Locating Disabilities in Historical Medical Literature

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~Kelly Hacker Jones The second collection of documents I curated this summer focus on the topic of disabilities in medical history. This is topic that is rich for exploration and requires careful contextualization. The words used to describe physical, mental, and emotional impairments have, over time, come to be used as degrading and dehumanizing terms, yet many such (including “cripple,” “feeble-minded,” “moron,” and the like) were commonly used in medical literature of the nineteenth and… Continue reading

A New Look!

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We’ve been working on a new look for the website all summer and we’re just about ready to roll it out. All our URLs are going to stay the same, as will all our social media accounts, so you don’t need to worry about updating anything or changing any bookmarks. We’re going to be rolling out the changes over the next two weeks, starting with the small stuff and working up to a full redesign… Continue reading

From Our Partners: Memory Lives On: Documenting the HIV/AIDS Epidemic

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Memory Lives On: Documenting the HIV/AIDS Epidemic Friday, October 4 – Saturday, October 5 Byers Auditorium in Genentech Hall, UCSF Mission Bay campus Join UCSF Archives & Special Collections for this interdisciplinary symposium exploring and reflecting on topics related to archives and the practice of documenting the stories of HIV/AIDS. The task of documenting the history of HIV/AIDS and thinking about the present and future of the epidemic is daunting. The enormity and complexity of… Continue reading

From Our Partners: NYAM Fellowships

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The New York Academy of Medicine is currently accepting applications for both of their fellowships — the application period closes on August 23, 2019. The Audrey and William H. Helfand Fellowship in the History of Medicine and Public Health The Helfand Fellowship supports research using Academy library resources for scholarly study of the history of medicine and public health. It is intended specifically for a scholar in residence at the Academy Library. While all proposals will… Continue reading

The Cow says, “Ouch!” Animals in the History of Vaccines

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~Kelly Hacker Jones. Following the “animal turn” in historical research, more work has been done in the history of medicine on animals as research subjects. In the realm of vaccination, this history should be immediately apparent: it’s right there in the name. Edward Jenner in his 1798 treatise, An Inquiry into the Causes and Effects of the Variolae Vaccinae, applied a Latin name to the cowpox: variolae vaccinae (smallpox + from cows), from which the… Continue reading

“What I did on my Summer Vacation”: MHL Education and Outreach Fellow Edition

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~Kelly Hacker Jones I’ve spent the first month of my fellowship culling through documents in the Medical Heritage Library Collections that illustrate moments in the history of vaccine development and use. These have ranged from notices in state medical society journals about new serums and state laws to scientific reports to anti-vaccination tracts. In selecting items for inclusion in the exhibit, I gravitated towards those that were representative of key events or themes in vaccine… Continue reading

From Our Partners: Journals Digitisation at the Wellcome Collection

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~This post courtesy Paul Horn, Digitisation Support Officer, Wellcome Collection. We are at the beginning of a project to digitise Wellcome’s collections of journals – the periodical publications of a range of societies, organisations, and academic disciplines concerned with health.  The project is exciting because of its scale, the new challenges it presents, and the benefits it will offer to researchers and other users. The journal holdings are substantial and are representative of Wellcome’s wide-ranging… Continue reading