Author: MHL

With Much Appreciation

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It is with much appreciation that I thank Robin Naughton for her service as the Medical Heritage Library’s Vice-President from July 2020 through August of this year. Robin spent five years contributing to the work of MHL, four of them in leadership positions. (She was the MHL’s Secretary from 2018 to 2019.)

Robin initially represented the New York Academy of Medicine, bringing her expertise as the manager of its Digital Lab to bear on the MHL’s digitization projects, website re-design, and metadata clean-up efforts. In 2020, Robin transitioned to a new appointment as Assistant Professor, Web and Digital Services Librarian, for the Queens College Library (QCL), While Robin is no longer able to serve on the Board of Directors, her contributions will continue to influence how the MHL shares its digital content. She will be missed!

As a result of this change, it is with enthusiasm that I announce that Beth M. Lander, our current Treasurer and Managing Director, Philadelphia Area Consortium of Special Collections Libraries (PACSCL), has been elected our new Vice-President, with Melissa Grafe, John R. Bumstead Librarian for Medical History, Head of the Medical Historical Library, Yale, stepping in as Treasurer. Melissa is no stranger to the operations of the MHL, having served as its first President from 2018 to 2020. I am also pleased to report that our current Secretary, UCSF Archivist Polina Ilieva, has agreed to run for Vice-President this June.

Please join me in thanking Robin, Beth, Melissa, and Polina!

Emily R. Novak Gustainis, MHL President

From Our Partners: UCSF Archives to House The COVID Tracking Project, a National Database Donated by The Atlantic

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The COVID Tracking Project, a crowdsourced digital archive documenting the face of the pandemic in the United States, will become part of the permanent collection in the UCSF Archives & Special Collections and will be accessible to researchers and the public.

The project was launched by The Atlantic to address the lack of reliable information about the pandemic, was volunteer-driven and published data on COVID-19 testing, cases, hospitalizations, and deaths in the U.S. The information gathered was cited by major journals and many news stories and used by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and the federal Food and Drug Administration.

This collaborative project brings together teams from The COVID Tracking Project team, the California Digital Library, and UCSF Archives & Special Collections. It will provide impetus for developing tools and new approaches for archiving collections, comprising diverse formats from instant messages to source code to emails as well as data sets.The COVID Tracking Project has already published its primary dataset in the Dryad data repository and the team anticipate that within a year this remarkable born-digital collection will be preserved and made accessible online.

This archive joins other publicly-accessible UCSF archives on the community HIV/AIDS epidemic response, tobacco industry, the opioid industry, and the food industry.

For more, see:

·       UCSF to House COVID Tracking Project, a National Database Donated by The Atlantic

·       Archives of the COVID Tracking Project at The Atlantic Donated to UCSF, in Partnership With the California Digital Library

From Our Partners: NLM Now on Instagram!

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~ Post courtesy Krista Stracka, Rare Book Cataloger, U S National Library of Medicine

The National Library of Medicine is pleased to announce that we have joined Instagram! Follow @nlm_collections to see highlights from our collections that span ten centuries of global health history.

An NLM_Collections instagram post featuring an anatomical drawing and description.
First post from June 30, 2021
Visit NLM Digital Collections to access the fully digitized book: http://resource.nlm.nih.gov/2473070R.
Shelf mark: WZ 260 E87t 1783

First launched in 2010, Instagram is an American photo and video sharing social networking service. With over one billion monthly users worldwide, Instagram remains one of the fastest growing social media platforms. By joining, NLM aims to raise awareness of our holdings to boost discovery, access, and use of our collections and encourage users to engage with the collections through the platform’s liking, sharing, commenting, and location tagging features.

An NLM_Collections Instagram post featuring an example of crosswriting, handwriting along both horizontal and vertical lines.
Post from July 12, 2021
Visit NLM Digital Collections to view online: http://resource.nlm.nih.gov/2931059R
Shelf mark: MS B 59

Followers can expect to see a variety of visuals and learn interesting details on our page. Explore images and videos from our expansive collections of books, manuscripts, archival collections, audiovisuals, journals, and more. Get a peek behind the scenes at conservation work and digitization efforts. Learn about events, lectures, and exhibitions.

Posts will often feature digitized content that is remotely accessible through the NLM Digital Collections or from the Medical Heritage Library where you can view the entire work.

An NLM_Collections Instagram post featuring an embossed, decorated, green cloth cover of a book of poisoning mysteries.
Post from July 29, 2021
While NLM’s holding has not been scanned, the Wellcome Collection has digitized and made their copy available in the Medical Heritage Library collection. Visit: https://archive.org/details/b24877013
Shelf mark: QVB T469p 1899

Instagram also offers the opportunity to join a large community of archives, libraries, galleries, and museums that periodically feature collections based on themes or hashtag campaigns. For example, next month NLM will be mingling in the National Archives and Records Administration’s #ArchivesHashtagParty. Each month, participating institutions post on a different theme to showcase archival materials from their collections.

We welcome you to follow @nlm_collections at https://www.instagram.com/nlm_collections/ and to share what you would like to see featured on our page. More anatomical atlases? Movable books? Comment below!

Call for Internship Applications: 2021 Fall Metadata Intern

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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 is looking for a Metadata Intern to work with the Content and Metadata Working Group.  The internship will provide hands-on experience with current metadata schemas, editing metadata on digital objects, and identifying objects for bulk metadata updates.  In addition, the intern will have an opportunity to identify content based on available metadata and generate a list of possible items that could become collections. 

We are looking for interns interested in learning about the use of metadata in digital collections.

DUTIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES:

  • With direction from the Content and Metadata Working Group, edit and fix metadata for MHL Internet Archive (IA) digital collections.
  • Create a list of digital items for metadata updates.
  • Create a list of digital items based on metadata to create collections.
  • Other duties as assigned

QUALIFICATIONS AND EXPERIENCE:
This is an unpaid, virtual internship for a student in a graduate library and information science program with a strong interest in metadata and digital collections.  An interest in the history of medicine and public health would also be good but not required.   Experience with metadata schemas and knowledge of content management systems would be helpful.

UNPAID INTERNSHIP:
This is an unpaid internship and it requires the intern to receive credit from the intern’s home institution.  

HOURS:
To be determined by institutional program requirements

TO APPLY:
Send a cover letter and resume to medicalheritagevicepresident@gmail.com by June 18, 2021.  Please include departmental requirements for an internship along with your application.

Join us 4/23 for “The Animal Soul between Peter Scheitlin and Charles Darwin” with Elizabeth McNeill

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Fri, April 23, 2021
12:00 PM – 1:30 PM EDT
Register: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/spring-speaker-series-elizabeth-mcneill-tickets-143312530637

The 19th-century origins of studying animal behavior is commonly traced back to Darwin’s experiments in the late 1830s at the London Zoological Gardens with the aim of researching mental evolutionism. Inthis talk, McNeill complicates this origin story by re-situating it within the 19th-century history of psychology in the German-speaking world and, more specifically, the slow, contentious rise of animal psychology as a viable object and mode of scientific study. By tracking the shift from the question of the “animal soul” to that of the “animal expression of emotions” over the course of the 19th century, she draws into relief the tenuous position of “the animal” (and those who wished to study its inner life) in emerging psychological fields, as the positivist, experimental natural sciences gradually dethroned natural philosophy.

Speaker

Elizabeth McNeill is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at the University of Michigan. Her dissertation, “Speaking (of) Animals in the Life Sciences and Literature of 20th-Century Germany,” tracks the various knowledge practices at work in the constellation of animality, language, and experimentation from the mid-19th to the late-20th century in the German-speaking world. “Speaking (of) Animals” ultimately reorients well-known scientific and literary figures such as Franz Kafka, Wilhelm Wundt, Robert Musil, and Konrad Lorenz in the context of once popular but today mostly forgotten or disqualified scientific discourses about animal intelligence and communication.

This Friday, 4/9! “‘Black Museum’: An American Medical Experiment” with Sarah L. Berry

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Please join the Medical Heritage Library, Inc. for the third talk in our Spring Speaker Series!

When
Fri, April 9, 2021
12:00 PM – 1:00 PM EDT

Register here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/spring-speaker-series-sarah-l-berry-tickets-143311824525

Racial disparities in health and medical care have been highlighted by the current pandemic, but they have long roots in U.S. history. Teaching and researching this history is important for moving forward with restorative justice and health equity. A particularly rich starting point is “Black Museum,” a 2017 episode of the sci-fi television series Black Mirror. This episode features three fictional medical technologies that call up specific, real ethical problems in U.S. racial and medical history. The technologies, exhibited by the Black Museum’s owner, a former research recruiter, harken back to the nineteenth-century commodification of race and somatic difference in three linked areas: the new science of forensics (institutionalized in the original Black Museum of Scotland Yard); medical museums; and circus “freak” shows. This presentation explores the “Roots of Racism in Health and Medicine” collection and other resources in the Medical Heritage Library in order to uncover the historical connections among race, medicine, entertainment, and crime dramatized in the episode. This talk offers pedagogical techniques to immerse students in digital archival research, enabling them to make their own connections among race and health justice in U.S. cultural history.

Speaker

Sarah L. Berry, PhD, is a Visiting Assistant Professor of English at State University of New York—Oswego. She specializes in Health Humanities and writes on medicine, gender, race, and U.S. cultural history. She is a Contributor-in-Residence at Synapsis, serves in the Health Humanities Consortium, and is working on a book titled, Patient Revolutions: Health and Social Justice in America from Abolition to the Affordable Care Act.

Register for “Carry On: The Depiction of Post-War Disability in Government Propaganda and Consumer Culture, 1919-1925”

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About this Event

Please join the Medical Heritage Library, Inc. for the first in our Spring Speaker Series!

When
Fri, March 26, 2021
12:00 PM – 1:00 PM EDT

How to Register
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/spring-speaker-series-nora-oneill-tickets-143307467493

After World War I, as 200,000 military members returned home with a disability, the US government standardized rehabilitation programs for the first time. The consolidation of rehabilitative services by the government resulted in a consistent definition of disability and ability, one which was intimately tied to a veteran’s economic contribution to their family and community.

By combining clinical treatment and work training within these programs, the government promised a return to economic independence. This promise was communicated through government propaganda geared to veterans, including the magazine Coming Back (1919) and Carry On (1919-1918).

Though the government promised a reformulation of disability as compatible with independence, rehabilitation failed to take into account the lived experiences of all disabled veterans, including veterans of color, women, and people who developed disabilities other than amputations. Disability, coupled with the valor associated with Great War veterans, was redefined to include the possibility of achieving independence through paid work, and yet this independence was only ascribed to those who government officials believed could succeed in their programs: white men with physical disabilities.

Speaker

Nora O’Neill is a first-year medical student at Yale School of Medicine. She is pursuing a combined MD-PhD in the History of Science and Medicine. In 2018, she completed her bachelor’s degree from Harvard University in the History of Science, focusing on the intersection of disability rights and reproductive justice. At Yale, she plans to study the social constructions of disability in medical and social activist spaces. As a physician historian, she hopes to engage in patient-centered care while also unraveling the historical complexities of the patient-doctor relationship.

Registration is required. Please visit: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/spring-speaker-series-nora-oneill-tickets-143307467493.

Registrants will receive a Zoom link the day before the event.

Co-sponsored by the Center for the History of Medicine, Francis A. Countway Library

From Our Partners: J Worth Estes Lecture

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Center for the History of Medicine, Countway Library
is pleased to share information about the Boston Medical Library’s 17th Annual J. Worth Estes Lecture
1980s Biological Revolution in Psychiatry: What Really Happened, and What Really Happened Next, with Anne Harrington, Ph.D.

Dr. Harrington is the Franklin L. Ford Professor  of the History of Science, Harvard University, and is the author of four books, including Re-enchanted Science, The Cure Within, and Mind Fixers.
 
Register here.

The 1980’s saw a rapid pivot away from previously dominant psychoanalytic and social science perspectives in psychiatry towards a “medical model.” However, the standard understanding as to why this occurred is wrong. Revolution was declared back then, but not because there had been scientific breakthroughs. We need a new and better understanding of what really happened in the 1980s. Those ideas have directly shaped the fraught world of psychiatrty with which we live today.

Questions about this event? Please contact the Boston Medical Library.

CALL FOR PROPOSALS: LAMPHHS 2021

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Change is constant. Whether socio-cultural, economic, scientific, political, ecological, environmental, or technological, drivers of change — and change itself — are critical to how we function in our roles as librarians, archivists, and museum professionals.

In the realm of professional practice, sometimes these changes are so considerable they fundamentally challenge existing concepts of who we are as professionals, what the impact of our work is, and how we engage our constituencies. They represent a paradigm shift in our underlying assumptions and affect the why of what we do.

This year, Librarians, Archivists, and Museum Professions in the History of the Health Sciences (LAMPHHS) invites you to share how you are challenging or changing practice to meet institutional and patron needs. 

We welcome all proposals, but are especially interested in those that address fundamental changes in the way library, archival, and museum professionals are engaging with:

·         Deprecated notions of neutrality as they apply to acquiring, describing, accessing, and exhibiting special collections, archives, and museum collections

·         Collections access and expectations of privacy

·         Legacies of racism, sexism, and other forms of anti-inclusivity in our home organizations

·         Collaborative or non-custodial collecting

·         Contested collections, problematic histories, and creating a cultural environment relevant to a diverse public. 

Session Formats: The Program Committee encourages submission of proposals that may include, but are not limited to, the following formats: 

·         Individual Presentations: Speakers should expect to give a presentation of no more than 15 minutes followed by 10 minutes of discussion. Individual papers will be combined into panels.

·         Panel Discussion: Open session with a panel of three (3) to four (4) individuals informally discussing a variety of theories or perspectives on the given topic(s). Please confirm participation with all panelists before submitting the panel proposal.

·         Traditional: Open session with two to three fully prepared papers of fifteen (15) minutes each and a comment and discussion period after the presentations.

·         Special Focus Session: 50-minute session designed to highlight innovative archives or museum programs, new techniques, and research projects. Audience participation is encouraged.

Please submit your proposal via this submission form: https://forms.gle/DK44fneSbX6VB7sj7

The deadline for submitting session proposals is Friday, February 25, 2021.  

This will be a virtual conference.

You must be a LAMPHHS member to submit a proposal. Not a member? Join for only $15.00 via http://iis-exhibits.library.ucla.edu/alhhs/membership.html.

If you have any questions please email emily_gustainis@hms.harvard.edu. 

2021 Program Committee:

Emily Novak Gustainis, Harvard Medical School

Brandon Pieczko, Indiana University School of Medicine

Ashlynn Rickord, Public Health Museum

Paula Summerly, University of Texas Medical Branch

From Our Partners: Medica

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~Post courtesy Solenne Coutagne, manager of digital projects at BIU Santé

There is another anniversary this autumn, in addition to the anniversary of MHL. The BIU Santé celebrates the 20th anniversary of Medica, our digital library (https://www.biusante.parisdescartes.fr/histoire/medica/index.php).

Festivities will include:

–          A blog post on the history of this digital library by the people who worked on its creation and enrichment.

–          An Advent calendar featuring 20 noteworthy digitizations

–          A guestbook (in the form of a blog post) will be set up for partners and users to tell anecdotes, stories or simply wish Medica a happy birthday.

–          We will share all this on social networks with the #20ansMedica between November 23rd and mid-December.

Don’t hesitate to leave a message in the guestbook (you can send me your texts by return mail and I will copy and paste them into the blog post).

You are also invited to relay the publications using the #20ansMedica or to use the hashtag for your own publications on social networks between November 23rd and mid-December.