According to Wikipedia, and the search engine True Knowledge, April 11, 1954 is considered the least eventful day in the 20th Century. No significant newsworthy events, births, or deaths are are known to have happened on this day. So… instead of googling, how about bookling, or is it booklering? I am a bookler (the art of hunting down information from books), and this is how I came to have some of the books in my library.
“Finding Facts Fast” by Alden Todd, published 1979. This was a great reference book that I used often in college. It tells you how to find information, first in local libraries, then others. Also how to take notes, use references, all on research. This was long before computers (I did have a computer class in BASIC language, typing out IBM print cards.) This book helped me a great deal in finding out information.
Before internet, there was no Google. Libraries were the way to go. Some habits die hard. I was in the hospital a few years back with stomach pains. I had Pancreatitis. Of course I googled it, and we all know what rabbit hole one jumps in when googling illnesses. I went even one step further. I also searched for books on Pancreatitis. While internet can be quicker, books on a subject can hold more details. And I questioned how did Doctors find out information before the computer? Certainly they would read specialty books on specific illnesses. So I then bought “Diseases of the Stomach, Intestines, and Pancreas” by Robert Coleman Kemp, published 1917. It had 438 illustrations. Reading it, I thought I was going to die a hundred times over.
I once had kidney stones, and went to hospital. Again with the google, and now also with Booklering, I bought two books for doctors, “Genitourinary Diagnosis and Therapy for Urologists and General Practitioners” by Dr. Ernst Portner, published 1913 with forty-three illustrations; and “Practical Cystoscopy, and the Diagnosis of Surgical Diseases of the Kidneys and Urinary Bladder” by Paul M. Pilcher, published 1911 with 233 illustrations, 29 being in color. Thought I was going to die again. My brain was insisting there was so much more wrong with me that the doctors were not yet telling me.
Then finally, when time came to have my gall bladder removed, I booklered, and found the book “Diseases of the Gallbladder and Bile Ducts” by Waltman Walters and Albert M. Snell, published 1940, with 342 illustrations on 195 figures. I was so nervous before surgery, that I forgot to tell them to let me keep the gall stones they pulled out-one was the size of a robin egg.
You see, many health problems may not be in my head, but I sure can inflate and make them worse that what they are. However, I do now have these very unusual books at my fingertips.
I then one day had some real bad stomach cramps. I was reading what I had on stomach cramps. It didn’t help me.
I flipped through this pamphlet that my sister in law gave me. “How Should I tell my Daughter” published in 1954 by Personal Products Corporation, makers of Modess. ( Retrobrands USA LLC in the U.S. and Canada has recently re-released the brand. Modess was a Sanitary Napkin Brand that began in the 1920s.) This book has really nice lithograph pictures, as it goes through the story of menstruation for young girls.
I cannot help reading about illness I may or may not have. You get a different side of information overload, than if you google. I may be a mental mess now, but still I keep on bookling. And the library keeps growing.
Thanks for reading.
Librarytomes 