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Celebrating Elizabeth Blackwell

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Title page of text by Elizabeth Blackwell with heavy art deco pattern around the edgesThis week, the Medical Heritage Library is celebrating the life of Elizabeth Blackwell (1821-1910), the first woman to receive a medical degree in the United States and the first woman on the UK Medical Register. Elizabeth, born February 3, 1821, in Bristol, England, was the third child of Hannah (Lane) Blackwell (1792–1870) and Samuel Blackwell (1790–1838)’s nine children. Elizabeth attended Geneva Medical College from 1847 to 1849, and in 1853, she established a small dispensary in New York City with her sister, Emily (the third woman to receive a medical degree in the United States), and Dr. Marie Zakrzewska (1829-1902); the dispensary  expanded in 1857 to become the New York Infirmary for Indigent Women and Children. As an adjunct to the infirmary, Elizabeth and Emily founded the Women’s Medical College in New York in 1868. In the years following the Civil War, Elizabeth resettled in England. There, with physician and feminist Sophia Jex-Blake (1840-1912), she founded the London School of Medicine for Women in 1874. Like her sisters, Elizabeth Blackwell never married. Continue reading

Yale Medicine Goes to War, 1917

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A new exhibition from Medical Heritage Library partner Yale University entitled “Yale Medicine Goes to War, 1917″ commemorates America’s entry into the war at the local level. From mobilizing a “first of its kind” Mobile Hospital Unit, No. 39, to research on the effects of chemical warfare, this exhibition explores the many ways that Yale Medical School faculty, researchers, and students contributed to the war effort at home and abroad. The war diaries of Harvey Cushing, a pioneering neurosurgeon and Sterling Professor of Neurology at the Yale School of Medicine (1932–1939), are also on view, documenting the trials and trauma of war, particularly brain damage arising from shell fragments, shrapnel, and gunshot wounds. Continue reading

The John K. Lattimer Lecture: “The Marrow of Tragedy: Disease and Diversity in Civil War Medicine”

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Please join The New York Academy of Medicine (1216 Fifth Avenue at 103rd Street, New York, NY 10029) on Tuesday, February 21, 2017 at 6:00PM-7:30PM for Margaret Humphreys’ John K. Lattimer Lecture.

Health care in the U.S. Civil War is often depicted as gruesome, with amputations (sans anesthesia) as the centerpiece of horror. In actuality, hospitals could be sites of healing, although there were significant differences between North and South. In this lecture, Margaret Humphreys highlights the variations among medical loci during the war, an analysis that illustrates the aspects of “good health care” that made a difference in the survival of Civil War patients. Continue reading

Nuisance or Necessity? Historical Perspectives on the ‘Informed’ Patient

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Dr. Dana Atchley interviewing a patient, 1958. Photo by Elizabeth Wilcox, courtesy Archives & Special Collections, Columbia University Health Sciences Library.

Dr. Dana Atchley interviewing a patient, 1958. Photo by Elizabeth Wilcox, courtesy Archives & Special Collections, Columbia University Health Sciences Library.

The History of the Health Sciences Lecture Series presents Nuisance or Necessity? Historical Perspectives on the ‘Informed’ Patient, by Nancy Tomes, PhD, SUNY Distinguished Professor of History, Stony Brook University, New York.

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NHPRC awarded a grant to UCSF Archives and Special Collections

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~This post courtesy of Polina Ilieva, Head of USCF Archives & Special Collections

UCSF Archives and Special Collections (A&SC) is pleased to announce it has been awarded a 2016 National Historical Publications & Records Commission (NHPRC) grant from the National Archives in support of the project, Evolution of San Francisco’s Response to a Public Health Crisis: Providing Access to New AIDS History Collections, an expansion of the AIDS History Project (AHP). Continue reading

Imperfecta: Fear, wonder, and science

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~This post courtesy Beth Lander, College Librarian, Historical Medical Library, The College of Physicians of Philadelphia

On March 9, 2017, Imperfecta opens in the Mütter Museum, an exhibit curated by the staff of the Historical Medical Library, which will examine in text, image, and specimen how fear, wonder, and science shaped the understanding of abnormal human development. Continue reading

#ColorOurCollections 2017!

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We’re very excited to be working on our pages for #ColorOurCollections 2017!

If you’d like something to work on ’til February, check out NYAM’s Pinterest gathering of coloring pages — blank and completed by artists!

There was also this very interesting piece from Jill O’Neill at the Scholarly Kitchen with some thoughts about the inaugural #ColorOurCollections: What #ColorOurCollections Suggests.