About thirteen months ago, I started this blog to keep my friends, colleagues and family updated about the work I was doing. As I have been blogging for over a year now and as I am going to discuss history blogs on a panel this week, it is time to reflect on how it all started, what it has brought me, and what the future looks like. I was inspired to start a blog of my own by Lindsey Fitzharris’ brilliant blog The Chirurgeon’s Apprentice, although I by no means intended to copy what she is doing, nor did I expect to generate the same kind of success. Lindsey has, amongst other things, gone on to appear in a variety of media, writing for the Huffington Post and crowd funding her own television series. However amazing all this is, it just would not be right for me (the camera doesn’t love me, for starters).

However, blogs are a useful medium for a historian whatever your ambitions are. As a reader of history blogs, I can say they give me a quick and enjoyable insight in what colleagues are working on, enabling me to contact them easily if I am working on something similar, or have some information that might be useful to them. Some of my favourites are:

• Joanna Ebenstein, founder of the Morbid Anatomy Library and Cabinet in Brooklyn, New York, runs the Morbid Anatomy blog, a wonderful overview of anatomical collections and events: http://morbidanatomy.blogspot.nl
• Gemma Angel’s blog on the history of tattoos: http://lifeand6months.com
• The Alienist’s Compendium, a blog on a variety of medico-legal, historical, and scientific topics written by a director of mental health services for the American state prison system: http://alienistscompendium.com
• Professor Anita Guerrini’s blog, mainly on her work on the history of animal anatomy but also on current events and conferences: http://anitaguerrini.com/anatomia-animalia/
• The Recipes Project blog, a collective of scholars interested in the history of recipes, ranging from magical charms to veterinary remedies: http://recipes.hypotheses.org
• Shells and Pebbles, an Anglo-Dutch history of science blog: http://shellsandpebbles.wordpress.com
• The Giant’s Shoulders, a monthly science blogging event, in which authors are invited to submit posts on topics in the history of science: http://ontheshouldersofgiants.wordpress.com
• The blog of the London Wellcome Library for the History of Medicine:  http://blog.wellcomelibrary.org

If you look at these blogs you may be surprised to find that they vary wildly: some are personal projects, some are collectives or institutional blogs, some appear weekly, others incidentally. There are blogs that feature journal article-length pieces, while there are also blogs (like my own) that rely on shorter pieces. One is not necessarily better than the other, although it is good to realise that a certain format will be more likely to draw a particular audience.

For me, writing my blog is valuable in itself, as it allows me to share finds that do not fit entirely in a ‘real’ publication, as well as to share work in progress. Moreover, blogging helps me to reflect on my own work and to communicate it to a variety of people. My research is funded with public money, so I feel obliged to show the public what I am doing with it. Obviously I could simply refer to my print publications on my faculty page, but I want to share my work more frequently, more directly, and with a broader audience. In comparison to others, mine is a small, rather unpretentious blog, but still people from seventy countries have viewed it over 4,000 times in the past year.

Apart from the fact that it is nice to know that my parents and someone in Japan read my blog, it has also brought me into contact with people whom I otherwise never would have met, like Tamara Varney. My blog also got me invited as a guest blogger with The Recipes Project and I regularly receive emails from other academics, as well as from journalists and people who are simply interested in one of the topics I write about who ask questions, have helpful suggestions, or who want to share some of their work with me. Finally, the blog serves as a business card: often people look one another up on the internet before meeting at a conference, and a blog gives a quick impression of the work you’re doing.

I know I am probably not using the full potential of my blog yet; I could improve on tagging and categorizing, and might be able to use my posts more strategically. Yet the foundations are there, and as James M. Banner Jr. points out in his book Being a Historian. An introduction to the professional world of history:

“Fortunately, there is some evidence that the readership of serious history blogs, infinite in prospect, is, while small in comparison to those on popular subjects, an attentive one spanning the world. Whether this audience can help make history blogging an accepted, respectable means of communicating historical knowledge among both amateurs and professionals remains to be seen. But no one concerned with the future of historical communication can afford to ignore this new use of a young medium.”[1]

Next week, I am going on holiday to Indonesia – a long-cherished dream coming true. Of course I am excited about the prospect of exotic markets, vibrant cities, meeting new people, stunning landscapes and drinking cocktails on a palm-rimmed beach. But I am also very curious about what remains to be seen of the Dutch colonial period, as I have read that most of what remains in terms of colonial architecture and archives is ‘crumbling.’ The upcoming trip reminded me of a number of publications on Dutch trade and scientific activities in the colonial era in what was called ‘Oost-Indië’ (East India) or ‘de gordel van smaragd’ (the emerald girdle).

Between 1602 and 1795, the Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie (United East India Company, VOC) imported great amounts of a variety of goods from what is now Indonesia, such as tea, coffee, ginger, cinnamon, nutmeg, and tin. Many of these goods had some kind of medicinal purpose. Nutmeg for example, was not just appreciated as a spice, but also for its hallucinogenic properties, which were used to keep slaves calm during the long, arduous sea journeys. Although excessive use could cause deliria and even death, nutmeg was a sought-after commodity among medical men and even appeared in preparations of human anatomy sometimes.[1] Yet the Dutch stationed in Batavia (now Jakarta) also wanted to have traditional European cures at hand, and many pills, potions, salves, and herbal plasters had to be made afresh as they could not be kept for long.

“The Castle and the Laboratory at Batavia” From: Batavia de
hoofdstad van
Neêrlands O. Indien, Amsterdam, 1782. Courtesy of the Nationaal Archief.

In a fascinating article on VOC laboratories that I read in a Dutch popular history magazine last year, Jeroen Bos shows that for these purposes, the VOC maintained at least two medical laboratories in Batavia. One was an independent ‘medicinal shop,’ a sort of apothecary shop; the other was the city hospital laboratory. A third laboratory was linked to the artillery and only produced gunpowder. Unlike the contemporary chemical laboratories at the universities of Utrecht and Leiden , the laboratories in Batavia were not aimed at chemistry research, but primarily at the production of drugs and quality control of the products the VOC acquired in the region, such as cinnamon and quicksilver. Unfortunately, hardly any detailed information about the lay out of the laboratories and exactly what was made and tested in them remains.

Andreas Weber’s dissertation

The VOC ceased to exist on December 31st, 1799, as it had run into financial trouble. Yet the Dutch would continue to occupy parts of Indonesia until it became independent in 1945. (Actually, the Dutch occupied parts of Indonesia even longer, until 1949 – a particular painful and unflattering period in our history) Between 1800 and 1945, East India continued to be a source of fascination for researchers working for the Dutch government. German Caspar G.C. Reinwardt (1773-1854) for example, spend about seven years collecting data on the administration, nature and economy of Java, initiated reforms of its public health services and the education system, and established a botanical garden at Buitenzorg, just outside Batavia, where rare and potentially economically interesting plants were cultivated. As my colleague Andreas Weber has vividly described in his book on Reinwardt, the king obliged him to collect rare specimens for the Dutch Cabinet of Natural History on his field trips, and Reinwardt also employed other to amass natural history collections.[2]

Another colleague, Fenneke Sysling, in her 2013 thesis on physical anthropology in the Dutch East Indies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, argues that ideas about race were both made and broken in the colonies.[3] Even today, some Dutch museums have uncomfortably large collections of skulls, skeletons, measurements and photographs of indigenous people, collected to answer the great anthropological questions of the time. How many different races were there in the archipelago, how were they divided over the islands? Questions that could never really be answered of course, but nonetheless the research was done for decades, and could only be done because of the often-violent Dutch colonial presence in the archipelago.

With this knowledge, I will walk around the remains of Batavia. I am not exactly proud of Dutch colonial history, but I am grateful that my colleagues and I have the opportunity to research it. Indonesia has had a huge influence on Dutch trade and science over the centuries (not to mention on Dutch society, but that is another story), one that we should not forget, even if the physical remains of Dutch colonialism slowly disappear from the country.

This week, when I was researching some sources on late seventeenth-century iatrochemistry, I ran across a reference to the work of Philip Verheyen (1648-1710), a farmhand-turned-anatomist. I had never heard of him before, but thought his work might be interesting for me, so I did what every person, including an academic, does these days: I googled him. And clicked the first link: a Wikipedia page. A bit surprised that a quite detailed Wikipedia page in English, complete with painted portrait was dedicated to a relatively obscure seventeenth-century Flemish anatomist, I started reading. It all seemed genuine enough, with references to the work of known Dutch historians of medicine such as Lindeboom. Until I read that Verheyen had dissected his own leg and suffered phantom pains after it was amputated, and that this

‘…prompted him to take up a career in anatomy in order to probe and understand this phenomenon and also write the deeply personal series of notes (1700-1710) that may be translated either as “Notes on My Amputated Leg,” or “Letters to My Amputated Leg,” the former seeming more probable, while the latter is more in keeping with the tone of the notes.’

Verheyens 1693 ‘Corporis Humani Anatomia’ was reprinted 21 times and translated in several languages.

I bet you clicked the link to the Letters, didn’t you? I did! And it’s a stub. Some people may now think ‘well, duh, of course, you shouldn’t just believe everything that’s on Wikipedia.’ Obviously you shouldn’t (as I keep stressing when I’m lecturing too), but by now I have read so many weird and wonderful things about early modern medicine and chemistry that a small part of me still wondered whether there was some truth to this story. So I looked Verheyen up in Picarta (the Dutch national library catalogue, a sort of Worldcat). He did indeed exist, wrote quite some interesting things on anatomy, but no letters to his leg. The other references I could check online do mention the amputated leg, but no dissection or letters.

Then I continued reading the Wikipedia page and noticed that the author says that Verheyen studied at the Leids Universitair Medisch Centrum – indeed an existing institution, but a profoundly twentieth-century institution. A bit annoyed with this nonsense now, I scrolled back up and had a closer look at the ‘painting’ of Verheyen dissecting his own leg. Now I immediately saw it was not a painting at all, but a digitally composed image – I actually recognized ‘Verheyen’ as one of the onlookers in Tulp’s Anatomical lesson. When I magnified the image, I noticed the bare ‘stump’ of the leg under the table, and couldn’t help laughing. Someone had put a lot of thought into this!

Rembrandt, The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp , 1632. Oil on canvas. Mauritshuis, The Hague.

Philip Verheyen Dissecting His Amputated Leg. According to Wikipedia: “Anonymous. From the collection of Pieter Deheijde.”

Back to Google, I found that the sixth hit was a link to a project of a New York-based artist, Sreshta Rit Premnath. It turns out that the ‘painting’ and the entire Wikipedia page on Verheyen are part of an art project. In a response to a message written by someone who did not notice the inconsistencies, Premnath readily admits that the Wiki is largely fictitious, and the portrait a digital creation. Yet it is not some silly joke; Premnath raises some serious questions with this project. As he puts it himself:

‘Do we not all perceive the world through images that are given to us through books and media; and through the socio-political contexts in which we are brought up? The painting “Philip Verheyen Dissecting His Own Amputated Leg” does not actually exist. It is a composite image I have created in order to explore this fragility of truth and authenticity.’

I think the way Premnath has chosen to raise these questions is quite brilliant, as even people who are generally considered to be relatively smart and critical-minded (historians like myself, the author of the message Premnath is responding to – who is apparently a medical doctor) are initially willing to believe that Verheyen really dissected his own leg and wrote letters to it. This may seem silly, but on the other hand open-mindedness is also required to be a good academic. This balancing of open-mindedness and critical thinking also reminded me of another exploration of the fragility of truth and authenticity I really love: David Wilson’s Museum of Jurassic  Technology in Los Angeles. This museum leaves visitors wondering which of its exhibits are real – yet they are all wonderful. I had the pleasure of visiting the museum in 2010, but if you can’t, do read Lawrence Weschler’s Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder. Pronged Ants, Horned Humans, Mice on Toast, and Other Marvels of Jurassic Technology.

Although I admit I was a little annoyed when I initially discovered I was being ‘fooled’ with the Verheyen Wiki, I think projects like Premnath’s and Wilson’s are more than necessary to keep everyone, including, or maybe especially us academics, sharp and critical about what we understand as true and authentic and factual. Contemporary art can hold up a mirror, and show us how we often construct stories unthinkingly – and that it is the task of the historian to undo these constructions and think them through and reconstruct them into histories. Only to humbly realize that those histories are also stories, of course.

Last week (and much of the weeks before), as most of you in the northwest of Europe may have noted, it was hot. While I was in the UK and spent most of my time in thoroughly air-conditioned libraries, it did not bother me much. But then I came back home, and for all kinds of practical reasons it was more convenient to work from my decidedly un-air-conditioned, early twentieth-century house than to make the four-hour round trip commute to my office at the University of Groningen, or to hide in other libraries.

Professor Wouter van Doeveren, 1730-1783

So there I was. I was supposed to be writing a paper, but seemed to suffer from something I’ll unscientifically define as ‘cooked brain.’ Nothing sensible seemed to come out of my hands or mind. Maybe I should have gone to Groningen after all, as I suddenly remembered an oration by an eighteenth-century Dutch professor of anatomy who taught at Groningen and later at Leiden. Wouter van Doeveren (1730-1783) in 1770 gave an oration on the beneficial climate of the city of Groningen – it was his farewell to the city where he had worked for sixteen years.

Today, Dutch people still joke about the north of the Netherlands being colder than the south or even the middle, which seems rather ridiculous as the distances are tiny, the landscape is rather unvaried, and the entire country has a mild marine climate (Cfb in the Köppen-system). However, there is some truth to those quips: on the website of the Royal Dutch Meteorological Institute (KNMI), there are maps of the long-term average temperatures in the Netherlands, and these do show that on average, the west is about a degree Celsius or so warmer than the middle of the country, and the east is even a bit colder in winter, whereas in summer it is the other way around.  So although it is more of a west-east divide than the popular idea of a north-south divide suggests, there are climatological differences in this tiny country.

View of the city of Groningen from the side of the Aa gate (the Aa is a river), 1750-1850. The subscript reads: “This is Groningen, jewel of the history journals because of its heroics. Famous for its diligence and rich growth, it is called the country’s crown jewel.” Courtesy of Leiden University Library.

Van Doeveren had no KNMI maps, yet he did know that ‘the moderate marine climate of Groningen is beneficial for the body.’ The rather cool climate, according to his lecture, was good for people, as the cold enhances the solidity and resilience of the fibres of the body, strengthening it and thus multiplying the force of life.[1]  As he readily admitted, his ideas were based on the work of Hippocrates, who argued that studying the climate in various regions and cities and its influence on different bodies could provide information on the benefits of certain climates to human health.[2] However, Van Doeveren disappointedly noted that although the climate and the natural resources of Groningen made it a rather healthy place, the population still wrought havoc on itself by choosing a diet of ‘corned or smoked meat and fish, pickled vegetables, old and sharp cheese,’ and unhealthy drinks like ‘acerb, sharp wines, strong spirits, and watery extracts.’[3]

With Van Doeveren’s wise words in mind, I made a fresh salad and a jug of not-too-watery lemonade, put my fan on my desk, and got on with it. Next time we have a heat wave, I’ll take the salad and the lemonade to Groningen!

Previously, I have written about mercury and some other metals being used as drugs throughout the eighteenth century, and we have also seen that most physicians were well aware of the potential danger of metals to the human body. Some of them even actively warned against metals in their academic work. This week, I found a treatise by the Leiden professor of chemistry H.D. Gaub (1705-1780), which appeared in the transactions of the Dutch Science Society in 1754, on testing wine for lead.[1]

Lead poisoning was quite common in the early modern period, as lead was used in eating and cooking utensils, in water containers and in alcohol distillation equipment. Moreover, lead was sometimes deliberately added to wine to make it sweeter. This caused fast and severe, often lethal lead poisoning, that was also known as Poitou colic (after a particularly widespread case of lead poisoning by wine in the French city of Poitou in the 1720s) or painter’s colic  – painters were prone to lead poisoning because of the high levels of lead in many paints.[2]

A seventeenth century view of the Rhine Valley. The Latin legend reads: “is it sweet to drink bad/leaden (‘plumbea vina’) wine from a golden cup? – I’d rather drink good wine from a glass”. Source: http://www.nicks.com.au/Index.aspx?link_id=76.1221

By the mid-eighteenth century, it was commonly known that adding lead to wine was a dangerous practice, and as Gaub wrote, governments in wine-producing countries had set heavy penalties on it. However, his own tests revealed that even some of the Rhine and Moselle wines commonly drunk in the Netherlands contained lead anyhow. For a while, it was thought that lead could be detected in wine by mixing spiritus salis (hydrochloric acid) through it. But Gaub did his own tests and came to different conclusions.[3] It turned out that only lead dissolved in vinegar became visible as a white powder or turbidity when spiritus salis was added. Other forms of lead in wine, such as sugar of lead (lead acetate), lead white, minium (red lead), and lead oxide remained undetected.

The only reliable way to test wine for the presence of any form of lead, Gaub argued, was the already known method of using Atramentum Symphateticum, a tincture of arsenic sulphur and quicklime. In order to test wine for lead, a little wine was poured into a white cup and some drops of the Atramentum Symphateticum were added. If the wine went cloudy with a yellowish-red, brown or black colour, lead was present – the darker the colour the higher the lead contents. If the turbidity was whitish, there was no lead in it and it was safe to drink.

Gaub finished his treatise with some words of comfort. Although lead pollution did occur in Rhine and Moselle wines, it was not very common because of the laws and regulations in the German lands. Wine lovers should be wary of extremely sweet wines, as well as those that were uncharacteristically dark for their age, and wines of supposed high quality offered at a very low price. In case of doubt, they could rely on the Atramentum Symphateticum test, which, by the way, also worked for butter, which in times of scarcity was apparently also sweetened with lead.

This little treatise shows that an academic physician and chemist like Gaub also applied his knowledge for very practical purposes, and wanted to spread it for the common good. Moreover, it shows the historic realm of seemingly contemporary issues such as food safety and the relevance of science for society. Think about that, next time you have a glass of wine or put some butter on your bread!