Category: News

Digitizing Dorothea Lynde Dix at the National Library of Medicine

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Portrait of Dorothea Lynde Dix, from NLM’s Images from the History of Medicine database.

Dorothea Lynde Dix (1802-1887) was one of the most influential lay social reformers to focus on the care and treatment of the mentally ill in 19th-century America. After starting a career as a school teacher in Massachusetts, Dix became aware of the abject conditions under which mentally ill persons in the state were held and treated: many of them kept restrained in dank prisons with little or no clothing, heat, or treatment. Campaigning first in Massachusetts and Rhode Island and then around the country, she approached numerous private donors, state legislatures and the US Congress to make funding available to build humane facilities for the mentally ill. Continue reading

Blog Redesign in Progress!

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As you may have noticed if you visit our website regularly, we’ve made some changes to the look of the place.

At the minute, we’re still trying to get all the rough edges smoothed out: testing out color schemes, arrangement of widgets, and so forth.

We appreciate your patience while we work through to our final design choices — and if you see something you love or something you hate, please, tell us in the comments!

Thanks!

MHL at two million images: a behind-the-scenes look at the project

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(Above) A collage of images from Countway books recently digitized and added to the MHL

This month, the Center for the History of Medicine contributed its two-millionth page-image to the Medical Heritage Library. That number translates into almost 6,000 volumes that have been digitized in their entirety (and downloaded over 90,000 times), or nearly two-thirds of our forecast total contributions to the project.

Those who are interested in the process of library digitization might also be interested to learn more about what those statistics mean in terms of logistics and workflow. What does it take to produce millions of page-images from a collection of hundreds of thousands of rare and fragile books? How much time is required? What are the biggest challenges involved? In this two-part series of blog posts, we will examine a large-scale digitization project from the inside. Continue reading

Lamar Soutter Library Contributes Rare Books to Online Medical Heritage Library

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We are pleased to announce the addition of 286 classic medical rare books from the Lamar Soutter Library, University of Massachusetts Medical School, to the Medical Heritage Library (MHL)’s holdings in the Internet Archive. The Lamar Soutter Library is the first contributor of existing digital materials to the MHL; by adding the tag “medicalheritage” to the cataloging information for each book in the Internet Archive, the Lamar Soutter Library has radically expanded the volumes’ potential audience. These digital texts join materials from Columbia, Harvard, and Yale, the National Library of Medicine, and the New York Public Library that will comprise the MHL. Continue reading

Early American Veterinary Texts in the National Library of Medicine’s Medical Heritage Library Collection

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A handwritten recipe for the botts, a parasite that affects horses, in Gervase Markham’s "The Citizen and Countryman’s Experienced Farrier" (Wilmington, Delaware: James Adams, 1764). Ingredients include vinegar, molasses, and gin.

Over the past twelve months the National Library of Medicine, a principal partner in the Medical Heritage Library, has been digitizing books from its early American medical book collection, and included have been a number of important and interesting items relating to veterinary medicine. Continue reading