Category: From Our Partners

~This post courtesy Melissa Grafe.

Looking for funds to research at Yale’s Medical Historical Library? Apply for the Ferenc Gyorgyey Research Travel Award at the Medical Historical Library of the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University.

The Ferenc Gyorgyey Research Travel Grant is available to historians, medical practitioners, and other researchers outside of Yale who wish to use the Historical collections of the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library. In any given year the award is up to $1,500 for one week of research.  Funds may be used for transportation, housing, food, and photographic reproductions. The award is limited to residents of the United States and Canada. 

The Medical Historical Library holds one of the country’s largest collections of rare medical books, journals, prints, photographs, and pamphlets. It was founded in 1941 by the donations of the extensive collections of Harvey Cushing, John F. Fulton, and Arnold C. Klebs. Special strengths are the works of Hippocrates, Galen, Vesalius, Boyle, Harvey, Culpeper, Haller, Priestley, and S. Weir Mitchell, and works on anatomy, anesthesia, and smallpox inoculation and vaccination. The Library owns over fifty medieval and renaissance manuscripts, Arabic and Persian manuscripts, and over 300 medical incunabula.  The notable Clements C. Fry Collection of Prints and Drawings has over 2,500 fine prints, drawings, and posters from the 15th century to the present on medical subjects, and the collection has expanded to approximately 10,000 items.  Themes include social justice, war, drug use, reproductive rights, HIV/AIDS, activism, and more.  Although the Historical Library does not house the official archives of the Medical School, it does own a number of manuscript collections, most notably the Peter Parker Collection, papers of Harvey Cushing, and the John Fulton diaries and notebooks. The Library also owns an extensive Smoking and tobacco advertising collection, the Robert Bogdan collection of disability photographs and postcards, a large medical imagery from popular publications donated by Bert Hansen, and smaller collections of patent medicine ephemera from noted collector William Helfand.

Applicants will need to apply through our fellowship site, and upload a curriculum vitae and project description, including the relevance of the Medical Historical Library collections to the project, as well as provide two references attesting to the particular project. Preference will be given to applicants beyond commuting distance to the Medical Historical Library.  This award is for use of Medical Historical special collections and is not intended for primary use of special collections in other libraries at Yale.  Applications are due by MAY 1^ST, 2020.  They will be considered by a committee and the candidates will be informed by early June 2020.  Winners may be asked to do a blog post discussing their research.

Additional information about the Library and its collections may be found at: https://library.medicine.yale.edu/historical

Please apply through Yale University Grants & Fellowships website. The deadline is May 1^st, 2020.

Requests for further information should be sent to:

Melissa Grafe, Ph.D
Head of the Medical Historical Library and John R. Bumstead Librarian for Medical History
Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library
Yale University
P.O. Box 208014
New Haven, CT 06520-8014
Telephone: 203- 785-4354
Fax: 203-785-5636
E-mail: melissa.grafe@yale.edu

~This post courtesy Chrissie Perella and Beth Lander.

We are pleased to announce that over 20,000 pages of lecture notes and related material has been digitized to date as part of “For the Health of the New Nation” grant.  “For the Health of the New Nation: Philadelphia as the Center of American Medical Education, 1746-1868” is a two-year project funded by CLIR and organized by the Philadelphia Area Consortium for Special Collections Libraries (PACSCL).  The initiative will digitize, describe, and provide access to 140,000 pages of lecture tickets, course schedules, theses, dissertations, student notes, faculty lectures notes, commencement addresses, opening addresses, and matriculation records, sharing not only the voices of the medical greats, but also the often unheard voices of students.

Some of the highlights included in our first batch of uploads to the Internet Archive include the Samuel Knox notes on lectures from the University of Pennsylvania (1783-1785), a two-volume set of notes on topics such as midwifery, symptoms of pregnancy and labor, typical and atypical births, and postnatal care.  These notes are one of the earliest sets of student lecture notes in the Library’s collection.  The contain Samuel Knox’s 1783 abstract of Colin McKenzie’s lectures on midwifery in 1773 at the University of Pennsylvania as well as Knox’s notes on Adam Kuhn’s materia medica lectures and Benjamin Rush’s chemistry lectures at the University of Pennsylvania, 1784-1785.  Although we may not have many (if any) patient records from 18th-century Philadelphia, these lecture notes can tell us a lot about preventive care and treatments for illnesses in contemporary times.  For example, Knox notes that “Bleeding [bloodletting] in the first three or four months prevents abortion.”  Bloodletting was not uncommon in late 18th century and early 19th century obstetrics.

Other materials digitized as part of “For the Health of the New Nation” give us insight into the lives of medical students.  The Forster family papers (1819-1880) include letters from James H. Stuart to his mother and brother, Benjamin, which concern his training and experiences as a medical student in Philadelphia at the University of Pennsylvania.  James earned his M.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1850.  He opened a medical practice in Erie, and later became an Assistant Surgeon in the U.S. Navy.  He was a member of Commodore Matthew Perry’s expedition to Japan in the 1850s, and was lost at sea off the Chinese coast in September 1854.

On 22 August 1846, James wrote his mother to say that his class had passed their examinations with “flying colors” and that Dr. Gray had “said it was the best examination he had ever seen.”

In a later letter, dated 12 March 1849, James asks his mother to send money for a book entitled “Wood’s Practice,” which he says at $5.50 is a cheap book.  We have two copies of this book, as well as several archival collections created by or relating to George B. Wood (1797-1879).

What else can we learn from student lecture notes and correspondence?  Check out these and other items digitized as part of the grant here: http://bit.ly/cpp_fhnn, and start exploring what medical students learned and how they lived in the early days of Philadelphia.  Keep an eye our Twitter account @CPPHistMedLib for updates!

~This post courtesy Polina Ilieva.

The Archivists and Librarians in the History of the Health Sciences (ALHHS)/Medical Museums Association (MeMA) is currently seeking nominations for its three Publication Awards. 

Nominations can be from one of three categories: 

• Monographs published by academic or trade publishers.
• Articles published in journals, trade or private periodicals of recognized standing.
• Online resources produced predominantly by ALHHS/MeMA members.

All nominations must meet the following criteria: 

• Published within 3 years of the award date. 
• Author(s) must be ALHHS/MeMA member(s) in good standing for the last 12 months. 
• The nominated monograph, article, or electronic resource is related to the history of the health sciences or works on the bibliography, librarianship and/or curatorship of historical collections in the health sciences.

Nominations that meet each of the above criteria will be considered by the Publication Awards Committee.

The Committee will look for the following benchmarks of excellence when evaluating qualifying nominations:

• Quality and style of writing.
• Contribution to the field.
• Relevance to the profession.

Up to one Publication Award in each category will be presented at the 2020 annual meeting in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Winners do not need to be present to win.

To nominate a work, please send a PDF or 3 physical copies of a printed work (photocopies are acceptable), or the URL for an online resource to the Publication Awards Committee Chair. Please include along with all nominations a cover letter giving the item’s complete citation (including all authors, publisher, and publication date) and the category under which the nomination falls (i.e. Monograph, Article, or Online Resource). Authors may nominate their own works. Re-nominations are also allowed, so long as the nominated publication still falls within the 3-year time period.  

The deadline for nominations is Friday, February 14^th, 2020. For more information, please contact Publication Awards Committee Chair: Polina Ilieva at polina.ilieva@ucsf.edu