From the For the Health of the New Nation project, An essay on Rubeola for the Degree of Doctor of Medicine from 1825:
There are lots more like this, too: just check out the feed of the items most recently added to our collection!
We’re accepting applications for our summer 2022 fellowship until the end of the month!
Join us on Friday, April 1 (no joke!), for the second in our spring speaker series: Rachael Gillibrand.
Throughout the summer of 2021, Rachael was employed by the Medical Heritage Library as the Jaipreet Virdi Fellow in Disability Studies. The purpose of her fellowship was to use the Medical Heritage Library’s digital collections to produce a primary source dataset relating to the theme of ‘Disability and Technology’. In this lecture, Rachael will talk about her time with the Medical Heritage Library and will elaborate on some of her more curious findings. Expect to hear about the development of patents for artificial breasts; how vulcanite rubber drew dentists into gunfights; and why a Victorian gentleman might be found with hippopotamus in his mouth!
Frontispiece to volume one, issue four of Commentarii de rebus in scientia naturali et medicina gestis in 1752.
We’re pleased to announce the first of our Spring Speaker Series, Aja Lans.
Aja Lans completed her PhD in Anthropology at Syracuse University in 2021, where she concentrated in historical archaeology and cultural heritage preservation. Her dissertation traces the long history of violence against Black women in the United States by merging skeletal data with archival resources. These various archival traces shed light on the ways biocultural processes in the past continue to shape daily life, health, and well-being in the present. Aja is now a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard University as part of the Inequality in America Initiative. She continues to pursue decolonizing research while focusing on the ethics of museum collections, the objectification of human remains, and the history of race. Aja was a fellow for the Medical Heritage Library, Inc. during the summer of 2021.
Her talk is titled Uncovering the Roots of Racism in Medicine: A Practice in Reading Against the Archival Grain:
As an anthropological archaeologist, I utilize an expanded notion of archives that includes artifacts housed in museums, including human remains. I read against the archival grain while investigating the links between racism and the professionalization medicine and physical anthropology over the long 19th century. To do so, I consult a variety of archival texts and documents, as well as their links to collecting and curating human remains. This requires a deep understanding of the historical context in which collections were assembled and supposedly objective scientific studies performed. In this way, we might identify inherent biases, which were often intimately linked to scientific racism.
We’re currently accepting applications for our 2022 Education Resources Fellowship! Get full details and application instructions here.
The bookplate from an 1823 copy of The book of fate — the plate alone is worth a look!
The cover of E A Wallis Budge’s 1930 Amulets and superstitions.
It’s that time of year, folks: time for us to search out a 2022 fellow! The full description and application instructions are below; and, please, share this unrestrainedly!
ABOUT US:
The Medical Heritage Library, Inc. (MHL) is a collaborative digitization and discovery organization of some of the world’s leading medical libraries committed to providing open access to resources in the history of healthcare and health sciences. The MHL’s goal is to provide the means by which readers and scholars across a multitude of disciplines can examine the interrelated nature of medicine and society, both to inform contemporary medicine and to strengthen understanding of the world in which we live.
DESCRIPTION:
The Medical Heritage Library seeks a motivated fellow to assist in the continuing development of our education and outreach programs. Under the guidance of a member of our governance board, the fellow will develop curated collections or sets for the MHL website on one of the following topics: climate change, aging, or LGBTQ+. Examples of existing primary source sets can be found on the MHL website: http://www.medicalheritage.org/resource-sets/. These collections will be drawn from the over 300,000 items in our Internet Archive library. The curated collections provide a means for our visitors to discover the richness of MHL materials on a variety of topics relevant to the history of health and the health sciences. As part of this work, the fellow will have an opportunity to enrich metadata in MHL records in Internet Archive to support scholarship and inquiry on this topic.
This paid fellowship will be hosted virtually, but there may be opportunities for onsite interactions with one of the MHL member institutions.
DUTIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES:
QUALIFICATIONS AND EXPERIENCE:
This virtual position is open to all qualified graduate students with a strong interest in medical or health history, with additional interests in library/information science or education. Strong communication and collaboration skills are a must. Fellows are expected to learn quickly and work independently.
FELLOWSHIP DURATION:
The fellowship will take place anytime between the end of May 2022- end of August 2022
HOURS:
150 hours, over 12 weeks with a maximum of 20 hours in any given week.
SALARY:
$20/hour not to exceed $3000
NUMBER OF AVAILABLE FELLOWSHIPS: 1
To apply, please provide the following:
Please submit your application materials by March 28th, 2022 through this form: https://forms.gle/Rgf28DJVcP4eLs9M9
Candidate interviews will take place virtually.Please contact MHL at melissa.grafe@yale.edu if you have questions.
New to our collections are some items from the American Philosophical Society via the For the Health of the New Nation project. This is one of those items: page proofs for William Cullen’s Practice of Physic.
Click on the title of the book above or on the image below to see the page proofs and click here to see editions of Cullen’s work already in the MHL.
