Category: Events

You have until Thursday to grab your free ticket for our 10th anniversary conference.

The conference runs from 11 to 5 (EST) and you can check out the full program with links to all the abstracts below!

11:00am-12:00pmWelcome and Keynote 

• Welcome: Emily R. Novak Gustainis, President, Medical Heritage Library, Inc.; Deputy Director of the Center for the History of Medicine at the Francis A Countway Library of Medicine at Harvard University
• Keynote Speaker: Dr. Jaipreet Virdi, Assistant Professor for the Department of History at the University of Delaware
  Digitized Disability Histories

12:00pm-1:00pm

Presentations

Moderator: Robin Naughton, Vice-President, Medical Heritage Library, Inc.; Assistant Professor, Web and Digital Services Librarian, Queens College, CUNY

• Helene Cazes, Ph.D., University of Victoria, British Columbia
  Searching for female perfection in the MHL collections
• Amber Hinde, Ph.D. (candidate), University of Glasgow, Scotland
  ‘A doctor’s advice and prescription is now worth more than any soothing syrup’: Writing ‘Scientific Motherhood’ in Early Twentieth Century Britain

1:00-2:30Break

1:15pm-2:15Lunch and Learn
Moderator: Polina Ilieva, Board Member, Medical Heritage Library, Inc.; AUL for Archives and Special Collections, University Archivist, UC San Francisco

• Catherine DeRose, Program Manager for the Digital Humanities Lab, Yale University, and Peter Leonard, Director of the Digital Humanities Lab at Yale University
  Visualizing Medical Heritage Collections at Scale
• Krista Stracka, Rare Book Cataloger for the Rare Books and Early Manuscripts Section in the History of Medicine Division, National Library of Medicine
  Rarity factor: Unveiling unique materials from the National Library of Medicine
• Kate Tasker, Industry Documents Library Archivist, University of California, San Francisco and Rachel Taketa, Tobacco Projects Assistant, University of California, San Francisco
  Smoke on Screens: Audiovisual Evidence of the Tobacco Industry’s Harms to Public Health

2.30pm – 3.30pm
Presentations

Moderator: Beth Lander, Secretary/Treasurer, Medical Heritage Library, Inc.; Managing Director, Philadelphia Area Consortium of Special Collections Libraries (PACSCL)

• Jonathan Jones, Ph.D., Civil War Era Postdoctoral Scholar, George and Ann Richards Civil War Era Center, Pennsylvania State University
  Drugs and Digitization: Investigating Opiate Addiction in the U.S. Civil War Era with the Medical Heritage Library
• Whitney Arnold, Ph.D., Adjunct Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature and Director of the Undergraduate Research Center for the Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences at the University of California (UCLA)
  Medicine in the Monthly Review: A Large-Scale Analysis of Medical Texts and Discourses

3:30-3:45Break

3.45pm – 4.45pm
Presentations

Moderator: Melissa Grafe, Board Member, Medical Heritage Library, Inc.; Ph.D, Head of the Medical Historical Library, John R. Bumstead Librarian for Medical Historical, Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library, Yale University

• Caterina Agostini, Ph.D. (candidate), Rutgers University
  Diet, Weight, and the Authority of Books: Santorio’s Medical Method
• E. Thomas Ewing, Associate Dean for Graduate Studies and Research and Professor of History, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University; Ariel Ludwig, Ph.D,Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University; Jessica Brabble, student, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
  A Properly Made Mask: Historical Lessons from Popular Culture and Medical Discourse during the 1918 Flu Epidemic

4:45pm-5:00pm

Closing

• Closing: Robin Naughton, Vice-President, Medical Heritage Library, Inc.; Assistant Professor, Web and Digital Services Librarian, Queens College, CUNY 

You’ve got one week to sign up for our free 10th anniversary conference next week on Friday, November 13th.

You can check out our full program and read abstracts from all our speakers here.

We look forward to seeing you next Friday!

The Medical Heritage Library is hosting an online conference to celebrate a decade of digitizing primary resources in the history of medicine on Friday November 13, 2020. 

The Medical Heritage Library is a digital curation collaborative among some of the world’s leading medical libraries. The conference seeks to highlight research, teaching, and learning outcomes for our open-access collection of texts, films, images, and audio material in medical and health sciences and related subject matter. These materials represent a wide range of historical periods, linguistic traditions, and scientific cultures, and we encourage proposals that reflect the scope of our medical heritage collections. We seek to forge new relationships and strengthen existing ones with scholars, educators, and allied health professionals, in medical humanities, digital humanities, library and information science, medical history, art history, critical race studies, cultural studies, disability studies, philosophy, and bioethics.  

We invite proposals on a range of topics related to our collections, including, but not limited to:

Affect management and practitioner burnout

Collections as data

Disability studies and medicine

History of sexuality

Local and indigenous medical knowledge

Lung disease and cigarette smoking

Medical museums

Medicine and the arts

Medicine and literature

Patient experience(s)

Public health

Race science and medicine

State medical societies

Teaching the pandemic(s)

Vaccines and anti-vaccination

Women and medicine

We ask that proposals reference at least one work digitized by the Medical Heritage Library, or discuss how the collections informed the research behind the presentation. Please see our website at www.medicalheritage.org and our Internet Archive collections archive.org/details/medicalheritagelibrary for more details.  

We welcome proposals of non-traditional presentation formats, such as workshops, lightning talks, collaborative discussions, digital demonstrations, and creative performances, as well as traditional academic papers and panels.  

Please submit an abstract of 300 words or less and a bio of 100 words or less through our abstract submission form by September 18, 2020. Make sure to note the intended form of your contribution, and provide an email contact for all authors. If you have any questions, please contact us at conference.mhl@gmail.com 

We look forward to reading your submissions.

Together with LAMPHHS, we’re offering an online session all about the MHL!

Melissa Grafe, our immediate past president from the Historical Medical Library of Yale Medical School, Jessica Murphy from the Center for the History of Medicine at the Francis A Countway Library of Medicine, and Hanna Clutterbuck-Cook from the MHL and the Center will be guiding the session.

When: Friday, July 31^th at 1 p.m. EST

What: We’ll spend about 30-45 minutes on an introduction to the MHL and strategies for diving into the MHL corpus, showing how to surface materials related to epidemics and diseases as an example (a hot topic for the upcoming fall semester!), and discussing other ways the MHL is promoting discovery of various parts of the collection.

In this Digging Into Digital session, we’ll dive into the rich and freely open collections digitized by the Medical Heritage Library, a non-profit collaborative digitization and discovery organization committed to providing open access resources in the history of healthcare and the health sciences. This session is tailored for library, archive, and museum professionals who provide history of medicine and health research help and classroom teaching. 

Please quickly register your email here:  https://forms.gle/YhBeBLpnibRJS2KX9

The session is open to people outside of LAMPHHS, so if you have colleagues who want to join in, they are welcome to do so.   We will use the email you share in registration to send you the Zoom link the day before the session. 

#ColorOurCollections is back! You can find coloring books from archives, libraries, and special collections around the world, including ours.

You can also get ours from this direct link which will take you to a printable .pdf. If you color any of our pages, we’d love to see pictures! Send any photos to medicalheritage@gmail.com and happy coloring!

~Post courtesy Nicole Milano, Head, Medical Center Archives, NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medicine.

For those in the New York City area, please join us on November 21st at 5:00 pm in the Uris Faculty Room (A-126) for the Heberden Society history of medicine lecture series! Dr. Jeffrey S. Reznick will be presenting “So Comes the Sacred Work: Disabled Soldiers and the Humanitarianism of John Galsworthy during the Great War” at Weill Cornell Medicine (1300 York Avenue, New York, NY.) Dr. Reznick is the Chief of the History of Medicine Division at the National Library of Medicine.

John Galsworthy (1867-1933), recipient of the 1932 Nobel Prize for literature, was one of the best-selling authors of the twentieth century. While his name has become synonymous with The Forsyte Saga, the epic sequence of novels and “interludes” about the upper-middle-class Forsyte family, his literary reputation belies his humanitarianism during the Great War supporting British and American soldiers disabled in combat.

This lecture will address the personal and ethical circumstances which motivated Galsworthy to take up what he called “the sacred work,” and the relevance of this history to scholarly and popular dialogue about the immediate and future care of soldiers disabled in war.

Co-sponsored with the Weill Cornell Division of Medical Ethics, this lecture is free and open to the public! Registration is not required.