Browsing by Author "Beck, Emily"

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    The change that lies ahead: teaching the history of dentistry with rare materials
    (2023) Theis-Mahon, Nicole; Hendrickson, Lois; Miller, Ai; Opryszko, Anna; Beck, Emily
    Background: All year one dental students (105) have a two hour history of dentistry class as part of their professionalism course. In 2022 the course director invited the dental librarian and curators of the health sciences rare book collection to develop a new direction for this class. The librarian and curators wanted the class to be an engaging, relevant, active learning session for the students. They created a novel approach where groups of students engaged with historical materials. Class objectives were to understand dentistry’s past, present, and future; juxtapose history and progress; and reflect on the past and one’s place in dentistry. Description: The dental librarian collaborated with the course director to identify current themes in the dental literature to explore in class, including oral/systemic health; disparities; diversity, equity and inclusion; technology; consumerism; and oral healthcare settings. Curators from the rare books library identified over 100 print materials and artifacts from the late 19th and early 20th century related to the themes. Students were divided into groups of 8-10 and rotated through six themed tables using a World Cafe methodology. Each table had rare materials relevant to that theme and questions for the students to discuss. Questions were provided on large post-it notes and a Google form to provide multiple options for responding. Groups were asked to think about and discuss the questions within the context of the materials and the contemporary theme they were paired with. Thoughts were recorded on the post-it notes or entered into the Google form. An optional Qualtrics survey was distributed at the end of class to gauge their interest in the themes discussed, reflections of working with rare materials, if the class enhanced their understanding of the history of dentistry, and how the themes applied to their education and future as a dental practitioner. Conclusion: 80% (84/105) students responded to an optional Qualtrics survey. Results showed that the class stimulated students' interest in the history of dentistry, that they learned something new, they were going to share what they learned in the class, and that engaging with historical materials provided a different way of learning history. An open-ended question prompted students to reflect on the session and how it would apply to their education and future as a dental practitioner. Students made connections between the history of dentistry and evidence-based practice. This class presents a model that librarians can use to actively engage students and learners with historical themes in the health sciences, encouraging students to consider ways of improving future dental practice.
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    Communities Of Healing: Domestic Medicine And Society In Early Modern Italy
    (2018-04) Beck, Emily
    Many scholars have employed a variety of means to investigate the interactions between the range of people who practiced medicine in the early modern period, from charlatans and midwives to physicians and surgeons. These non-academic practitioners have been marginalized by previous histories of medicine, which reflect both their absence in contemporary printed works as well as the origins of the history of medicine as a field that prioritized finding the roots of modern medical practice. Recovering lay histories requires looking beyond printed treatises to working texts such as formularies, recipe collections, and other ephemera. This project investigates the form, movements, and activities of lay healers and their practices in the medical marketplace of early modern northern and central Italy. In this project, I propose that the anonymous manuscript medical recipe books of laypeople can be dissected to provide further information about not only interactions between healers, but also the theories, supplies, context, and educational practices of non-professional healers. Influenced by works in microhistory, chapters one, two, and three present focused investigations of small groups of manuscripts in order to contextualize the practice of medicine in northern and central Italy. Chapter one examines three manuscript recipe books written by a Capuchin monk, showing how laypeople drew on the rhetoric of printed medical books and offered medical education to their brethren. Chapter three also draws on these manuscripts, but turns to questions of the patient population that the author anticipated his practice would treat. Although information about specific patients is generally lacking in manuscript recipe books, focusing on recipes for women provides a rich set of information from which to draw conclusions about the medical interactions between clerical men and women in surrounding communities. Chapter two is a comparison of recipe writings in manuscript recipe books and in the first pharmacopoeia in Florence, the Ricettario Fiorentino. This comparison lends itself to enlivening how historians understand the ways knowledge changed, circulated, was adopted, or was ignored by both professional and lay healers from the late fifteenth to mid-sixteenth centuries. In chapter four, I claim that manuscript recipe books provide a rich source of information about the material context in which laypeople created medicines and healed their patients. Rather than allowing incongruent themes like veterinary medicine, beauty aids, and mischief to fall to the side for thematic consistency, this chapter asserts that examining all these manuscript recipe book entries together leads to a more holistic picture of the landscape of lay healing in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italy.