In 1877, Edward Levinstein, M.D. and director of the Maison de Santé in Schonberg-Berlin wrote Morbid Craving for Morphia or, in German, Die Morphiumsucht. Levinstein disclaimed any attempt to trace the history of morphine or its medical importance; his main interest was to examine the process of morphine addiction and, if possible, how to cure it. Continue reading
In an announcement made earlier this month, the British Library and Google made public their joint agreement to allow the Google Books scanning service access to over 200,000 volumes from the British Library. This will encompass over 40 million pages of out-of-copyright material. While Google recently experienced a major setback to its scanning projects with the failure of the author settlement, the prospect of free access to some of the British Library’s unique materials is… Continue reading
In 1882, styles of clothing for women were restrictive to say the least: tight bodices and long sweeping skirts restricted breathing, made it hard to move freely, and, in some cases where lacing was taken to the extreme, might even crack ribs or damage internal organs. Whether or not all women adhered to the dominant style all the time is, of course, impossible to say; probably most women made adjustments as necessary for individual figures,… Continue reading
The National Library of Medicine, the world’s largest medical library and a component of NIH, announces the release of Medicine in the Americas. A digital resource encompassing over 350 early American printed books, Medicine in the Americas makes freely available original works demonstrating the evolution of American medicine from colonial frontier outposts of the 17th century to research hospitals of the 20th century. Continue reading
Via a recent posting to the Caduceus-L listserv, we learn that the Rudolph Matas Library of Tulane University is announcing the opening of its online collection of New Orleans Charity Hospital Reports. Available through the Internet Archive, the Rudolph Matas website, and LOUISiana Digital Library Collection of Collections, the collection of reports spans over 100 years from 1842 to 1974. Researchers can browse the reports online or download the reports in .pdf form from the Matas… Continue reading
If you happen to know that you’re looking for a title from a particular contributor to the MHL — or perhaps you want to restrict your search so that you only get results from a library close to you or one you are planning to visit in the future — there’s a way to do that! Continue reading
Published in 1914, Orison Swett Marden’s Keeping Fit is a part-handbook, part-sermon, and part-“to do” list. Marden himself was a leading exponent of “New Thought” in the late 19th and early 20th century. “New Thought” believers argued that thought had a direct influence on life: if you thought you were happy, successful, and well-liked, the odds were in favor of all three of those things being true. “New Thought” also had some similarity with Christian Science… Continue reading
I just returned from the International Linked Open Data in Libraries Archives and Museums (LOD-LAM) Summit in San Francisco, CA . This was an intensive two-day conversation of what the internet could look like if libraries, archives, and museums unleashed their high quality metadata on the semantic web. How would the web differ from the way we know it today as primarily a tool for consumers? The web as we know it now is built… Continue reading
The University of Michigan Library Copyright Office, in partnership with the HathiTrust Digital Library, is launching an effort to identify orphan works among the holdings of the HathiTrust. Orphan works are those which are within their copyright date restrictions but for which no copyright holder can be found: effectively, they have no parent individual or organization and are, therefore, orphaned. Still, granting access to these works can be problematic since they are not outside the… Continue reading
Robert Goodsir did not, however, technically go in search of Franklin himself but, rather, in search of his own brother who had embarked with Franklin on his ill-fated 1845 voyage from England to discover the Northwest Passage. Sir John Franklin was a noted — and notoriously unlucky — Arctic explorer whose last voyage ended in complete disaster: his two ships were missing for over ten years and even when the deaths of Franklin and his… Continue reading
