Digital Highlights: “Earnest Willie”

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Narratives from the sickbed have been popular for centuries. In the nineteenth century, a particular style of sickroom story was popular; it can be loosely described as the “angel in the house” story. This phrase is often used to describe stories that center around women such as Susan Coolidge’s 1870s What Katy Did but it can be stretched to cover narratives with a male protagonist and William David Upshaw’s 1903 “Earnest Willie” or Echoes from a Recluse seems to… Continue reading

From Remedia: “TRANSMISSION: Disposing of the dead: The cremation debate in the 19th century”

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In her insightful book, “This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War,” Drew Faust shows how the Civil War forever changed America’s experience of death. Never before had the country seen such a large fatality toll within such a short period of time: 750,000 people are believed to have died during the war, a number, according to Faust, “approximately equal to the total American fatalities in the Revolution, the War of 1812, the Mexican War,… Continue reading

Dr. David Hosack: “Stormy Petrel” of American Medical Education

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Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library History of the Health Sciences Lecture Series Dr. David Hosack: “Stormy Petrel” of American Medical Education By Michael Nevins, M.D., President, Medical History Society of New Jersey Wednesday, March 13: Refreshments, 5:30; Lecture, 6pm Russ Berrie Medical Science Pavilion, Room 2, 1150 St. Nicholas Ave. at West 168th St. Continue reading

Medical Heritage Library Increases Warren Museum Accessibility

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Recently digitized works in the Medical Heritage Library have created a window into the historical and modern collections of Harvard Medical School’s Warren Anatomical Museum. Digital surrogates of six books and pamphlets, published between 1835 and 1911, have been made available through the efforts of the Center for the History of Medicine and the National Library of Medicine. Continue reading

The College of Physicians of Philadelphia begins digitizing with Internet Archive

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The Historical Medical Library of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia has just completed its first book shipment to the Internet Archive. The College is one of four sub-grantees in the NEH grant awarded to the MHL via the Open Knowledge Commons. With this shipment, The College begins digitizing over 500,000 pages of rare American medical journals, some of which only exist in a handful of libraries nationwide. Continue reading