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Apply to be our 2023 Education Resources Fellow!

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We’re accepting applications for our summer 2023 fellowship!

The Medical Heritage Library seeks a motivated fellow to assist in the continuing development of our education and outreach programs. Under the guidance of a member of our governance board, the fellow will develop a curated collection or sets for the MHL website on the topic of mental health and illness. Examples of existing primary source sets can be found on the MHL website: http://www.medicalheritage.org/resource-sets/. These collections will be drawn from the over 300,000 items in our Internet Archive library. The curated collections provide a means for our visitors to discover the richness of MHL materials on a variety of topics relevant to the history of health and the health sciences. As part of this work, the fellow may have an opportunity to enrich metadata in MHL records in Internet Archive to support scholarship and inquiry on this topic.
This paid fellowship will be hosted virtually, with no in-person component.

DUTIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES:

  • Based on the input of MHL members and others, work on the creation of curated sets of materials drawn from MHL collections.
  • Enrich MHL metadata to highlight underrepresented topics in our Internet Archive collections.
  • Regularly create blog posts and other type of social media for posting to MHL accounts.
  • Other duties as assigned.

QUALIFICATIONS AND EXPERIENCE:
This virtual position is open to all qualified graduate students with a strong interest in medical or health history, with additional interests in library/information science or education. Strong communication and collaboration skills a must. Fellows are expected to learn quickly and work independently.


FELLOWSHIP DURATION:
The fellowship will take place anytime between the end of May 2023-mid-August 2023

HOURS:
150 hours, over 12 weeks with a maximum of 20 hours in any given week.

SALARY:
$20/hour not to exceed $3000

NUMBER OF AVAILABLE FELLOWSHIPS: 1
To apply, please provide the following:
Cover letter documenting interest in position
Curriculum Vitae
2 References- names (with positions) and emails and phone numbers of references to contact.
No letters required.
Please submit your application materials by March 27 th , 2023 through this form.
Candidate interviews will take place virtually. Please contact the MHL at mhltreasurer@gmail.com if you have questions.

This Friday, 4/9! “‘Black Museum’: An American Medical Experiment” with Sarah L. Berry

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Please join the Medical Heritage Library, Inc. for the third talk in our Spring Speaker Series!

When
Fri, April 9, 2021
12:00 PM – 1:00 PM EDT

Register here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/spring-speaker-series-sarah-l-berry-tickets-143311824525

Racial disparities in health and medical care have been highlighted by the current pandemic, but they have long roots in U.S. history. Teaching and researching this history is important for moving forward with restorative justice and health equity. A particularly rich starting point is “Black Museum,” a 2017 episode of the sci-fi television series Black Mirror. This episode features three fictional medical technologies that call up specific, real ethical problems in U.S. racial and medical history. The technologies, exhibited by the Black Museum’s owner, a former research recruiter, harken back to the nineteenth-century commodification of race and somatic difference in three linked areas: the new science of forensics (institutionalized in the original Black Museum of Scotland Yard); medical museums; and circus “freak” shows. This presentation explores the “Roots of Racism in Health and Medicine” collection and other resources in the Medical Heritage Library in order to uncover the historical connections among race, medicine, entertainment, and crime dramatized in the episode. This talk offers pedagogical techniques to immerse students in digital archival research, enabling them to make their own connections among race and health justice in U.S. cultural history.

Speaker

Sarah L. Berry, PhD, is a Visiting Assistant Professor of English at State University of New York—Oswego. She specializes in Health Humanities and writes on medicine, gender, race, and U.S. cultural history. She is a Contributor-in-Residence at Synapsis, serves in the Health Humanities Consortium, and is working on a book titled, Patient Revolutions: Health and Social Justice in America from Abolition to the Affordable Care Act.

From Library War Service to Science: Bibliotherapy in World War I

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This Friday, we’d like to point you towards an online exhibit on bibliotherapy as used during World War I. This exhibit was created and curated by Mary Mahoney, a Ph.D. Candidate in History at the University of Connecticut. She is currently completing a dissertation on the history of bibliotherapy, or the use of books as medicine.

Most readers can think of a novel that offered some comfort, a poem that presented direction, or even a biography that provided inspiration. The notion that books can heal is as old as reading itself but, during World War I, doctors and librarians joined together to apply reading as a form of therapy.

 

Celebrating Vivien Thomas

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~This post courtesy of Phoebe Evans Letocha, Collections Management Archivist, Alan Mason Chesney Medical Archives Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions.

Vivien T. Thomas, oil portrait by Bob Gee, 1969

Vivien T. Thomas, oil portrait by Bob Gee, 1969

To commemorate February as both Black History Month and American Heart Month, the Medical Heritage Library salutes the contributions of Vivien Thomas, an African American surgical technician at Johns Hopkins. Continue reading