National Library of Medicine Releases “Medicine in the Americas,” Featuring Digitized Versions of American Medical Books Dating Back to 1745

From Anatomical Tables of the Human Body, William Cheselden, 1796.

From Practical horse farrier, or, The traveller's pocket companion: shewing the best method to preserve the horse in health...,William Carver, 1820.

The National Library of Medicine, the world’s largest medical library and a component of NIH, announces the release of Medicine in the Americas. A digital resource encompassing over 350 early American printed books, Medicine in the Americas makes freely available original works demonstrating the evolution of American medicine from colonial frontier outposts of the 17th century to research hospitals of the 20th century.

The project is made possible in part through the participation of the National Library of Medicine in the Medical Heritage Library, a digital curation collaborative supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and administered by the Open Knowledge Commons.  As part of the project, the Library expects to upload the files to the Medical Heritage Library at the Internet Archive.

Drawing on the collections of NLM’s History of Medicine Division and including works from the United States, Latin America, the Caribbean and Canada, this initial release of Medicine in the Americas encompasses monographs dating from 1745 to 1865. Additional titles, dating from 1610 to 1920 and drawing further upon NLM’s comprehensive collection of early American printed books, will be available on an ongoing basis in the future.

Medicine in the Americas will be of interest to scholars, educators, writers, students and others who wish to use primary historical materials to help expand knowledge of medical and public health history for the advancement of scholarship across the disciplines and for the education of the general public.

Digital files created for Medicine in the Americas, reside in NLM’s Digital Collections, a repository for access to and preservation of digitized biomedical resources. Digital Collections allows rich searching, browsing and retrieval of monographs and films from NLM’s History of Medicine Division. Medicine in the Americas joins the recently launched collection, “The Public Health Film Goes to War,” as well as other digital resources, the digital files for which also reside in Digital Collections.

Thanks to Michael North, Head of the Rare Books and Early Manuscripts Department of the History of Medicine division, for writing up this great resource for us. The MHL is pleased to have more quality projects making valuable resources available to researchers.

As always, for more from the Medical Heritage Library, please visit our full collection!