You may be familiar with the photo hosting site Flickr for hosting or browsing travel, work, or personal photographs, but many archives and special collections repositories are using the service to draw attention to their collections.
In the field of medical history, for example, the Otis Historical Archives, part of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology’s National Museum of Health and Medicine, has put up hundreds of photographs, postcards, and cartoons.
The material includes photographs from the Civil War, World War I, World War II, and bodies such as United States Navy’s Bureau of Medicine and Surgery. Also found here are topical collections such as Mirrors which collects 61 images of wounded patients posing to display their scars or injuries; in each case, a mirror is being used to point to some aspect of the wound that might not otherwise be noticed or readily seen by the viewer of the photograph. (For some interesting observations on the Mirrors set, check out this post from The Sterile Eye, a blog dedicated to medical photography.)
Highlights include of the Otis Archives material on Flickr:
General Pershing's dentures
World War II mess kit cleanliness poster
General Henry Barnum, gunshot wound
Colonel Frank Townsend examines the bullet that killed Lincoln and the probe used to examine the President
Thanks to Assistant Archivist Laura E. Cutter for sharing the great work of her repository with us!