Internet Archive Introduces New BookReader

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Books digitized by the Medical Heritage Library can be viewed in the new BookReader.  A number of features have been added, including: Navigation bar that helps show your location in the book and navigate through it. Search results and chapter markers (if available) show up on the navigation bar. New Read Aloud feature reads the book as audio in most browsers.  No special software is needed. Vastly improved full-text search.  Search results are shown on the navigation… Continue reading

Digital Highlights: Who is Francesco Durante or, What Can We Learn from Download Statistics?

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Internet Archive, where the Medical Heritage Library’s content now resides, has a neat feature that allows you to see what has been downloaded most often.  With almost 8,500 volumes digitized by February 1, 2011, I thought it would be interesting to see what content in MHL was being most heavily used. The results are surprising.  Among the top ten most downloaded volumes are three Columbia University catalogues (numbers 2, 5, and 10); three anatomical works:… Continue reading

Forests, trees, and digitization

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As the medical profession continues to wrestle with the ethics, logistics, and implications of randomized controlled trials, I’ve become happily involved with an informal international collaborative group, led by Iain Chalmers (editor of the James Lind Library), in examining the history of controlled trials before the famous 1948 British Medical Research Council study of streptomycin for tuberculosis. At the most basic level of full-text searching, digitization enables scholarship that simply could not be performed otherwise.… Continue reading

Internet Archive to Change Derivatives

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The Internet Archive has been studying the usage stats of the DjVU and Black/White PDFs. The demand and activity with these file formats is very low, so the Internet Archive will halt the derivation of these two file formats.  In addition to the ‘Read online’ option, the Internet Archive will continue to offer: PDF (color) EPUB Kindle Daisy Full Text If users are concerned about this change, please  contact us at medicalheritage@gmail.com. Continue reading

Topics selected for digitization in 2010-2011

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The Medical Heritage Library partners worked together during June and July 2009 to identify collection strengths and complementary subject areas for digitization. Works selected for scanning include such topics such as anesthesia, popular medicine and homeopathy, medical jurisprudence and general public health, with a core focus on the intersection of medicine and society. Continue reading

Digital Highlights: Cure of a true cancer of the female breast with mesmerism

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John Elliotson (1791-1868) studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh and Jesus College, Cambridge. A strong interest in phrenology and mesmerism, which traditional practitioners were reluctant to accept as valid medical or scientific disciplines, led him to resign his post as physician to London’s University College Hospital in 1838. Thomas Wakley, the founder of The Lancet, at the time a new addition to the medical community, initially supported Elliotson but changed his mind. In 1838,… Continue reading

Directories and their varied uses

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The participants in the Medical Heritage Library have been particularly eager to include  runs of their local physicians’ directories.  Holdings of these tend to be very “site-specific,” — Columbia University is unlikely to have extensive runs of directories from New England while Harvard, on the other hand, would. The Columbia University Health Sciences Library’s set of New York area directories, however, is almost complete dating back to 1887, including both The Medical Directory of the… Continue reading

Digital Highlights: God’s revenge against murder! Or, the tragical histories and horrid cruelties of Elizabeth Brownrigg, midwife, to Mary Mitchell, Mary Jones, & Mary Clifford, her three apprentices

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Medical jurisprudence is among the subject areas from which the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine’s Center for the History of Medicine has selected titles to be digitized. This image also tangentially represents another topic on which the Center will focus its digitization efforts, namely obstetrics. Elizabeth Brownrigg, a midwife in 18th-century London, was executed for her cruel mistreatment of orphaned children apprenticed to her in order to be trained as domestic servants. The Center’s… Continue reading

Medical Heritage Library

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The Medical Heritage Library is a digital curation collaborative among some of the world’s leading medical libraries. The MHL promotes free and open access to quality historical resources in medicine. Our 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 strengthen understanding of the world in which we live. Current digitization partners are:… Continue reading

Old Research Tools List

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This list of digital research tools has been superseded by the new Develop@MHL page! But since we know folks liked and used this page, we didn’t want it to vanish into thin air. So here it is! Research Tools, Text Analysis, and Visualization Diigo – Allows you to take notes, add virtual “sticky notes”, or highlight most Webpages. Endnote (for purchase) – Citation tool. github – A public code repository. Google Scratchpad – Handy little free widget that lets you take… Continue reading