Search Results for: )

Call for Fellowship Applications: Educational Resources Fellow

  By ,

ABOUT US:

The Medical Heritage Library, Inc. is a collaborative digitization and discovery organization of some of the world’s leading medical libraries committed to providing open access to resources in the history of healthcare and health sciences. The MHL’s goal is to provide the means by which readers and scholars across a multitude of disciplines can examine the interrelated nature of medicine and society, both to inform contemporary medicine and to strengthen understanding of the world in which we live.

DESCRIPTION:

The Medical Heritage Library (MHL) seeks a motivated fellow to assist in the continuing development of our education and outreach programs. Hosted by one of our member institutions in New York, Boston, New Haven, Philadelphia, or San Francisco, the fellow will develop curated topical collections or sets for MHL website drawn from the over 300,000 items in our Internet Archive library. These 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 will have an opportunity to enrich metadata in MHL records in Internet Archive to support certain types of scholarship/inquiry, such as reproductive health, human sexuality, race and equity in healthcare, or other topics to be determined. The fellow will also begin developing educational materials tied to K-12 and/or university level curriculum.

The fellowship is paid and may be taken for course credit.

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.
  • Participate in creating and implementing social media promotions and campaigns.
  • Other duties as assigned.

QUALIFICATIONS AND EXPERIENCE:

This 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 are a must. Fellows are expected to learn quickly and work independently.  

FELLOWSHIP DURATION:

The fellowship will take place anytime between the end of May 2020-mid-August 2020

HOURS:

20 hours per week, over 12 weeks.

SALARY:

$20/hour

To apply, please provide the following:

    Cover letter documenting interest in position

    Curriculum Vitae

    2 References

Please submit your application materials by Friday, April 3, 2020 to:

Attn: Fellowship committee medicalheritage@gmail.com

Call for Fellowship Applications: Outreach Fellow

  By ,

ABOUT US:

The Medical Heritage Library, Inc. is a collaborative digitization and discovery organization of some of the world’s leading medical libraries committed to providing open access to resources in the history of healthcare and health sciences. The MHL’s goal is to provide the means by which readers and scholars across a multitude of disciplines can examine the interrelated nature of medicine and society, both to inform contemporary medicine and to strengthen understanding of the world in which we live.

DESCRIPTION:

The Medical Heritage Library (MHL) seeks a motivated fellow to develop and organize the planning of the tenth anniversary of our organization. Collaborating with the MHL Education and Outreach working group or Governance group, the fellow will help plan a virtual conference to take place in fall 2020 or spring 2021. Hosted by one of our member institutions in New York, Boston, New Haven, Philadelphia, or San Francisco, the fellow will develop a suite of online programs, webinars, or virtual conferences to celebrate the content in the MHL, appeal to digital scholars, and engage with our users. The fellow will research how to develop virtual conferences, propose topics, help identify and recruit speakers, outline planning including outreach, logistics, and organization, and provide a working plan for the conference. The fellow will also liaise with MHL partners, including the DPLA and Internet Archive for possible programming or publicity. 

Working with our Co-ordinator, the fellow will launch an anniversary social media campaign, including the creation of an Instagram account for the MHL. 

The fellowship is paid and may be taken for course credit.

DUTIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES:

  • Develop and help implement online programs, webinars, or virtual conferences. 
  • Coordinate communications around the MHL’s tenth anniversary. 
  • Liaise with MHL partners for possible programming or publicity. 
  • Participate in creating and implementing social media promotions and campaigns.
  • Other duties as assigned.

QUALIFICATIONS AND EXPERIENCE:

This 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 are a must. Fellows are expected to learn quickly and work independently. Experience planning programs, events, or webinars is preferred.  

FELLOWSHIP DURATION:

The fellowship will take place anytime between the end of May 2020-mid-August 2020

HOURS:

20 hours per week, over 12 weeks.

SALARY:

$20/hour

To apply, please provide the following:

    Cover letter documenting interest in position

    Curriculum Vitae

    2 References

Please submit your application materials by Friday, April 3, 2020 to:

Attn: Fellowship committee medicalheritage@gmail.com



ALHHS/MeMA 2019-20 Call for Publication Awards Nominations

  By

~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 14th, 2020. For more information, please contact Publication Awards Committee Chair: Polina Ilieva at polina.ilieva@ucsf.edu

Explore some of the earliest printed medical books in our collection online

  By

~This post courtesy Melissa Grafe, John R. Bumstead Librarian for Medical History, Head of the Medical Historical Library at Yale University and President, Medical Heritage Library, Inc.

Medical Heritage Library partner the Cushing/Whitney Medical Library at Yale University is pleased to announce that parts of its incunable collection are now available online! The effort to digitize these incunables and make them freely available worldwide was generously funded by the Arcadia Fund.

The Medical Historical Library, part of the Cushing/Whitney Medical Library, contains over 300 medical and scientific incunabula, which are books, broadsides, and pamphlets printed before 1501. These incredibly rare incunables represent the earliest history of printing in Europe and the first examples of medical knowledge circulated in printed form. Many of the incunables display elements of the print and manuscript world, including marginalia, historiated initials, and some of the earliest printed depictions of the human body, often derived from manuscript illustrations. The 44 incunables digitized in this project represent ones not found online anywhere. Topics include astrology, medicine, plague, anatomy, remedies, herbals and much more.

Tree of life from Gaerde der suntheit (1492)
Tree of life from Gaerde der suntheit (1492):

The incunable collection was donated to the Medical Library by one of our founders, Dr. Arnold Klebs (1870-1943), a Swiss tuberculosis expert and bibliophile. The last decade of Klebs’ life was especially devoted to his ambitious incunabula project. He hoped to publish a catalog with full entries for scientific and medical incunabula. In 1938, he published a short-title catalog (i.e. brief entries), Incunabula scientifica and medica, of all known scientific and medical incunabula.

Wolf howling at the moon from Bernat de Granollach’s Lunarium: ab anno 1491 ad annum 1550
Wolf howling at the moon from Bernat de Granollach’s Lunarium: ab anno 1491 ad annum 1550

Klebs did not purchase many incunabula himself. Instead, he encouraged fellow bibliophile and famed neurosurgeon Dr. Harvey Cushing to buy them and acted as intermediary with book dealers in Europe. Through the efforts of Klebs and Cushing, Yale’s Medical Historical Library holds one of the largest medical and scientific incunable collections in the United States.

Please explore these incunables on the Cushing/Whitney Medical Library site on Internet Archive, as part of the Medical Heritage Library. You can also find other Arcadia-funded digitized texts, including medieval and Renaissance medical and scientific manuscripts, Yale Medical School theses and early Arabic and Persian books and manuscripts, in this collection. 

A Tale of Two Roberts. Explorations in 19th-Century Medical and Theological Pamphlets

  By ,

~We’re delighted to offer this guest post! Lesa Scholl is Head of Kathleen Lumley College, the postgraduate college of the University of Adelaide.

I was extremely grateful to the amazing Hanna Clutterbuck-Cook recently when I sent out a desperate Friday afternoon email. This semester I’ve been visiting the Armstrong Browning Library at Baylor University, where they have a fantastic collection of nineteenth-century manuscripts and rare books. While I was examining Anglican pamphlets and tracts that engaged with poverty, hunger, and social justice, I happened upon a particular pamphlet: Remarks on Fasting, and on the Discipline of the Body: In a Letter to a Clergyman. By A Physician (1848). This pamphlet intrigued me, primarily because it was a medical doctor writing to a clergyman, not to speak against the practice of fasting, but to encourage appropriate ways in which to fast: ways that would promote bodily and spiritual health. He also gives a fascinatingly detailed description of what an appropriate diet ought to be—although he loses me when he tries to get me to refrain from coffee!

The Physician’s recommended daily diet
The Physician’s recommended daily diet

This pamphlet is central to my current book project, Fasting and Wasting: Religion, Nutrition, and Social Responsibility in Victorian Britain. I’m also looking at Robert Wilson Evans’s The Ministry of the Body (1847), which Remarks responds to directly. Evans’s work was published in the previous year, also by Rivingtons, who had published Remarks, and while my doctor-author begins by being extremely flattering in his citations of Evans’s work, he proceeded to critique every criticism on fasting that the clergyman had presented! An eminent medical doctor defending fasting to a clergyman—offering to teach the clergyman how to teach his flock to fast appropriately—isn’t exactly the expected trajectory.

I had found my clergyman, but my doctor continued to elude me. And that is where my MHL connection began—with the desperate Friday afternoon email! Hanna put me onto the Royal College of Surgeons, whose librarian got back to me within an hour. With true librarian magic, my doctor was uncovered, thanks to a nineteenth-century penciled annotation: another Robert. Robert Bentley Todd, MD, one of the founders of King’s College Hospital in London.

A statue of Robert Bentley Todd stands outside King’s College Hospital

That Todd was the doctor is almost too good to be true. The question remains as to why such a prolific writer and influential figure chose to write the pamphlet anonymously. While I haven’t ascertained this answer fully, I suspect it was because it was well-known that Todd was good friends with John Henry Newman from his Oxford days, and it had only been three years since Newman’s extremely controversial conversion to Roman Catholicism. Given that Newman was also known for his more ascetic religious practices, including extreme fasting, and Todd’s own High Church persuasion, having the pamphlet signed may have influenced the readership to smell the dangers of popery. In fact, Todd was known to be deeply critical of extreme fasting, and, as his pamphlet details, held to fasting as food restriction more than complete abstinence—a stance that resonated with Todd’s and Newman’s fellow Oxfordian, Edward Bouverie Pusey’s attitude toward fasting in Tracts for the Times. Indeed, the reduction of portions rather than complete abstinence was seen as a way to prevent gluttony and intemperance at the end of the fast, and was believed to be more difficult than abstinence.

With my two Roberts—Evans and Todd—at the helm, my research has stretched out into the conversations that were occurring between medical doctors and theologians within nineteenth-century Britain, and the way in which these conversations impacted understandings of social responsibility and public health, as well as spiritual and moral wellness. I’m juxtaposing lesser known works in Victorian Studies, such as the multivolume Bridgewater Treatises and the Rivington Theological Library, with the more familiar Tracts for the Times, revealing the deep connections of thought and ethos between medicine and religion in the Victorian period.

The majority of my research engages with the way in which nineteenth-century doctors and theologians were thinking about the relationship between the body and the soul, and the way that then relates to the social body: how does our impetus to care for our physical bodies affect the way we think about the bodies around us? Many thinkers, both scientific and religious, saw a place for fasting that was both spiritually edifying, but focused outward toward the community: fasting to sympathize and understand; fasting to curb luxury and self-indulgence in an age of excessive consumerism when so many were starving; and, perhaps most importantly, in the words of Pusey, “to give to the widow, or the poor, the amount of that which thou wouldest have expended upon thyself.”

Duke University History of Medicine Collections Travel Grants

  By ,

~Post courtesy Rachel Ingold, Curator, History of Medicine Collections, Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University.

The History of Medicine Collections in the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Duke University is accepting applications for our travel grant program.

Anyone who wishes to use materials from the History of Medicine Collections for historical research is eligible to apply, regardless of academic status. Writers, creative and performing artists, film makers and journalists are welcome to apply for  research travel grants. Research Travel Grants support projects that present creative approaches, including historical research and documentation projects resulting in dissertations, publications, exhibitions, educational initiatives, documentary films, or other multimedia products and artistic works. All applicants must reside beyond a 100-mile radius of Durham, N.C., and may not currently be a student or employee of Duke University.

Grants of up to $1500 will be awarded and may be used for: transportation expenses (including air, train or bus ticket charges; car rental; mileage using a personal vehicle; parking fees); accommodations; and meals. Expenses will be reimbursed once the grant recipient completes research travel and submits original receipts.

The Duke University History of Medicine Collections acquire, preserve, interpret, and make available for research and instruction materials documenting the history of medicine, biomedical science, and health and disease in the global context of the Western medical tradition. The collections seek to bring historical perspectives to bear on contemporary health issues and to facilitate an interdisciplinary understanding of the history of medicine. Collection strengths include, but are not limited to anatomical atlases, human sexuality, materia medica, pediatrics, psychiatry, and obstetrics & gynecology.

The deadline for applications is January 31, 2020 by 5:00 PM EST. Recipients will be announced in March 2020. Grants must be used between April 1, 2020 and June 30, 2021.

Fellowships Now Accepting Applications

  By

Our partners at the Center for the History of Medicine are currently accepting applications for two separate fellowships. Following posts are courtesy Jessica Murphy, Public Services Librarian at the Center.

Since 2003, the Boston Medical Library (BML) in the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine has sponsored annual fellowships supporting research in the history of medicine using Center for the History of Medicine collections. BML Fellowships in the History of Medicine at the Countway provide stipends of up to $5,000 to support travel, lodging, and incidental expenses for a flexible period between July 1, 2020 and June 30, 2021. Besides conducting research, the fellow will submit a report on the results of his/her residency and may be asked to present a seminar or lecture at the Countway Library.

The collections of the Center for the History of Medicine enable researchers to contextualize, understand, and contribute to the history of human health care, scientific medical development, and public health; they reflect nearly every medical and public health discipline, including anatomy, anesthesiology, cardiology, dentistry, internal medicine, medical jurisprudence, neurology, obstetrics and gynecology, pharmacy and pharmacology, psychiatry and psychology, and surgery, as well as variety of popular medicine topics and public health subjects such as industrial hygiene, nutrition, and tropical medicine. The Center serves as the institutional archives for the Harvard Medical School, Harvard School of Dental Medicine, and the Harvard School of Public Health, and is home to the Warren Anatomical Museum, which includes anatomical artifacts, pathological specimens, instruments, and other objects. Through the Center, researchers have the opportunity to use the rich historical resources of both the Harvard Medical Library and Boston Medical Library.

Fellowship proposals (no more than 5 pages) should describe the research project and demonstrate that the Countway Library has resources central to the research topic.
Applications should include:
• CV
• Length of visit
• Proposed budget and budget breakdown (travel, lodging, incidentals)
• Two letters of recommendation are also required

Electronic submissions of materials may be sent to: chm@hms.harvard.edu

Boston Medical Library Fellowships
Center for the History of Medicine
Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine
10 Shattuck Street
Boston, MA 02115.

Application deadline is Friday, February 14th.

Please see our website for more information and details about previous research recipients. Awards will be announced in early April.

and

The New England Regional Fellowship Consortium (NERFC) is now accepting applications for 2020-2021 research grants.

This collaboration of thirty major cultural agencies will offer at least twenty awards in 2020–2021. Each grant provides a stipend of $5,000 for a minimum of eight weeks of research at three or more participating institutions beginning June 1, 2020, and ending May 31, 2021. The Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine and its Center for the History of Medicine is a NERFC member. Visit the NERFC website for more information and list of participating institutions.

Special award in 2020–2021: The Colonial Society of Massachusetts will underwrite a project on the history of New England before the American Revolution.

Application Process: All applications must be completed using the online form.

Deadline: February 1, 2020

Questions: Contact the Massachusetts Historical Society:
Phone at 617-646-0577 or Email fellowships@masshist.org

Event: Heberden Society Lecture

  By

~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.