Trove is a discovery project from the National Library of Australia, aggregating a wide variety of content all to do with Australian history. The Library itself describes Trove as “supports the discovery and annotation of items in Australian collections. The term “Australian collections” encompasses libraries, archives, university repositories and major online collections such as biographical databases, digitised book collections and digitised newspaper collections.”
Trove, like the Old Bailey Online, does not seem to lend itself immediately to researchers interested in medical history; however, many of the same caveats apply and, approached correctly, Trove lives up to its name. A search for “medicine,” for example, yields over five million results, many of them available freely online and including photographs, digitized newspapers, articles, books, reviews, maps, and datasets.
Five million results is a little much for anyone to wade through, and there are ways to cut down your list by choosing to see only material available online, or if you happen to be in Australia for example, limiting searches to libraries or repositories available to you. You can also select to break down search results by year, language, or Australian connection. For researchers looking for medical information, Trove can reveal great sources with a little patient searching.
As always, for more from the Medical Heritage Library, please visit our full collection!