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 City of New York and its successor, The Medical Directory of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut. Besides their obvious biographical, genealogical, and local history importance, the directories have an abundance of fascinating advertisements for medical equipment, patent medicines, and sanitaria.
I find these last particularly interesting since I suspect that in many cases the directories contain the only visual documentation of many of these rest homes, private psychiatric clinics, and health resorts that once dotted the metropolitan New York area.
For instance, this ad from the 1909 edition for “The Idylease Inn” in still-rural Newfoundland, N.J. proclaims itself “a Modern Health Resort” with “Out-Door Exercises, Beautiful Scenery and Delightful Walks and Drives…” However, be warned: “NO TUBERCULAR NOR OBJECTIONABLE CASES.”
And who would ever have thought that Astoria, Queens, was once the place to go for “Alcoholic and Narcotic Habitues” looking to dry out (from the 1907 edition):
And, of course, the great advantage of having them digitized means that you, dear viewer, can use them in the comfort of your home or office. This has been a great help to my colleague, Arlene Shaner, Assistant Curator and Reference Librarian in the New York Academy of Medicine’s Historical Collections, as she recently emailed me:
Since January of 2010, a large part of the Academy’s 19th and early 20th century collections has been in off-site storage because of a stack renovation project. Access to digital surrogates through portals like the Medical Heritage Library has made a world of difference to me as a public services librarian. Many of the questions I answer require the ability to check multiple years of medical directories and having these available online has enabled me to continue to answer those kinds of questions even though our hard copies are temporarily off-site. The digital surrogates also allow me to send the link to the text to my patrons, providing them with direct access to the materials themselves. Since many of my patrons are located very far away and may never be able to come and consult the NYAM collections in person, I am delighted to be able to offer them enhanced service thanks to the materials available through MHL.
Each of the participating institutions in the Medical Heritage Library has a wealth of such local texts that are rarely found outside of their region. One of the goals of the MHL is to make these less common texts available to anyone with access to a computer.
http://www.archive.org/stream/medicaldirectory11medi#page/848/mode/2up
http://www.archive.org/stream/medicaldirectory09medi#page/4/mode/2up
The Medical Heritage Library site on Internet Archive: http://www.archive.org/details/medicalheritagelibrary
Books digitized by the Medical Heritage Library can be viewed in the new BookReader. A number of features have been added, including:
