Our Rare Books, Our SMC: An Exhibit of Items Held at Saint Mary's College

Novak, Barely Scratching the Surface

You can find much of the same information about many of the books in the Rare Book Room online if you want to, but actually getting to touch them and imagine what sort of life an item had opens a whole new world. How many people touched this book? What impact did it have on their lives? How did this book end up in the Rare Book Room? Many of these questions we will never find the answers to, but if you really listen to the pages, it's almost as if the book is trying to tell you itself--like it’s trying to take you to another world.

This website barely even scratches the surface of what is inside the Rare Book Room. Many of us chose to focus on more modern items because the older items are written in Latin, French, Arabic, Italian, and even a cuneiform language. Getting to see and touch the older objects was almost an out of body experience for most of us, but there was only so much we could understand from them. We couldn’t exactly learn an entire language in half of a semester.

My favorite book that I chose to work with was The Compendium of the Theory and Practice of Midwifery by Samuel Bard. At first glance at this book, I didn’t think I would end up picking it. I wrote it down on the mandatory list we had to have of ten books in order to check a box. I wasn’t intending to do much more research on it. However, the more time I spent looking into the book, reading it, and researching its history, the more I became interested in it. The introduction is really what piqued my interest in it. Bard really had some nerve talking down to midwives that way. I knew that women’s healthcare today lagged behind, but I didn’t realize how or why, and this book really helped teach me that (not that that was Dr. Bard’s intention, which it definitely wasn’t).

I really wish I had more time to look into this book because I found it interesting in so many ways. I originally wanted to go more into how race impacted his biases. He mentions race several times in his book, even going as far as calling women from other nations “savages,” and I read that the majority of women of color during this time period were enslaved women of color and that Bard himself owned multiple slaves. However, I didn’t have the time or the space to really give this topic the deep discussion it deserved. I also wish I had had more time to compare the practices in this book to modern day medical practices and how they developed, but my knowledge in the medical field isn’t very extensive so this would’ve taken a long time.

The other book I worked with was The Female Student: Or, Lectures to Young Ladies On Female Education for the Use of Mothers, Teachers, and Pupils. I didn’t find this book as interesting as the midwifery book, so I decided to merge my research into it with the discussion of Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, which I honestly wish I worked on instead. The Female Student was progressive for its time; Mrs. Phelps was very passionate about female education, which wasn’t a popular opinion when she was writing. However, she definitely was limited by historical period, as she claimed Wollstonecraft was a “monster” for not wanting to be reduced to a housewife.

Overall, I very much enjoyed this class and this experience. I got to interact with primary sources in a way I never had before and that other undergraduate students don’t often get to do. I would definitely recommend this class to anyone interested in history or the humanities.

Ella Novak
Creative Writing and History Majors
Class of 2027

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