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The James Harvey Young papers (opening soon) will be an exciting new addition to the Emory University Archives holdings. The collection contains manuscripts, correspondence, research, teaching materials, and a multitude of records pertaining to Emory University committees and governance.
 
Dr. James Harvey Young was born in New York in 1915, though spent most of his childhood in Indiana and Illinois. He graduated from Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois, where he developed an interest in health fraud and quackery. After obtaining his Ph.D. in history from the University of Illinois, he took a teaching position at Emory in 1941, where he would stay until his retirement in 1984. He served as a member on multiple committees, oversaw 37 doctoral dissertations (an Emory record), and served as head of the history department for nearly a decade, all while teaching and continuing his research on food and drug regulation and medical quackery. He continued to research, write, and speak publicly on issues surrounding health and consumer protection until his death in 2006.
   

Some highlights of the collection are manuscripts and drafts of Dr. Young’s most celebrated works, The Toadstool Millionaires, The Medical Messiahs, and Pure Food, which served as the go-to reference book for the early history of the Food and Drug Administration in America. The James Harvey Young papers will also be an asset to social historians. Given the decades-long span of personal correspondence, it will be a valuable resource in examining the changing nature of personal and familial communication, both in terms of content, writing style, and the technologies implemented to stay connected. We are pleased to bring this content to MARBL researchers.

NOTE: The James Harvey Young papers are currently closed to researchers. Please contact marbl@emory.edu for questions about the collection.

Excerpt from Seamus Heaney hand-edited typescript

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As a classicist, I am accustomed to working with limited information.

The works that survived the last 2000 years from Greece and Rome did not come to us entirely intact, and I have frequently dealt with gaping holes, questionable validity, and alternate versions of texts.

So, when it came to time to choose my career path, I made it my goal to do my part in the tradition that allowed great works to survive, intact, into the future.

With those thoughts in mind, the summer between my sophomore and junior years, I secured a job in MARBL. My responsibilities were simple, as expected for an untried undergraduate - reshelving materials and running photocopies for researchers. Now, those tasks were not the most riveting things I had ever done, but materials themselves made my job interesting and exciting. And while the rare and and old books called to my soul with their history and beauty, it is the personal papers of MARBL's collection that unexpectedly caught my attention.

Over the three summers that I worked at MARBL, thousands of papers from hundreds of collections passed through my hands. I read letters from both northern and southern soldiers during the Civil War. I glanced through family accounts from the 18th century. I saw Billie Holiday's tax returns. I went through typescripts hand edited by Seamus Heaney and screenplays by Salman Rushdie. I copied greeting cards and post cards and invitations and scrapbooks and pencil drawings. I came to realize that these minutiae of daily life give a rounded view of these people, and collectively, they provide snapshots of the lives of both ordinary and extraordinary individuals. Buried in these papers wasn't just the works of the authors, but the authors themselves.

Before I worked in MARBL, my focus was purely on finished, published, traditionally valuable texts - great novels and poems and art. Now, however, I see that there is so much more information that should be saved. The scholarly concept of ancient society is profoundly limited by the types of texts that have survived, which are almost exclusively the published writings of the upper elite. MARBL has taught me that there is real value to having more information of different kinds, glimpses into the personal lives of people from all backgrounds and all social classes. If these types of works can be preserved for the future, then those who come after us can have the context that we lack. They will have a better understanding of who we are and what our lives are truly like. Working at MARBL has shifted my goal from merely preserving works to preserving lives. Thank you, MARBL (and MARBL staff!), for three wonderful summers and for helping me find my path forward into the future.

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MARBL was fortunate to recently receive a fascinating and rather gruesome gift in the form of the Atlas of the Diseases of the Skin by H. Radcliffe Crocker, published in Edinburgh in 1896. This large format work is lavishly illustrated with color depictions of many stomach-turning skin diseases.

Warts, Atlas of the Diseases of the Skin, 1896

Before the ability to reproduce color photographs scientific atlases such as this were used as reference books for the education of physicians. MARBL’s copy is particularly special due to its condition and housing. Initially the work does not look like a book at all as it is housed in a very large and heavy wooden box. Opening the box reveals not the expected two bound volumes but the work as it was originally issued in 16 parts each bound in a cheap paper cover. Copies in original parts like this are rare as they were meant to be bound together in two volumes once the set was complete. Title pages for both volumes were included in the final part. The reason why the original owner, a Dr. Webb Fowler of Coventry, England, had an expensive box fabricated rather than having them bound is unknown but he undoubtedly wanted to protect the substantial investment the set represented.

Outside of Box Holding the
Atlas of the Diseases of the Skin, 1896

Inside of Box Holding the
Atlas of the Diseases of the Skin, 1896

At one guinea or 21 shillings each, the entire set cost sixteen guineas or over £6,000 in today’s money, based on comparing average earnings. This work also represents a limitation of digitized images of books- it would be hard to digitally capture the splendid wooden box!