There is nothing electric about the Electropoise, and the “Plain Directions” (which are actually anything but plain) that accompany the object tell its user, “Do not expect any sensations of current or shock. Nature does not work that way.” The Electropoise is simply a brass lozenge called the “Polizer” to which is attached at one end a flexible uninsulated cord. At the end of the cord is a small metal disc with an elastic band, which the user attaches to her ankle for a general cure or to whatever part of the body ails her for specific therapy. The user is directed to put the tube in a bucket of cold water (the exact temperature of the water and the amount of time for the therapy being determined by a complex series of disease classifications and formulae) and then let healing oxygen flow through the cord and into the body. The instructions claim that “[t]he oxygen … is carried into the general circulation and oxidizes the blood, thus burning out all manner of poisonous impurities, destroying bacteria and preventing their further propagation.” Of course in reality, the Electropoise did absolutely nothing at all. Its makers relied on the principle that a portion of those who are sick – and, more importantly, those who believe they are sick – will get better without any treatment. A contemporary promotional feature in an 1894 issue of The New York Evangelist promises that the Electropoise could cure “an alphabet of ailments” from abscesses to vertigo. The brochure that accompanies the instrument includes seventy pages of testimonials from satisfied customers who believe they have been cured of headaches, insomnia, “female complaints,” rheumatism, malaria, pneumonia, paralysis, nervous disorders, consumption, and cancer. The directions include further serious ailments that the device is supposed to cure; for example, they advise that sufferers of “apoplexy, apparent death, congestion of the brain … drowning and epilepsy” can be aided by “chang[ing] the plate from one wrist to the other every twenty or thirty minutes during continuous application.”

According to an advertisement in an 1895 issue of The Cosmopolitan: A Monthly Illustrated Magazine, the cylinder is filled with, “a composition, the nature of which is not made public.” In the December 1, 1900 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, N.C. Morse, M.D. writes, “I have had it sawed into sections and alas, like the goose that laid the golden egg of fable fame, there is nothing in the carcass!” However, despite its literally hollow claims, the Electropoise was very popular, so much so that the Electrolibration Company, founded in Birmingham Alabama, soon added offices in New York and London and began marketing new devices such as the Oxydonor, which was the same as the Electropoise except that instead of being hollow, it contained a stick of carbon inside. Other companies followed with their own versions. In 1899, Sanche tried to prevent the sale of the rival Oxygenor but it was held by the court that there was insufficient evidence to show that Sanche’s invention was useful or valuable enough to be afforded protection. The American Medical Association released official statements, such as a 1915 book on “Mail-Order Medical Fraud,” condemning this kind of ersatz medical treatment.

As well as being potentially dangerous, the Electropoise was also expensive. Advertisements from the period indicate that this model of the Electropoise was priced from $10 to $35. The booklet included with the Lilly Library’s copy lists the price of the pocket model as $25 and the standard model (a large device which was mounted on a wall) as $50. This may sound like an inexpensive cure for all ills, but $25 at the turn of the century was comparable to several hundred dollars today. The testimonials included in the literature make it clear that consumers could pay in installments. The two books included with the Lilly Library’s copy of the Electropoise are undated. The book which includes testimonials has the name L.A. Bosworth on the cover, and many of the testimonials are addressed to him in the form of letters. Bosworth was a reverend in Boston, MA, but his connection with Sanche or the Electrolibation Company of Birmingham is not clear.

So who used the Electropoise? The illustration included in the literature that accompanies the device gives us a clue. A woman in the “Gibson Girl” style lounges prone on a settee, reading a book while the cord of the Electropoise snakes delicately from her ankle into a vase on the floor. This woman in her lacy dressing gown is the perfect consumer for the product. She is clearly of the middle or upper-middle class and she has leisure time in which to convalesce. While the testimonials reveal that both men and women used the product, it would have been especially appealing for vague “female complaints” or the ubiquitously-diagnosed condition of “hysteria” – in other words the types of ailments that may well be “cured” by a device that doesn’t do anything except make the sufferer believe that he or she will get better. The Electropoise enjoyed its reign of popularity at the same time that the vibrator was invented to “cure” hysterical women by means of genital massage – a method practiced manually by doctors and midwives since the times of Galen and Avicenna and brought into the age of electricity in the late 19th century by enterprising inventors who aspired to save doctors the trouble of inducing “hysterical paroxysm” manually. In the Paris Exposition of 1900, over a dozen medical vibratory devices were available for the perusal of visiting doctors, from low-priced foot-powered models, to the $200 elaborately-designed “Chattanooga.” The Electropoise was perhaps a distant cousin of these devices designed to cure hysteria, the great bugaboo of 19th-century medicine, a catch-all for everything from serious mental illnesses to boredom and sexual frustration. The instructions for using the Electropoise includes a section for female complaints and advises that “[i]n many cases the internal female generative organs can be treated more successfully by local application to the organ itself. For this purpose the Uterine Electrode [a long metal rod that could be attached to the device] should be used. Agents can furnish it. Price, $2.50.” Specific male complaints, including hydrocele, varicocele, and “self abuse” could be treated by applying the metal disc to the scrotum. In its promise to provide relief to even the most intimate of problems, bypassing the process of visiting a real doctor, this curious little device illustrates the allure of quack medicine and is not so different from placebo products shilled on late night infomercials today. There will always be a market for the phony miracle cure.

Rebecca Baumann, Reference Associate

Sources Consulted:

American Medical Association. Medical Mail-Order Frauds. Chicago: American Medical Association, 1915. Hathi Trust Digital Library.

“The Electropoise.” New York Evangelist. December 6, 1894. ProQuest American Periodicals.

“The Electropoise.” The Cosmopolitan: a Monthly Illustrated Magazine. 1895. ProQuest American Periodicals.

Rachel Maines. The Technology of Orgasm : “Hysteria,” the Vibrator, and Women’s Sexual Satisfaction. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999.

N.C. Morse. “Modern Empirical Inventions.” The Journal of the American Medical Association. Volume 35, part 2. December 1, 1900. Hathi Trust Digital Library.

Carolyn Thomas de la Peña. The Body Electric: How Strange Machines Built the Modern American. New York: New York University Press, 2003.

Roger Ebert (1942-2013), who passed away on April 4, 2013 at the age of 70, leaves behind an enduring legacy as a Pulitzer Prize-winning film critic for The Chicago Sun-Times (where he worked for 46 years) as well as a pioneer in both television (with Gene Siskel) and online criticism. Ebert’s impact on his profession, and on the countless number of individuals whose paths crossed with his, was enormous. To name one example relevant to Bloomington: In his 2011 memoir, Life Itself (New York: Grand Central Pub.), Ebert writes in glowing terms about the Vickers Theatre, an independent art-house cinema located in Three Oaks, Michigan, originally co-owned and operated by Jon Vickers, now Director of the Indiana University Cinema.

Early in his career, Roger Ebert was a protégé of Pauline Kael (often referred to as “Paulettes”), the influential film critic for The New Yorker. Two of his letters are in the Kael mss., a voluminous collection of her personal papers and correspondence. All his life invested in politics and social issues, Ebert tells her about the 1974 Conference on World Affairs he attended at the University of Colorado, and names a few notable panelists whom he speculates were invited “to add variety to the academics, politicians and fanatics.”

The Kael mss. is one of several collections featuring professional criticism in the arts available at the Lilly Library.

A truly extraordinary item in the collection is a Theatre Log circa 1934-1946. This log was printed with the intention that the owner would fill in the pre-printed sheets with information about the plays and/or movies they attended. The blanks are to be filled with not only things like the name of the performance and the theatre that it was performed in, but also who accompanied them to see the show, with plenty of room to express your opinion of the show.

The example in the Lilly’s collection was compiled by an unknown author. Even without the identity of the author, their detailed evaluations bring to life this author’s criticism and appreciation of theatre.

One entry of interest reflects on a performance at the Mercury Theatre in New York in 1938. The author saw Orson Welles portray Brutus onstage in “Julius Caesar.” “The only thing that annoyed me was the manner in which Welles kept poking his chin out and skyward in the Mussolini manner – a little too exaggerated at times to be pleasant,” she expresses quite bluntly. She adds: “This was an ingenius (sic) production in the true Orson Welles manner.”

We are fortunate to have the Orson Welles manuscript collection here at the Library, filled with correspondence, photos, and much more relating to Welles’ radio, theatre, and film productions. For “Julius Caesar”, he was not only the star, but also the director, editor, and producer. The play was produced in modern dress on a barren stage. While it was assumed by audiences that he was reflecting on European dictatorship of the time, Welles was insistent that this was not his intention. “I’m trying to let Shakespeare’s lines do the job of making the play applicable to the tensions of our time,” Welles states in the Mercury Theatre weekly bulletin written by Henry Senber. Many more of Welles’ productions have materials here that are waiting to be explored.

The Lilly Library’s holdings also include many theatre playbills; fascinating sources that shed light on our culture. We see performances placed in a specific place and time in history, and advertisements that provide a window into the culture of the time. A wide variety of products were advertised, from automobiles to fur coats. The most common advertisements promoted cigarettes. Endorsed by many different celebrities, cigarettes were certainly a symbol of sophistication.

Much more can be discovered amongst the Lilly Library’s collections of performing arts ephemera. Please contact us if you’d like to come and take a look at some of our fascinating historical items.

–

Courtney Brombosz
MLS Candidate
Rare Books and Manuscripts Specialization Indiana University – School of Library and Information Science Bloomington, IN

“Joel is known internationally within the academy for his impeccable credentials as a rare books curator, a prolific scholar and brilliant professor,” Johnson said. “Over the past decade that Joel has served as associate director and most recently as interim director, Joel has become known for his collaborative leadership style and diligent work ethic. I have full confidence that he will be an outstanding director for the Lilly Library.”

An undergraduate English major at the University of California, Los Angeles, Silver went on to earn his Juris Doctor from Whittier College School of Law and his MLS at Indiana University. He began his long-standing career with the Lilly Library in 1983 and has served in multiple capacities: operations manager, curator of books, associate director to former Lilly director Breon Mitchell and interim director for two separate appointments. In addition, Silver is an adjunct associate professor and director of the special collections specialization in the IU School of Library and Information Science and an adjunct faculty member in the Department of English.

Silver has also made significant academic contributions with his scores of published articles, multiple books and numerous exhibition catalogs. He has a distinguished record as a lecturer and leader of rare-books-related workshops, and he has curated many exhibitions at the Lilly Library, including “The Reign of Charles II,” “J.K. Lilly, Jr.: Bibliophile,” “English Renaissance Prose” and “Five Centuries of Music.” His most recent book, “Dr. Rosenbach and Mr. Lilly: Book Collecting in a Golden Age,” was published by Oak Knoll Press in 2011.

“I’m honored to have the opportunity to serve as the director of the Lilly Library, one of the greatest repositories of rare books and manuscripts in the world,” Silver said. “The Lilly Library is known internationally for its broad and deep collections in many different subject areas, as well as for its commitment to serve all who wish to use them. I’m looking forward to continuing to build these collections, and to taking advantage of emerging technologies to help make them available to new audiences around the world.”

Consistently ranked among the nation’s top libraries for rare books, Indiana University’s Lilly Library contains more than 400,000 rare books, more than 150,000 pieces of sheet music and more than 7.5 million manuscripts — pivotal works of literature, history and shared culture.

The Lilly holds some of the university’s most important treasures, including the New Testament of the Gutenberg Bible; the first printed edition of Geoffrey Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales”; the First Folio of Shakespeare; John James Audubon’s “The Birds of America”; an extensive Abraham Lincoln collection; personal papers of Orson Welles and Sylvia Plath; and George Washington’s letter accepting the presidency.

The Lilly Library, on Seventh Street on Indiana University’s Bloomington campus, is part of the IU Bloomington Libraries. Regular business hours are 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday through Friday and 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. Saturdays. Admission is free and open to the public.

This year, Mediævalia 2013, featured Dr. Roger S. Wieck, Curator of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts at the Morgan Library & Museum. In addition, Dr. Wieck has held curatorial positions at the Walters Art Museum and the Houghton Library at Harvard. He is the author of The Prayer Book of Claude de France (2010), The Hours of Henry VIII: A Renaissance Masterpiece by Jean Poyet (2000), Painted Prayers: The Book of Hours in Medieval and Renaissance Art (1997), Time Sanctified: The Book of Hours in Medieval Art and Life (1988), and many other books and articles on medieval manuscripts. Prof. Keller’s interview with him can be seen on Youtube:

“We are so appreciative that Mark has chosen the Lilly Library for his generous gift of Kurt Vonnegut memorabilia,” says Cherry Williams, Manuscripts Curator for the Lilly Library. “A transparency, hand-drawn by Vonnegut will be a unique addition to our Vonnegut collection which includes correspondence, writings and personal letters to his daughter.”

When Kurt Vonnegut visited Indiana University in October of 1983, he gave a lecture titled “How to Get a Job Like Mine.” During the course of the evening, he fielded a variety of questions from students ranging from his dislike of word processors and his dismal outlook on the “terrifying” technological revolution on how it is affecting our culture. Elaborating, Vonnegut explained that too many men and women expect their lives to unfold as dramatic stories with intense highs and lows. He demonstrated this theory on an overhead projector and this image on transparency was the product of his explanation. Using Cinderella and Hamlet as character examples he explained, by line graphs, the differences between their storybook lives and those of us rooted in reality.

This transparency will join the impressive Vonnegut Collection at the Lilly Library. Comprised of Vonnegut mss., 1941-2007, which includes correspondence, writings, Farber files, and publishing records and the Vonnegut mss. II, 1965-2002, which consists of letters the novelist had written to his youngest daughter, artist Nanette Vonnegut.

Kurt Vonnegut was born in Indianapolis, Indiana. His writings include articles, short stories and scripts, but he is most well-known for his novels from his first, Player Piano in 1952, through Cat’s Cradle and Slaughterhouse Five, to his last Timequake in 1997.

For more information, please visit the Lilly Library at: http://www.indiana.edu/~liblilly/

Or contact Heather Edelblute, Director of Communication for IU Libraries at: hedelblu@indiana.edu

Lawrence Hott will discuss the problem of historical truth in documentary film, particularly in the context of the War of 1812, a period which presents a number of challenges to a documentary filmmaker. Hott is producer/director of the documentary film, The War of 1812, broadcast on PBS in October 2011. The War of 1812 film and bonus features can be viewed online, courtesy of PBS/WNED: http://www.pbs.org/wned/war-of-1812/the-film/watch-film-and-bonus-features/

Lawrence Hott and his partner Diane Garey have been making documentary films since 1978 as part of Florentine Films, and later Hott Productions. Their productions are among the most-watched broadcasts on public television. Notable titles include John James Audubon: Drawn from Nature and Wild by Law, the story of the Wilderness Act of 1964 and three men responsible for its passage, which was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.

Hott’s awards include an Emmy, two Academy Award nominations, the duPont-Columbia Journalism Award, the George Foster Peabody Award, five American Film Festival Blue Ribbons, and Fourteen CINE Golden Eagles. He received the Humanities Achievement Award from the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities in 1995; a Massachusetts Cultural Council/Boston Film and Video Foundation Fellowship in 2001; and the Rosalynn Carter Fellowship for Mental Health Journalism in 2001. He has been on the board of non-fiction writers at Smith College and has served as a panelist for the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Massachusetts Cultural Commission, and the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities. He is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Hott is a former juvenile court investigator and a lawyer by training, who has said that the law and documentary filmmaking have more in common than one would think: “a lot of legal practice has to do with the presentation of arguments, working with people, and being clear in your correspondence. I can’t think of a better training for a filmmaker than three years of law school.”

The talk will be followed by a reception. Both the talk and the reception are sponsored by the Friends of the Lilly Library and take place in concert with the exhibition, The War of 1812 in the Collections of the Lilly Library, on view through December 15, 2012, in the Main Gallery of the Lilly Library. An expanded version of the exhibition is available online at: http://collections.libraries.iub.edu/warof1812/

In this exhibition, artists, designers and publishers explore the connections between text and form. These selections from the Lilly Library demonstrate the cutting-edge yet playful experimentation of Fluxus art and visual poetry, which pushed the boundaries of textual conventions and investigated the production of meaning in language and art. Many of the works featured in “Verbi-Voco-Visual Explorations” come from the personal collection of Mary Ellen Solt, 1920-2007, a concrete poet and former professor of creative writing at Indiana University. The title “Verbi-Voco-Visual Explorations” is borrowed from artist Marshall McLuhan, who in turn borrowed it from James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake–an example of not only the multidimensional iterations of meaning conveyed in the exhibition, but also how influences can be sampled creatively into new works.

The exhibition includes big names like John Cage, whose centennial is celebrated this year, and also lesser known but still influential writers and artists. Cage’s M: Writings ’67-’72, in which he explores words, names and concepts through textual visualization techniques such as mesostics, a form of poetry in which words are spelled horizontally using letters from the middle of lines. Another iteration of the complicated nature of textuality and reading is Bruno Munari’s thought-provoking Libro illeggibile or “Illegible Book.” The work’s absence of text and red string threaded through the pages makes the book more of a sculptural object than a learning tool; while the codex format engenders understanding through familiarity. Johanna Drucker, a highly influential scholar of artist’s books, visual poetry, digital humanities, also demonstrates her artistic ability through her artist’s book The Word Made Flesh, which celebrates the embodiment of text through rich all-over page design and consummate deployment of fonts and colors to enrich meaning. Lilly’s edition of Jorge Luis Borges’ Ficciones illustrated by Sol LeWitt presents an intriguing melding of two highly-regarded figures. A number of the works included were published by the German imprint Hansjörg Mayer, a major publisher of artist’s books and an early innovator of the use of computers in graphic design.

The exhibition was crafted to highlight the upcoming show “Buzz Spector: Off the Shelf,” opening October 19th at the Grunwald Gallery. “Off the Shelf” features both Spector’s large, sculptural installations of books and his Polaroid works. The installations, including “The Library of Babel” inspired by Borges’ short story of the same name, and a piece featuring books by Indiana University authors, are all borrowed from Indiana University’s libraries. These installations invite commentary on the logic and poetry of the arrangement of books, and ask the audience to consider the function of the book object. Spector’s oversized Polaroid prints further investigate the themes of meaning and form, authorship and ownership, and the physical experience of reading.

Spector is an eminent figure in the artists’ book and book arts communities and an internationally known artist and writer. He has published numerous artists’ books as well as editing the critical volume The Book Maker’s Desire: Writings on the Art of the Book.

Additionally, The Fine Arts Library is hosting a complementary exhibition “On the Page: Artists’ Take on the Book and Library” October 6-November 8 in the Fine Arts Library lobby, which gathers examples of thoughtful, artistic engagement with the materiality and symbolic functions of the book object, stacks of books, and entire libraries. For more information, visit the Fine Arts Library blog: https://blogs.libraries.iub.edu/FAL/