A Catalog of (Medical) Curiosity -- The Weird and Varied Things I'm Reading

I thought it would be fun to blog a little about my research process -- not the actual strategies and methods, although I might write about that sometime as well, but more of the day-to-day stuff. Since the chapters for my book in progress are quite short, the length of magazine articles, I tend to have three of them going at once: one I'm gathering resources for and studying up on background information about, one I'm taking notes for and starting to draft, and one I'm actively crafting into a cohesive written piece. Here's a look at what I've been digging into:

Some of the books I have checked out of the library at the moment:

• The Strange Case of Dr. Couney: How A Mysterious European Showman Saved Thousands of American Babies by Dawn Raffel

• The Discovery of the Germ: Twenty Years That Transformed the Way We Think About Disease by John Waller

• George Washington's Teeth, a rhyming picture book by Deborah Chandra

• History of Nebraska, by James C. Olson and Ronald Naugle

• The Story of Dentistry from the Dawn of Civilization to the Present...with Special Emphasis on the American Scene by Maurice David Kaufman Bremner

• The Untold Story of Milk: The History, Politics and Science of Nature's Perfect Food: Raw Milk From Pasture-fed Cows, by Ronald F. Schmid

Some of these books I have read cover-to-cover, but most I'm using bits and pieces of. Some I'm reading for their facts, and others, I'm reading to understand the opinions inside. I couldn't help but reading the whole picture book, but I actually checked it out for its bibliography, which is quite useful -- not a common trait among picture books, but not unheard of either!

Some articles I have saved recently:

• Lots from the Nebraska State Medical Journal, the American Journal of Public Health, and the the newspaper The Omaha Bee, especially in the 1930s
• Several from the Mount Vernon Ladies Association
• A dissertation on the history of electricity distribution in Nebraska

Some articles I've read for background information:

• The Trans-Mississippi 
• The Rural Electrification Act of 1935
• The Dust Bowl
• Articles on an event in the history of dentistry called "The Historical Rebuff"
• Information on the anesthesiologist Virginia Apgar and the orthopedic surgeon Adolph Lorenz 

Things I've looked up:

• Did George Washington know Paul Revere?
• When were egg incubators invented?

A picture, if a complicated one, is probably starting to emerge... this week, the article I'm writing is about an infant incubator distributed to hospitals by the Nebraska State Department of Health in 1938, the one I'm drafting is about a travel toothbrush set belonging to George Washington, and the one I'm doing background reading for is on a milk pasteurizing apparatus.