Among recently published books that fall within our bailiwick, the editors of American Heritage have selected some outstanding titles.
Radios: The Golden Age
by Philip Collins; Chronicle Books; 119 pages.
You might have thought the golden age of radios was the 1920s, when Atwater Kent sold gleaming High Gothic burled-wood consoles the size of parlor organs, but the English aficionado Philip Collins isn’t interested in such musty classicism. For him, the best radios are the plastic ones manufactured from the 1930s to the 1950s, and this engaging book makes a good case for his point of view. During these years some six hundred manufacturers were struggling to make their radios look special. They drew on the talents of industrial designers like Raymond Loewy and Russell Wright, and more than a hundred of the results are marshaled here in a regular little 1939 World’s Fair of globes and ziggurats, their candy colors all glowing deliriously. Here is the definitively Moderne Air King of 1935—take away the lighted dial, and you have a swell Miami Beach hotel; here is the 1947 Porto Products Smokerette, with pipe rests hollowed out next to the dial; here is the 1940 Belmont Model 534, with the rounded snout of the streamlined locomotives of the day; here is the Mickey Mouse Model 411, made out of “Syroco wood”; here are a blazing blue-and-crimson 1947 Belmont and the 1940 Lumitone, which also serves as a lamp. The book isn’t heavy on text—there are just two pages—and yet the radios succeed so well at being objets d’art that the reader doesn’t miss it.
The Care of Strangers: The Rise of America’s Hospital System
by Charles E. Rosenberg; Basic Books; 437 pages.
When Thomas Jefferson was President, there were two hospitals in America, one in Philadelphia and one in New York, and to be accepted into one of them, a patient had to be judged morally worthy. A man with a venereal disease or an unwed pregnant woman need not apply. Nor did the hospitals aceept anyone with a “contagious” disease—including tuberculosis and cancer. Society leaders, esteemed for their high moral character, ran the hospitals, and no one questioned their Christian stewardship.
There wasn’t much hospitals could do for their patients anyway. They could offer food and shelter, a degree of cleanliness (high by the era’s standards, appalling by today’s), and a bed. At that time most of the sick were cared for at home, and society’s outcasts landed up in almshouses, which maintained a few beds for people to die in as well as serving as repositories for the destitute and insane.
In this important and highly readable book, Dr. Rosenberg, a prizewinning historian of medicine, traces the evolution of the American hospital from these medically primitive beginnings to the high-tech, vastly expensive system we have and complain about today. One of the most important elements in shaping the “texture of hospital life” was the professionalization of nursing. Florence Nightingale and her advocacy of cleanliness, order, and ventilation to prevent the dreaded complications then lumped together under the term hospitalism played a large part in this advance, as did hospital design as it developed during the Civil War.
Anesthesia, although accepted only slowly, relieved surgeons of the need to operate at breakneck speed while their agonized patients were forcibly restrained. And such new inventions as the stethoscope (also regarded somewhat suspiciously at first) proved useful in diagnosis.
It was not, however, until Joseph Lister in the late 1860s introduced his germ theory and his doctrine of antiseptic surgery that the possibilities of medicine exploded. Many doctors were slow to respond; as late as 1878 the editor of New York’s leading medical journal wrote that Lister “has a grasshopper in his head.” But during the half-century following Lister’s discoveries, the germ theory would “not only reshape the hospital but help transform every aspect of medicine.”
Dr. Rosenberg concludes that our present hospitals—highly and competitively technical and forbiddingly expensive—are considered unsatisfactory and inhumane by many Americans. The “discipline of the marketplace” will not necessarily protect the most vulnerable members of society, he concedes, but the problems cannot be blamed entirely on the medical system. “Health care policy will continue to reflect,” as it has since those first two hospitals at the beginning of the nineteenth century, “… our attitudes toward sickness and society.”
The Shakers: Hands to Work, Hearts to God
by Amy Stechler Burns and Ken Burns; Aperture, Inc.; 128 pages.
There is both beauty and surprise in this elegantly crafted book. Interspersed with splendid modern photographs and touching archival ones, a text—much more profound than most on the subject of the Shakers—describes the rise and demise of that amazing sect.
The Shakers are known mostly as a utopian society that was celibate, simple, determinedly clean, and given to oddly active religious observances, and both the adventurousness of their lives and the rigidity of their practice come as a surprise. The Shakers were inventors and innovators. At one of their Kentucky settlements, Pleasant Hill, they piped running water into their buildings for the first time in the area. Later, New Hampshire Shakers owned one of the first automobiles in the state and electrified their village while the state capital was still burning gas. They invented such items as the clothespin, the circular saw, “hair caps” for bald brethren, a washing machine, and a hernia truss. They never patented their devices, because they believed such possessiveness was selfish, and less altruistic outsiders made fortunes from their inventions. Their architecture was also ingenious. The famous Round Barn at Hancock Shaker Village in Massachusetts was designed for economy of labor. Since the Shakers “never saw any sense in fighting against gravity,” the barn is built into the side of a hill with entrances on three levels, enabling the farmer to stand in the center of the top floor and pitch hay down to the cattle ringed about below.
Almost from the beginning the Shakers proclaimed the equality of men and women, and in 1817 they condemned slavery, insisting that converts free any slaves they owned. The sect then welcomed such ex-slaves into their villages on a fully integrated basis.
Even stronger than the Shakers’ aversion to slavery was their devotion to pacifism. During the Civil War one of their elders went to Washington to plead for draft exemptions. Lincoln was impressed by the articulate Shaker. “We need regiments of such men as you,” he told him, but he granted the elder’s plea, making Shakers among the first conscientious objectors.
In contrast to their commercial and political progressiveness, their internal practice was rigid beyond understanding. For instance, they were given exact instructions on how bones should be piled on their plates after they had eaten; they always lined up in a prescribed order to enter a room, through separate male and female doorways, to the sound of a horn; they were required to step first on the right foot when going upstairs; and when they hitched up a team, the right-hand horse had to be harnessed first.
The Burnses are documentary film makers, and this book is based on a movie they have made about the Shakers. Fine color photographs of the pure, quiet rooms and neat villages, now open to the public as museums, give a powerful sense of what life was like for these dedicated people. As Thomas Merton said on seeing a Shaker chair, its “peculiar grace … is due to the fact that it was built by someone capable of believing that an angel might come and sit on it.”
