Adventures in the Archives: The Living Past
The stereotype of historians isolated in archives with dusty papers and dim lighting has more than a grain of truth to it. Granted, my archive experiences have been more ice cold and brightly lit than dank, but the isolation can be striking. I’ve spent entire days immersed more in the past than in the world around me. History work can be lonely and leave you feeling cut off from the present. This can actually be useful when it means closer connection with historical actors and their worlds. But you run the risk of getting cut off from everything — both the past and the present — during the at-times mind-numbing search for that single piece of valuable evidence within reams of irrelevant material.
After hours of paging through letters, newspaper clippings, and magazine articles unrelated to my own project, I start seeing paper rather than people. At these times, it is easy to forget that the “useless” sources are snippets of people’s lives. Even if only momentarily, they intersected with the lives of one or many individuals — people with full, rich lives outside of my own area of research interest. Because zoning out like this over so many scraps of paper can be such an issue, it’s both welcoming and jarring when a source wrenches me out of that funk: when it forces me to come face-to-face with the lived experience of the past.
This has happened to me more than once, but one time sticks in my mind for its sheer power. I’d spent hours poring over issue after issue of a popular family health magazine. The American Medical Association started publishing Hygeia in 1923 to educate people about personal health and renamed it Today’s Health in 1950. I wanted any story, advertisement, or advice column dealing with pregnancy planning or genetics. The indexes had failed me, and so I’d moved on to flipping as quickly as possible through every issue published over a period of decades.
It started some time after my fourth cup of stale coffee and hundredth ad for “Hartman Baby Carriages,” “Hygeia nursing bottles,” “Thum” thumb sucking deterrent, evaporated milk, and various cookware. I stumbled across a story that snapped me back out of that space where the people dissolved into the background and only my topic and my analysis mattered.
The story title, “My ‘RH Factor’ Baby,” caught my eye because, well, it had the word “baby” in it, which was a flag. But more importantly, it promised to be a personal account, something I desperately hoped to find. Much of my work depends on doctors’ accounts. I’m left to infer patient and client voices from often sterile case reports, and so I’m thrilled when I find anything that offers a glimpse into a person’s life from their own point of view. But I had no idea how much this story would move me.
In this story, Elizabeth Sturns recounted her heart-wrenching story of losing a child shortly after birth to a hemolytic disease related to Rh antigens (what makes your blood “positive” or “negative”). The Rh factor excited human geneticists in the 1940s because it drew attention — and funding — to the field. Research eventually led to therapies that helped save children’s lives and prevent the condition in the first place. Sturns’ story dealt partly with this, so it’s where my brain initially filed it.[1]
But the story turned out to be much more important for what it reminded me about how we should think about and analyze the past (and the present). Elizabeth Sturns wrote:
[gblockquote]”No one but a mother can really understand the feeling of closeness one has to the little unborn child in the womb, whose flutters and kicks prove it is getting stronger all the time in preparation for its advent into this world. So no one but a mother can truly appreciate the empty, hopeless feeling which possessed me for many months after my little girl was born […] just three months too soon. She weighed one pound 12 ounces, and lived 30 minutes. Her very tininess even for her prematurity indicated her development had not gone well, and I tried to console myself that it was more merciful for her not to live than to survive if she would not have been strong and healthy.”[2][/gblockquote]
Every time I read this it knocks me back a little. Sturns’ eloquent and powerful story reminds us of what is so obvious that it can easily be forgotten: the past is populated with real, complex people, with a diversity of experiences. As historians it’s our job to try to unearth these experiences, the factors that shaped them, and to make historical claims about them. But often we shy away from the raw emotion, the felt experiences, of the past. We take shelter in analysis.
This isn’t to say that analysis is unimportant. We still need to read sources with a critical eye. And there are some good reasons for our hesitation to consider emotion. After all, emotion is pretty opaque, especially with decades or centuries of distance. Who’s to say that “happy” in 2014 means the same thing as “happy” in 1950 or 1750 or 1050? Sturns comes right out and says this: “No one but a mother can really understand the feeling.” But though it may be impossible to completely understand what Sturns or others felt, her story serves as a reminder to me that I have to try. It may be hard to pin down, but we need to keep these lived realities of the past front and center in order to do justice to the historical actors that breathe life into our historical analysis.
I never would have found this story using the index, but I’m incredibly glad I did and that Sturns shared her story so many years ago. I’m curious to hear others’ reactions to this story and whether you’ve have similar experiences.
NOTES AND SOURCES
1. R. A. Fisher, “The Rhesus Factor a Study in Scientific Method,” American Scientist 35, no. 1 (January 1, 1947): 95–113; Sheldon C. Reed, “A Short History of Human Genetics in the USA,” American Journal of Medical Genetics 3 (1979): 288; A. W. F Edwards, “R. A. Fisher’s 1943 Unravelling of the Rhesus Blood-Group System,” Genetics 175, no. 2 (February 1, 2007): 471–476.
2. Elizabeth Daws Sturns, “My “RH Factor” Baby,” Hygeia 27 (July 1949): 489.
Adam Turner has a Master's degree in history from the University of Oregon and works as a web developer with a love of clean, standards-based markup and accessible, user-centered design.