Musk is a secretion originating from the Asian musk deer. (1) Since ancient
times, it was used pharmaceutically or as a perfume. (2) Investigating how musk
has been documented in the 16th and 17th centuries helps us to understand the
development of medical studies in teaching and research in this period. (3)
In the second half of the 16th century and
because of its odor, musk had attracted the attention of the physician Conrad
Gessner (1516–1565). He documented the animal secretion in three of his many
encyclopedic collections written to prepare prospective medical doctors: In the
first part of his Historia Animalium on mammals he identified an Asian musk
deer’s gland as the source of musk secretion. He also described the African
civet as producer of a secretion of similar smell. (4) In his commentary on
Aristotle's book De Anima, Gessner used musk as an example of a substances
absorbed by the human sense of smell. In this book he discussed the seat and
operation of the five external senses, touch, taste, smell, hearing and seeing.
He gave musk a place as an object of smell between his two main categories, the
good-smelling and the malodorous. Gessner classified the smell ambivalently,
allowing it the faculty to be perceived in some circumstances/situations as a
good smell, in others as a bad smell. (5)
Gessner also mentioned musk in his Thesaurus Evonymus as
one of the ingredients of perfume. (6) The Thesaurus is about modes and
apparatus of distilling and describes the technological equipment required to
carry out chemical processes that mix and preserve scents. Gessner had
addressed his books to students of medicine and philosophy, and he described
the Thesaurus especially as a "physical, medical and partly chemical
book."
In all three of Gessner’s works touching on medical knowledge musk was listed as only one
of many substances. Only much later, in the later seventeenth century, did the
first book appear, based on a doctoral dissertation, that took musk as its sole
topic, and thus allowed a more thorough study of this secretion. In 1682 the
Augsburg physician, Lucas Schroeck, published the book "Historia
Moschi", on the history of musk, in his home town. (7) As he himself
wrote, he produced the book according to the rules (ad normam) of the Academia
naturae Curiosorum, the Scientific Academy established in Schweinfurt in 1652,
which he had joined in 1677. (8)
Historia Moschi emerged from Schroeck’s Jena dissertation
on musk. He defended his doctorate in 1567, the thesis was published in the
same year in Jena. (9) Chair of the dissertation committee was the Jena
professor of medicine Johann Theodor Schenck (1619–1671). Schenck had been
professor of anatomy and botany in Jena since 1553, and from 1663 he was also
professor of theoretical medicine. (10) His work included textbooks and
reference books on anatomy, dietetics and botany. (11) Some of the numerous
theses that emerged under his leadership at the University of Jena, specified
individual entries from medical encyclopedias, including the said work on musk
and a study in 1672 on cinnamon, that, like musk, counted among the substances
that produced medically used odors, this time from the field of botany. (12)
A comparison of Schroeck’s Academy-guided book with his
thesis on musk shows that the former expanded the information given in the
dissertation: While the dissertation had 93 pages, the book numbered 229 pages.
Both contained three images, but the academy book’s images were engravings of
higher quality, containing more detail than the three woodcuts of the
dissertation. The presentation of the gland, for example, was now very detailed
and much easier to identify.
Both the dissertation and the monograph quote Conrad
Gessner's Historia Animalium among many other ancient and contemporary authors
as their reference. While the dissertation presents its subject in an
organisation very similar to Gessner’s historia animalium with the animal and
its habitat at the beginning of the discussion, the academy-guided book is
re-organized to focus on the extraction of musk, and to include not only the gland
of the musk deer, but also other animals producing similar smells. The re-organization
also points to many pharmaceutical aspects of the research, which Gessner and Schroeck’s
dissertation had not specified; it identified and examined the different ways in which humans could use
musk. However, the greatest difference in
Schroeck’s book from both his dissertation and Gessner’s writings lay in the
status of experiments included in the written record. The academy-guided book
cites not just the ancient authors, but especially those colleagues who had recently
explored and tested musk experimentally,
such as the anatomist Johann Rudolph Salzmann (p.19), who brought out his work Varia observata anatomica hactenus inedita in
1669. (13)
The publications about musk shed light on a development
in medical research between the mid sixteenth and late seventeenth century.
While Gessner treated musk as one item of a whole collection of specimens or
objects under zoological headers, the header of general physics, or headers
given by ancient perfumery research, Schenck and Schroeck, at least in his
disseration, examined the secretion on
its own, giving due space to all known details that other literature might
provide. This university dissertation research was not very remote from the
earlier collectionism, although it gave more attention to non-collection-based
questions, such as how to extract the musk from the gland. In the last instance,
the academy-guided book, Schroeck was writing for a scientific community
outside the university. He included contemporary anatomical and chemical
discoveries made in other universities for his academic readers, and also stressed
the practical and pharmaceutical benefits to human health of studying musk.
(2)
Rowe, David. Chemistry and Technology of
Flavours and Fragrances. John Wiley & Sons, 2009, 143-165.
(3)
Compare for the general history of medical studies in the 16th and
17th centuries: Siraisi, Nancy G. “Medicine, 1450–1620, and the
History of Science.” Isis 103.3
(2012): 491–514; Klestinec, Cynthia. Medical education in Padua: students,
faculty and facilities, in Grell, Ole Peter. Centres of Medical Excellence?: Medical Travel and Education in Europe,
1500-1789. Farnham, Surrey, England: Ashgate, 2010. The History of Medicine
in Context, 193-220.
(4)
Gessner, Conrad.
Historiae Animalium Lib.I. de Quadrupedibus Uiuiparis. Zürich: Froschauer,
1551, p. 786–793 (Capreolus moschi: Musk deer), p. 948–949 (Feles Zibethi
(Zibeth cat).
(5) Vives, Juan Luis, et al. Ioannis
Lodovici Vivis Valentini de Anima & Vita Libri Tres. Eiusdem Argumenti
Viti Amerbachii de Anima Libri IIII. Philippi Melanthonis Liber Vnus. His
Accedit Nunc Primùm Conradi Gesneri De Anima Liber, Sententiosa Breuitate,
Velutiq́ue per Tabulas & Aphorismos Magna Ex Parte Conscriptus ... .
Zürich: Hans Jakob Geßner, 1563,
p. 846, 854.
(6)
Gessner, Conrad. Thesaurus Evonymi Philiatri, de
remediis secretis, liber. Zürich: Andreas Geßner, 1554, 174-175 (Amber, musk
and camphora are mixt for a medication), p. 266–269 (rose water with musk), and
other places.
(7)
Schroeck, Lucas. Historia Moschi.
Augustae Vindelicorum: Göbelius, 1682.
(8)
As Leopoldina, the academy had its seat
from the 19th century in Halle, Germany, and was promoted in 2008 to
National Academy of Sciences. Today, its full title is Deutsche Akademie
der Naturforscher Leopoldina – Nationale Akademie der Wissenschaften. Lucas Schroeck was 1693 elected as president of
the then called Academia naturae
curiosorum and held the title until his death in 1730. His society name was
Celsus I. See for more details Neigebaur, Johann Ferdinand. Geschichte der Kaiserlichen Leopold
Carolinischen Deutschen Akademie der Naturforscherwährend des zweiten
Jahrunderts ihres Bestehens. Friedrich Fromann, 1860, p. 14.
(9)
Schenck, Johann Theodor; Schroeck, Lucas. Exercitationem
Academicam De Moscho, Illustris Medicorum Ordinis in Florentissima Salana
Consensu, Sub Praesidio ... Dn. Johannis Theodori Schenckii ... Publicae
Disquisitioni Submittit Lucas Schroeckius, Augustanus. Autor & Respondens,
Ad Diem Octobris. A.S.R. MDCLXVII. Jena: Wertherus, 1667.
(11)
Compare Zimmermann, Barbara. “Die Diätetik bei Johann Theodor Schenck: e.
Beitr. zur Medizingeschichte der Barockzeit.” Heidelberg, Univ., Diss., 1988.
(12) Schenck, Johann
Theodor, Johann Philipp Höchstetter. Dissertatio Medica De Cinnamomo. Jena:
Wertherus, 1670.
(13) Saltzmann, Johann Rudolph, and
Theodorus Wynants. Varia observata anatomica hactenus inedita. Amsterdam:
Konynenberg, 1669.
Models of the pre-diluvial monsters of Crystal Palace Park in London, sold as educational tools for the American market.
aus: Henry A. Ward, Catalogue of Casts of Fossils, from the Principal Museums of Europe and America, with short descriptions and illustrations, Rochester 1866, 80.
Organized marble games were common in America in the 1920s and 1930s, and later. Girls were allowed to take part in the national tournaments only from 1948. This pictures is from 1960.
Advertisement: "Ede's Chemical Portable Laboratory, containing above 90 select and useful Tests, Re-agents, and appropriate Apparatus, for a course of instructive and entertaining Experiments. Price £1 11s." (John W. Webster, Erving Professor of Chemistry and Mineralogy at Harvard University, Manual of Chemistry, 3rd ed., Boston 1839, 561).
Website reference for the picture: http://goo.gl/BP5vD (March 30, 2011)
Letter, written by a 16year old boy in about 1930 to Walter Nelson Durost (printed in Durost (1932), pp. 13-14 (see bibliography):
"Dear Mr. Durost: When I saw the piece in American Boy about your study of boys' collections, I determined that it was my duty as a confirmed hobbyist to write to you. As long as I can remember in my sixteen years I have had a hobby of some sort or other. My first recollections go back to the time when I used to collect clothes-pins. From then on life has been just one hobby after another. I am the despair of my mother because of the enormous amount of stuff which I pile in my room, in my dresser and in all available closets. Among the more notable things which I have collected are stamps, coins, and postcards. These, of course, come under the notice of every boy at some time or other and so I will pass them off briefly. One year by dint of scouring the streets and cigar stores I collected over 450 cigar bands which I pasted in a book and sold for the magnificent sum of seventy five cents. This rage was followed by one for match folders. I next turned my attention to small cards with pictures of baseball players, prize-fighters etc. printed on them, and which fellows match. I still have about five hundred of them. When Robert L. Ripley first came into prominence I collected his Believe-it or-not cartoons for several months and in cleaning out I just got rid of about a thousand of them. One time I started a collection of different types of humerous cartoons but the huge task which confronted me there soon stopped that. I have a big box in my closet now which contains, among other things, collections of theatre programs, ticket stubs, small-town newspapers, data on All-American football teams for the last three years and All-Sectional footbal teams all over the country, school notebooks in various and sundry subjects for seven years, football programs, baseball programs, newspaper clippings, a copy of the last edition of the New York World, curious plays and records in all sorts of sports and blotters of all sizes and shapes. This list of course does not include souvenirs of all sort, shape, kind and description from two trips to Europe. More recently I have narrowed my activities down to two things: collecting data on football and making forecasts on games and All-America selections, and collecting playing cards. I realize how hard-pressed you are for time but if among your mail you should find a letter or letters from anyone who collects playing cards, I wish that you would send me their names and addresses so that I could get in touch with them. ... I am sorry to have taken so much of your time but I hope I will get an early response from you.
Yours truly, ---
P.S. Just a few things I forgot for the moment: golf score-cards, reading mythology, and collecting useless statistics such as how many Chinese farmers there were in New York State in 1920, and there was really only one as the census will tell you. I have a brother who is just getting started. So far he numbers collecting trains, all manners of facts about airplanes, and toy soldires of which he has over four hundred. He also builds model airplans and has collected cigar bands, stampls, and bottle-tops."
Models of the pre-diluvial monsters of Crystal Palace Park in London, sold as educational tools for the American market.
aus: 
Organized marble games were common in America in the 1920s and 1930s, and later. Girls were allowed to take part in the national tournaments only from 1948. This pictures is from 1960.
Frau M. aus B. (Nordrhein-Westfalen) inseriert am 27.03.2011 um 08:41 ihre private Sammlung.
Advertisement: "Ede's Chemical Portable Laboratory, containing above 90 select and useful Tests, Re-agents, and appropriate Apparatus, for a course of instructive and entertaining Experiments. Price £1 11s." (John W. Webster, Erving Professor of Chemistry and Mineralogy at Harvard University, Manual of Chemistry, 3rd ed., Boston 1839, 561).