Special Collections

1997 SIL / Dibner Library Resident Scholars

Mart Stewart and Kathleen Crowther-Heyck in the Dibner Library

Three resident scholars were supported by The Dibner Fund this year to conduct research in the history of science and technology.

Kathleen Crowther-Heyck, a doctoral student at Johns Hopkins University, reported, “This summer I explored the Dibner Library's collection of sixteenth-century German vernacular medical books. This collection, which includes medical compendia, pharmacopoeias, surgical texts, plague tracts, midwifery and gynecology texts, and infant- and child-care manuals, contains a representative sample of the hundreds of printed vernacular medical books. These books, accessible to an audience literate in the vernacular but not in Latin, both reflected and shaped literate lay views of the body. In my dissertation I argue that vernacular medical books were not simply practical manuals about the maintenance and restoration of health, but rather they articulated complex and multi-layered understandings of the body. In doing so they reflected broader contemporary concerns about the relationship between body and soul, and between human beings and God, giving insight into the 16th-century German public's ways of thinking about the body.”

Mart Stewart, Associate Professor of History at Western Washington University, spent five weeks in the Dibner Library, doing research for part of a book-length project, A Cultural History of Climate in America. Dr. Stewart noted, “I worked mainly with the Dibner Library's extensive collection of books about nineteenth-century American world's fairs, to develop a discussion of the self-representations of the Signal Service and the U.S. Weather Bureau at several world's fairs and the cultural context of these representations. I also surveyed the Dibner Library's long run of almanacs (ca. 1650-1900) for weather prognostications, poems about climate and the seasons, and weather lore, to study the changing (and unchanging) manner in which views of the weather and of climate were presented in this popular medium. I used a range of materials in other branches of the Smithsonian Libraries as well as several books in the Dibner Library that relate to the study of meteorology in the nineteenth century, especially those by Sir John Herschel.”

Both Crowther-Heyck and Stewart were invited speakers at the National Museum of American History's Tuesday Colloquium where Ms. Crowther-Heyck's talk was on “Mirrors of Medicine: Vernacular Medical Texts in 16th-Century Germany,” and Dr. Stewart's presentation was on “Climate and Culture in Nineteenth-Century America.” The two Resident Scholars also addressed the Libraries' staff at informal brown-bag lunches on the materials they used in the Dibner Library.

Information will carry a note in the next issue by Ann Marie Petrov, the third 1997 scholar in the SIL/Dibner Library Resident Scholar Program.

Book Published

Bonnie Sousa, Dibner Library Technician, and Mart Stewart in the renovated stacks of compact shelving in the Dibner Library.

Sara Schechner Genuth, a 1997 Dibner Library Resident Scholar, has published a book based on research completed during her fellowship. Comets, Popular Culture, and the Birth of Modern Cosmology (Princeton, 1997) explores human belief about comets, ranging from ancient lore that sightings signaled the coming of wars, earthquakes, and other natural disasters, to less apprehensive views in the 17th century following the discoveries of Isaac Newton and Edmond Halley. Dr. Schechner Genuth holds a B.A., M. Phil., and Ph.D. in the history of science. She has worked as associate curator for the history of astronomy collection at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago, and has published widely.

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