Author: MHL

This prize was established in 1956 by Ralph and Jo Grimes of the Old Hickory Bookshop, Brinklow, MD, in memory of Murray Gottlieb, a New York antiquarian book dealer. Since 2010, this award has been sponsored by the MLA History of the Health Sciences Section. In 2016 it was renamed to honor longtime MLA member Erich Meyerhoff, AHIP, FMLA. Meyerhoff was a legendary figure in medical librarianship with a great devotion to the history of the health sciences. The purpose of the Meyerhoff Prize is to recognize and stimulate interest in the history of the health sciences. The prize is awarded annually for the best unpublished scholarly paper about a topic in the history of the health sciences. The author of the winning essay receives complimentary registration to the annual meeting, a certificate at the association’s annual meeting, and a cash award of $500 after the annual meeting. 

Eligibility: 

• The author of a paper submitted for the Erich Meyerhoff Prize must be a member of the Medical Library Association. 
• The submitted paper must treat some aspect of the history of the health sciences. 
• The submitted paper may be under consideration for publication at the time of submission, but cannot have been published. 
• The submitted paper must meet the requirements for submission to the Journal of the Medical Library Association. 

The deadline for submission is November 1, 2020. Click here more information and submission form.

Reminder! At least one author of the paper must be a member of the Medical Library Association. 

~Post courtesy Polina Ilieva, Head, Archives and Special Collections, UCSF Libraries.

We are excited to welcome the first-ever UCSF Library Artist in Residence, Farah Hamade.

There was a remarkable response to the call for submissions, and the committee reviewed twenty-seven applications from artists in the Bay Area, several US states, and Canada and representing diverse media formats, including ceramics, interactive wood sculpture, photography, bookmaking, videography, collage, comic books, painting, 3D installation, and others. Farah Hamade was named the inaugural UCSF Library Artist in Residence and commenced her yearlong project, The City is a Body: Systemic Vulnerabilities in the time of COVID-19 on June 1: https://www.library.ucsf.edu/news/meet-our-artist-in-residence/.

~This post courtesy Polina Ilieva, Head, Archives and Special Collections, UCSF Libraries.

When HIV/AIDS first seized the nation’s attention in the early 1980s, it was a disease with no name, known cause, treatment, or cure. Beginning as a medical mystery, it turned into one of the most divisive social and political issues of the 20th century. The University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) was at the forefront of medical institutions trying to understand the disease and effectively treat early AIDS patients.

Drawing on materials from the AIDS History Project collections preserved in UCSF’s Archives and Special Collections, the UCSF Library presents “They Were Really Us”: The UCSF Community’s Early Response to AIDS, a new digital exhibition on Calisphere that highlights the ways UCSF clinicians and staff addressed HIV/AIDS from its outbreak in the 1980s to the foundation of the AIDS Research Institute in 1996. 

From medical professionals defining the disease and developing a model of care, to activists calling for treatments and public education, this exhibition amplifies the resilience of a community not only responding to its local needs, but also breaking ground on a larger scale with efforts that continue to impact HIV/AIDS care and research today. 

This exhibition, including the digitization of materials used in this exhibition, has been made possible in part by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (PW-253755-17) “The San Francisco Bay Area’s Response to the AIDS Epidemic: Digitizing, Reuniting, and Providing Universal Access to Historical AIDS Records,” awarded to the UCSF Library in 2017-2020.

About UCSF Archives and Special Collections

UCSF Archives and Special Collections identifies, collects, preserves, and maintains rare and unique materials to support research and teaching of the health sciences and medical humanities and to preserve UCSF institutional memory. The Archives serve as the official repository for the preservation of selected records, print and born-digital materials, and realia generated by or about the UCSF, including all four schools, the Graduate Division, and the UCSF Medical Center.

The Special Collections encompasses a Rare Book Collection that includes incunabula, early printed works, and modern secondary works. The East Asian Collection is especially strong in works related to the history of Western medicine in Japan. The Japanese Woodblock Print Collection consists of 400 prints and 100 scrolls, dating from 16th to the 20th century. The Special Collections also contains papers of health care providers and researchers from San Francisco and California; historical records of UCSF hospitals; administrative records of regional health institutions; photographs and slides; motion picture films and videotapes; and oral histories focusing on development of biotechnology; the practice and science of medicine; healthcare delivery, economics, and administration; tobacco control; anesthesiology;  homeopathy and alternative medicine; obstetrics and gynecology; high altitude physiology; occupational medicine; HIV/AIDS and global health.

About Calisphere

Calisphere provides free access to California’s remarkable digital collections, which include unique and historically important artifacts from the University of California and other educational and cultural heritage institutions across the state. Calisphere provides digital access to over one million photographs, documents, letters, artwork, diaries, oral histories, films, advertisements, musical recordings, and more.

Calisphere Exhibitions are curated sets of items with scholarly interpretation that contribute to historical understanding. Exhibitions tell a story by adding context to selected digital primary sources in Calisphere, thereby bringing the digital content to life. Calisphere Exhibitions are curated by contributing institutions and undergo editorial review. We are currently refining these processes, which are outlined in the Contributor Help Center. Please contact us if you’re interested in learning more about Calisphere Exhibitions.

~This post courtesy Melissa Grafe.

Looking for funds to research at Yale’s Medical Historical Library? Apply for the Ferenc Gyorgyey Research Travel Award at the Medical Historical Library of the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University.

The Ferenc Gyorgyey Research Travel Grant is available to historians, medical practitioners, and other researchers outside of Yale who wish to use the Historical collections of the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library. In any given year the award is up to $1,500 for one week of research.  Funds may be used for transportation, housing, food, and photographic reproductions. The award is limited to residents of the United States and Canada. 

The Medical Historical Library holds one of the country’s largest collections of rare medical books, journals, prints, photographs, and pamphlets. It was founded in 1941 by the donations of the extensive collections of Harvey Cushing, John F. Fulton, and Arnold C. Klebs. Special strengths are the works of Hippocrates, Galen, Vesalius, Boyle, Harvey, Culpeper, Haller, Priestley, and S. Weir Mitchell, and works on anatomy, anesthesia, and smallpox inoculation and vaccination. The Library owns over fifty medieval and renaissance manuscripts, Arabic and Persian manuscripts, and over 300 medical incunabula.  The notable Clements C. Fry Collection of Prints and Drawings has over 2,500 fine prints, drawings, and posters from the 15th century to the present on medical subjects, and the collection has expanded to approximately 10,000 items.  Themes include social justice, war, drug use, reproductive rights, HIV/AIDS, activism, and more.  Although the Historical Library does not house the official archives of the Medical School, it does own a number of manuscript collections, most notably the Peter Parker Collection, papers of Harvey Cushing, and the John Fulton diaries and notebooks. The Library also owns an extensive Smoking and tobacco advertising collection, the Robert Bogdan collection of disability photographs and postcards, a large medical imagery from popular publications donated by Bert Hansen, and smaller collections of patent medicine ephemera from noted collector William Helfand.

Applicants will need to apply through our fellowship site, and upload a curriculum vitae and project description, including the relevance of the Medical Historical Library collections to the project, as well as provide two references attesting to the particular project. Preference will be given to applicants beyond commuting distance to the Medical Historical Library.  This award is for use of Medical Historical special collections and is not intended for primary use of special collections in other libraries at Yale.  Applications are due by MAY 1^ST, 2020.  They will be considered by a committee and the candidates will be informed by early June 2020.  Winners may be asked to do a blog post discussing their research.

Additional information about the Library and its collections may be found at: https://library.medicine.yale.edu/historical

Please apply through Yale University Grants & Fellowships website. The deadline is May 1^st, 2020.

Requests for further information should be sent to:

Melissa Grafe, Ph.D
Head of the Medical Historical Library and John R. Bumstead Librarian for Medical History
Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library
Yale University
P.O. Box 208014
New Haven, CT 06520-8014
Telephone: 203- 785-4354
Fax: 203-785-5636
E-mail: melissa.grafe@yale.edu

~This post courtesy Chrissie Perella and Beth Lander.

We are pleased to announce that over 20,000 pages of lecture notes and related material has been digitized to date as part of “For the Health of the New Nation” grant.  “For the Health of the New Nation: Philadelphia as the Center of American Medical Education, 1746-1868” is a two-year project funded by CLIR and organized by the Philadelphia Area Consortium for Special Collections Libraries (PACSCL).  The initiative will digitize, describe, and provide access to 140,000 pages of lecture tickets, course schedules, theses, dissertations, student notes, faculty lectures notes, commencement addresses, opening addresses, and matriculation records, sharing not only the voices of the medical greats, but also the often unheard voices of students.

Some of the highlights included in our first batch of uploads to the Internet Archive include the Samuel Knox notes on lectures from the University of Pennsylvania (1783-1785), a two-volume set of notes on topics such as midwifery, symptoms of pregnancy and labor, typical and atypical births, and postnatal care.  These notes are one of the earliest sets of student lecture notes in the Library’s collection.  The contain Samuel Knox’s 1783 abstract of Colin McKenzie’s lectures on midwifery in 1773 at the University of Pennsylvania as well as Knox’s notes on Adam Kuhn’s materia medica lectures and Benjamin Rush’s chemistry lectures at the University of Pennsylvania, 1784-1785.  Although we may not have many (if any) patient records from 18th-century Philadelphia, these lecture notes can tell us a lot about preventive care and treatments for illnesses in contemporary times.  For example, Knox notes that “Bleeding [bloodletting] in the first three or four months prevents abortion.”  Bloodletting was not uncommon in late 18th century and early 19th century obstetrics.

Other materials digitized as part of “For the Health of the New Nation” give us insight into the lives of medical students.  The Forster family papers (1819-1880) include letters from James H. Stuart to his mother and brother, Benjamin, which concern his training and experiences as a medical student in Philadelphia at the University of Pennsylvania.  James earned his M.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1850.  He opened a medical practice in Erie, and later became an Assistant Surgeon in the U.S. Navy.  He was a member of Commodore Matthew Perry’s expedition to Japan in the 1850s, and was lost at sea off the Chinese coast in September 1854.

On 22 August 1846, James wrote his mother to say that his class had passed their examinations with “flying colors” and that Dr. Gray had “said it was the best examination he had ever seen.”

In a later letter, dated 12 March 1849, James asks his mother to send money for a book entitled “Wood’s Practice,” which he says at $5.50 is a cheap book.  We have two copies of this book, as well as several archival collections created by or relating to George B. Wood (1797-1879).

What else can we learn from student lecture notes and correspondence?  Check out these and other items digitized as part of the grant here: http://bit.ly/cpp_fhnn, and start exploring what medical students learned and how they lived in the early days of Philadelphia.  Keep an eye our Twitter account @CPPHistMedLib for updates!