Learning from Users

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The MHL’s National Endowment for the Humanities “Digital Humanities Start-Up” project is underway (see: http://www.medicalheritage.org/2011/08/mhl-project-updates/). We are meeting with faculty, graduate students, and administrators at partner organizations to learn from them how they use digital sources in teaching and research, their ideal solutions to overcoming teaching and research obstacles, and how they envision the MHL supporting their work. This data will inform the near-term development of the MHL and its goals for the future. Continue reading

Digital Highlights: York Retreat

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The care of the mentally ill has been a current topic in medical discourse for centuries. In the late eighteenth century, a Quaker named William Tuke opened the York Retreat in York, England, as a new type of mental health hospital. In 1892, Tuke’s grandson, D. Hack Tuke, who had been a visiting physician at the Retreat, wrote Reform in the Treatment of the Insane as a history of his grandfather’s pioneering efforts towards reforming the care… Continue reading

Digital Highlights: The Biography of a Disease

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In the early years of the twentieth century, diseases were being re-studied in light of advances in the fields of bacteriology, virology, and pathology. S. Burt Wolbach, at the time pathologist at the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital and the Boston Lying-In Hospital and later professor at Harvard Medical School, brought out Studies on Rocky Mountain Fever in the Journal of Medical Research in three successive issues in 1919 and then all three sections were brought together in… Continue reading

Digitizing Dorothea Lynde Dix at the National Library of Medicine

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Dorothea Lynde Dix (1802-1887) was one of the most influential lay social reformers to focus on the care and treatment of the mentally ill in 19th-century America. After starting a career as a school teacher in Massachusetts, Dix became aware of the abject conditions under which mentally ill persons in the state were held and treated: many of them kept restrained in dank prisons with little or no clothing, heat, or treatment. Campaigning first in… Continue reading

Digital Highlights: Care for Ailing Sailors

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Modern-day students of history learn the use of primary sources almost from the minute they enter an undergraduate program; some, from high schools with engaged history faculty or by taking part in programs like History Day in Massachusetts, before then. Analyzing, closely reading, considering, debating, and writing about primary sources is a key part of any history student’s education. What makes today’s digital highlight particularly interesting, then, is that not only is it now a… Continue reading