels,” which covered the January to September 1863 portion of the first volume of the diary. Weaver later donated to the Library of Congress the three volumes of Daniels’s diary, the scrapbook and summaries and transcripts she prepared of the unpublished diaries.

Just in time for Col. Daniels’s 180th birthday, these materials are all available online for the first time… “a very acceptable birthday present” for the nation.

Trending: The Mother of Mother’s Day

(The following article by Audrey Fischer is from the May/June 2016 issue of the Library of Congress Magazine, LCM, soon to be available here. In the meantime, make sure to catch up on all our editions!)

One West Virginia daughter succeeded in memorializing mothers everywhere.

Anna M. Jarvis, 1864-1948, half length portrait, facing slightly right. Prints and Photographs Division

Greeting cards, flowers, candy, dining out—Mother’s Day is big business. Sales figures for the popular retail holiday topped $20 billion in the U.S. last year.

No one was more dismayed by the commercialization of Mother’s Day than Anna Jarvis (1864-1848), the woman who spearheaded the effort to memorialize mothers more than a century ago.

The ninth of 11 children, Jarvis was born in Webster, West Virginia on May 1, 1864. Her mother, Ann Reeves Jarvis, was a social activist who founded Mothers’ Day Work Clubs to combat poor health and sanitation conditions in the area. Only four of her children survived to adulthood. The others succumbed to such diseases as measles, typhoid fever and diphtheria, which were common in Appalachian communities. She also led her community’s effort to tend to wounded soldiers—the Blue and the Gray—during the Civil War.

After the war, Mrs. Jarvis continued to unite the deeply divided community by spearheading “Mothers Friendship Day” for the families of Confederate and Union soldiers. During one of her Sunday school lessons, she told the children that she hoped and prayed someone would devote a day to honor mothers.

The sentiment wasn’t lost on her daughter. Following her mother’s death on May 9, 1905, Anna began a campaign to honor her mother and mothers everywhere. Three years later, Andrews Methodist Episcopal Church in Grafton, West Virginia, was the site of the first official Mother’s Day celebration. The church has since been designated the “International Mother’s Day Shrine.”

The Mother With Children statue by William Douglas Hopen, outside the International Mother’s Day Shrine, at the Andrews Methodist Episcopal Church in Grafton, West Virginia. Photo by Carol Highsmith. Prints and Photographs Division.

Jarvis continued to campaign for a national holiday. Her efforts culminated in legislation passed by Congress and signed by President Woodrow Wilson on May 9, 1914, that declared flags be flown “on the second Sunday in May as a public expression of our love and reverence for the mothers of our country.” The first national celebration was held on May 10, 1914.

A victim of her movement’s success, Jarvis spent much of the rest of her life railing against the increasing commercialization of the holiday all over the world. Her protests, which began first with florists, escalated to arrests for public disturbances. She even took First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt to task for using the holiday to promote the health and welfare of women and children—a cause that her mother championed. Increasingly erratic, Jarvis died in a sanitarium in 1948.

FUN FACT

Mother’s Day is a singular possessive because Anna Jarvis intended for the holiday to honor “the best mother who ever lived, yours.”

MORE INFORMATION

Research Mother’s Day in Historic Newspapers

New Online: Walt Whitman, Heritage Months & Blogs

(The following is a guest post by William Kellum, manager in the Library’s Web Services Division.)

DIGITIZED COLLECTIONS

New online this month are two manuscript collections featuring the poet Walt Whitman. The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of Walt Whitman papers consists of approximately 3,000 items spanning the period 1842-1937. Most of the items date from 1855, when Whitman first published the poem “Leaves of Grass,” to his death at age 73 in 1892. The online presentation includes correspondence, poetry and prose manuscripts, notes and notebooks, proofs and offprints, printed matter and miscellaneous items. The collection is accompanied by articles related to Whitman’s notebooks, describing how the poet used them to capture his thoughts and words; the repair and conservation work done at the Library; and the story of how four of the notebooks were returned to the Library 50 years after they mysteriously disappeared from the institution’s manuscript collections.

1888 printed copy of Whitman’s “O Captain! My Captain!” with Whitman’s handwritten corrections. Manuscript Division.

The Walt Whitman Papers (Miscellaneous Manuscript Collection) has some 150 items, including some of Whitman’s earliest known correspondence, and a printed copy of Whitman’s poem “O Captain! My Captain!” containing the poet’s handwritten corrections.

USER FEATURES

We’re always looking for ways to make the digital collections easier to use. This month, we’ve added new features to the digital collections portal, including the ability to use facets to filter by format, subject and the Library division that manages the content. For example, this link shows you American history-related digital collections from the Prints and Photographs Division. In the coming months, we’ll be adding additional features for working with collections.

HERITAGE MONTHS

The Asian-Pacific American Heritage Month and Jewish American Heritage Month sites provide new content, as well as a new mobile-friendly visual design, a new video player and more. The Library provides the heritage month sites in collaboration with the National Archives and Records Administration, National Endowment for the Humanities, National Gallery of Art, National Park Service, Smithsonian Institution and United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

NEW BLOG

Finally, we add a new blog to our growing family – 4 Corners of the World Blog: International Collections and Studies. A joint project of the Library’s four area studies divisions — African and Middle Eastern, Asian, European and Hispanic – the blog will focus on the Library’s international collections, which comprise millions of items from ancient cuneiform tablets right up to materials from the present day.

Library in the News: April 2016 Edition

April headlines covered a wide range of stories about the Library of Congress.

Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera continues to make the news, especially with the April announcement of his returning for a second term.

Herrera told Sara Catania of Reuters that poetry fans provided an “inspiration tsunami” during his first year in which he shepherded a crowd-sourced poem and addressed high-profile tragedies.

For his second term, he told Ron Charles of The Washington Post that he’s considering a “superhero story for children” that they would assist in writing online in addition to outreach to young people with special needs.

Speaking to his hometown newspaper the Fresno Bee Herrera said there was much more work to be done and that he was grateful and honored to be reappointed.

Mentalfloss offered 10 facts about the Poet Laureate position for Poetry Month in which they highlighted Herrera’s second term.

Also “returning” to the Library was the StoryCorps mobile recording booth, which has been on tour since 2005. The Library of Congress is the repository for the oral histories collected as part of the project, which launched in 2003. Kicking off the Library tour stop was WAMU’s Diane Rehm and her son David. Washingtonian covered the event.

The Library has certainly honored and hosted its fair share of notable individuals through the years. In April, the institution celebrated writer Mario Vargas Llosa and awarded him its Living Legend Award.

“Living, yes, I think I am living,” he told the crowd at the festivities on Monday night (as reported in the New York Times). “Not a legend.”

And, putting the spotlight on the Library of Congress itself was Ryan Cooper for The Week.

“It’s a place where you feel the weight of history pressing down,” he wrote. “‘Is this tweet really the best use of your time?’ it says. ‘Shouldn’t you be unraveling the mysteries of the universe, or writing the next great American novel?’ … “Under the dome of the Main Reading Room — as with the Capitol Rotunda — the demand to live up to the national ancestors is almost palpable.”

Pic of the Week: StoryCorps Makes a Stop

NPR host Diane Rehm and her son David conduct an interview in the StoryCorps MobileBooth. Photo by Shawn Miller.

In May 2005, two StoryCorps MobileBooths left the Library of Congress to travel across the United States—one taking an Eastern route and the other covering the Western states. This inaugural tour stopped at 34 cities, and visits lasted two and three weeks, with about 100 interviews collected at each location.

The MobileBooth returned to the Library earlier this month, 11 years after it began its journey, for a five-week stay, where it will record oral histories of residents from the Washington, D.C. area. An Airstream trailer outfitted with a recording studio, the booth is at the Library through May 18. Reservations for interviews are required and can be made by calling 1-800-850-4406 or online at storycorps.org.

The brainchild of MacArthur Fellow Dave Isay, StoryCorps was launched in 2003 as a national initiative to instruct and inspire individuals to record oral histories and create meaningful personal experiences for the participants. The Library’s American Folklife Center (AFC) serves as the permanent home for those recordings.

Welcome to the Newest Blog, 4 Corners of the World

Today we welcome the newest member of the Library’s blogosphere: 4 Corners of the World.

Dedicated to showcasing the international collections and studies at the Library of Congress, the blog will highlight important research resources and rare treasures from the Library’s four area studies divisions — African and Middle Eastern, Asian, European and Hispanic.

The term “four corners” is used in many languages to represent social and cultural diversities around the globe. The four corners are represented by the Library’s four area studies divisions. Coincidentally, today the four divisions occupy the four corners of the Library’s elegant domed Thomas Jefferson Building.

Stay tuned for more posts, and make sure to subscribe to 4 Corners of the World and other Library blogs for more great content!

Paying the Doctor in 18th-Century Philadelphia

(The following blog post is by Julie Miller, early American historian in the Manuscript Division.)

 How did 18th-century Americans pay for their medical care? A leather-bound volume of patient payments kept by Philadelphia physician William Shippen Jr. between 1775 and 1793 helps answer this question. The volume is in the Shippen Family Papers in the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress.

Advertisement for William Shippen Jr.’s course on midwifery, open to medical students and
women with “Virtue enough to own their Ignorance.” Pennsylvania Gazette, Jan. 31, 1765.

In Philadelphia, Shippen practiced medicine and taught anatomy, surgery and “man-midwifery” – as obstetrics was called when it was practiced by a man – for more than forty years, except for an interval during the Revolutionary War when he was director of hospitals for the Continental Army. His income came from his medical practice, teaching and also from his real estate transactions, which are also documented in the Shippen Family Papers.

Shippen’s income was bolstered by two medical innovations: inoculation for smallpox and the obstetrics training he had received in England. Smallpox inoculation was available in Philadelphia by the 1730s, but it wasn’t until the 1750s, after an outbreak, that Philadelphians began to adopt it as a regular preventive practice. The result was a rising level of immunity in the population and a significant decline in incidences of smallpox. Historian Sarah Blank Dine, who has written extensively about William Shippen, points out that Philadelphians’ adoption of smallpox inoculation was a watershed for the city’s doctors, since it gave them the opportunity to provide an income-generating service to families on a nonemergency basis. (I would like to thank Sarah Dine for kindly sharing an unpublished conference paper with me.)

Delivering babies had a similar effect on doctors’ incomes, since it too was a service frequently required by families. Male-midwifery, however, was a new idea at the beginning of Shippen’s career and it took decades to catch on. In colonial America, babies were normally delivered by female nurses and midwives without formal medical training. Doctors were typically called in to cope only when there were complications. This began to change in the 1780s as American doctors such as Shippen, who had been introduced to man-midwifery in Europe, finally won the confidence of families and began to attend routine deliveries.

Baker Henry Plettreman paid Dr. Shippen in bread for smallpox inoculations and other medical care for his family, 1786-1788. Shippen Family Papers, Manuscript Division.

Shippen organized his records by name of household head, with approximately 330 families represented. Each entry records visits, diagnoses, procedures, prescriptions, charges and payments and in many cases stretching over decades. His family connections, his acquaintance with George Washington dating from his service to the Continental Army and the presence of the national capital in Philadelphia during and after the Revolution meant that he had many patients who could pay “cash in full.”

One of these was Pennsylvania Chief Justice Thomas McKean, to whose daughter, Molly, Shippen paid an emergency nighttime visit in 1781. In 1784 he treated a Spanish diplomat, Don Francisco Rendon (for diarrhea, among other things – maybe American food disagreed with him) and also rented him a house, earning £350 for the year – much more than the £3.10 he earned for his medical services. In 1791 he visited President Washington to treat one of his slaves, Hercules. The same year he delivered one of the 12 children of Lucy Knox, wife of Secretary of War Henry Knox. Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson was another of Shippen’s patients.

Patients without ready cash paid Shippen with goods: coffee, tea, wine, and beer; lengths of muslin, linen, and calico; handkerchiefs, silk stockings, a tablecloth, looking glasses, crockery, a tea table. Sometimes Shippen took a chance on things of dubious or uncertain value: once he accepted a lottery ticket in payment; another time he took what he described as a “bad painting.”

People who had neither goods nor cash to spare paid in labor. Bakers paid in bread, carpenters with woodcraft, tallow chandlers with candles and a barber with “dressing, &c. [etc.]” Mr. Bates, “horseman,” housed Shippen’s mare in exchange for advice on his nephritis. Some people never paid. After the name of one patient Shippen wrote “bankrupt,” after another, “gone.”

Shippen convinced a few of his wealthier patients to pay in advance with annual contracts not unlike the “concierge” plans that some doctors offer today. In January 1789, he recorded that General Stewart “agrees to pay me 15 guineas p[er]. annum for my advice & attend[an]ce &c.” Another patient, William Whiteside, agreed to the same arrangement, but had a hard time keeping up. He paid in two installments, supplementing his cash with tea and muslin. After two years he dropped the contract and resumed paying for individual services.

Because the volume is organized by family, it reveals who belonged to each household Shippen visited. Eighteenth-century households typically included not only husbands, wives and children, but also apprentices, servants and slaves. Many of these household members were legal dependents of the husband, father and master. So, for example, in 1783, Ralph Izard, a South Carolina representative to the Continental Congress, paid for medical care for his “man Frank.”

Husbands and fathers paid for wives and children but sometimes the lines of money and power in a family were unexpectedly complex. In 1783, for example, Shippen visited the family of coachman Henry Otto several times, mostly to treat his wife, who Shippen does not name. As head of household, Otto paid Shippen in washing. But women did laundry, not men. Thus it is likely that Mrs. Otto paid for her own medical care with her own labor, which her husband, as her master, owned.

Harder to work out are cases where people paid for the medical care of others outside their households. In 1789 Shippen cared for Elizabeth Hayes Darby through an illness that involved 10 visits, two “operations” and “tapping.” Darby is one of only a few women listed on her own in the records, so she was probably a widow or a spinster. In 1792 a member of the Lloyd family paid her bill of £15. The Lloyds were related to the Shippens. Could Shippen have approached a wealthy relative of his own to pay Darby’s bill? The volume doesn’t say. What it does reveal are clues about the networks of relationships that tied the city together through family, friendship and mutual obligation but also through social hierarchies that made servants, slaves and the poor dependent upon the self-interest or uncertain goodwill of the better-off.

It is worth asking just what Dr. Shippen’s patients got from him in exchange for their tea urns, tablecloths and “cash in full.” Shippen’s training in anatomy probably made him adept at repairing the dislocated wrists and broken bones he saw. But like all 18th-century doctors he purged and dosed his patients with drugs that probably did more harm than good. His smallpox inoculations protected many Philadelphians from a terrible disease. But during the epidemics of yellow fever that struck Philadelphia in the 1790s he, like every other Philadelphia physician, was helpless. When the epidemic first appeared in 1793, half of the population, including Shippen’s patients Thomas Jefferson and the Washingtons, left the city; about one-tenth of the population, many of them working people who did not have the means to flee, died. Shippen may have saved some mothers and babies from death during childbirth, but childbirth and infancy remained risky in the 18th century. Of the 12 children Lucy Knox gave birth to, nine died before they grew up.

Miss Rhea, July, 1790. Shippen Family Papers, Manuscript Division.

And what about poor Miss Rhea, who he charged £7.10 for “extirpating tumor and dressing”? When she suffered this illness in 1790, Rhea still owed Shippen money from 1785 and 1786. He recorded her new charges but not that she paid. Evidently a spinster, she lived outside the protective, if controlling, canopy of a family. I wish it was possible to snatch Miss Rhea out of the 18th century and transport her to the office of a 21st-century oncologist, insurance card in hand. There she would not only have a chance to get well but to have the dignity of paying her bill, wiping out the unpaid debt that remains to this day in Shippen’s records.

Today the cost of medical care and who will pay for it are at the center of national debates. In the 18th century, as Shippen’s records show, they were worked out privately between doctor and household head. With no pool of insurance premiums to draw on, Shippen’s flexibly adapted to his patients’ abilities to pay. But the records also show that access to medical care was dependent on who could pay for you if you could not pay for yourself. In a perilous medical environment it was a chancy and deeply inequitable system that relied on social hierarchies and ties of dependency that were out of joint with the vision of equality that Shippen heard debated in Revolutionary and early national Philadelphia.