Prime Fowle, a Man of Handsome Color

Yesterday, while pulling some 18th-century broadsides to show how the popular press functioned, we came across a curious inscription on "An Account of the Terrible Fire which Happened in Boston" from 1760.  After the horrific account, the printer's name is set in type: "Portsmouth, Printed by D. Fowle."  But under that, written in an 18th-century hand, is "& Prime Fowle a man of handsome color; 1760."

Who was Prime Fowle, and why is his name added? Colonial printing is pretty well documented, so this wasn't hard to look up. Daniel Fowle established the first newspaper in colonial New Hampshire, and it turns out his pressman was his slave, Primus, also known as Prime. Primus was a well-known person in Portsmouth at the time. When he died in 1791, still a slave and disfigured from a lifetime of pulling a hand press, the local paper printed tributes and a commemorative poem in his honor.

To learn more about Primus's life, see Black Portsmouth: Three Centuries of African-American Heritage by Mark Sammons and Valerie Cunningmham (Durham: University of New Hampshire Press, 2004), pages 33-35. To see an example of his presswork, ask for Broadside 760221.

The Medical Humanities

One of the joys of working in the archives is finding a moment of Dartmouth history that just blows your mind. The Dartmouth Medical School (now the Geisel School of Medicine) stopped granting degrees early in the 20th century because they feared they were about to lose their accreditation. The 1910 Flexner Report doomed most rural medical schools because it argued that students in rural areas could not be exposed to the variety of cases necessary for a well-rounded medical education. But, by 1960, medical training had changed, and Dartmouth was again poised to grant medical degrees.

To celebrate the re-establishment of a fully operational medical school, Dartmouth hosted a three-day convocation on "The Great Issues of Conscience in Modern Medicine." For such an event, you would expect a series of congratulatory, optimistic and forward-looking speeches by leaders in the medical community. But Dartmouth took a very different path: among the speakers invited were C. P. Snow and Aldus Huxley. Just the year before, scientist and novelist C. P. Snow had shaken the academic world with his famous "Two Cultures" talk at Cambridge. He outlined a course of history that had driven a wedge between the sciences and the humanities and left the two areas of intellectual pursuit incapable of communicating even on a basic level. This divide, he charged, had dangerous consequences for the future of civilization.

His dire warnings paled next to the damning critique of science and medicine offered up in Aldus Huxley's Brave New World. In a tragic dystopian future, medicine was simply a tool in the hands of a totalitarian state stripped of any humanity. Not only that, but Huxley was also gaining new fame for his explorations into hallucinogenic drugs.

These are the people you invite to celebrate the grand reopening of the medical school? A scholar who believed the entire system of knowledge generation was broken and a mescaline eating novelist who foresaw a joyless future predicated on eugenics? Wow, that is pretty cool.

To see the proceedings of the convocation, ask for D. C. Hist R111 .D3 1960.