We’re pleased to offer this post from Phoebe Evans Letocha, Collections Management Archivist at the Alan Mason Chesney Medical Archives of Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions.
“We believe that war nurses can best serve humanity by arousing in the minds of men and women a deadly hatred of war, and that the most effective method of accomplishing this end is by making public the kind of things war nurses see.” (From Johns Hopkins Nurses Alumnae Magazine October 1914 editorial)
Today we are pleased to continue with our three-part series from Tom Ewing, Sinclair Ewing-Nelson, and Veronica Kimmerly.
Part Two: “The Epidemic of Influenza” as an Editorial Intervention
On January 4, 1890, the Medical Record first noticed that the disease had reached the United States by publishing first-hand accounts by two New York City doctors of influenza cases under their care. Continue reading
The UK Medical Heritage Library brings together books and pamphlets from 10 research libraries in the UK, focused on the 19th and early 20th century history of medicine and related disciplines. This ongoing digitisation project is funded by Jisc (http://www.jisc-content.ac.uk/) and the Wellcome Library (http://wellcomelibrary.org). The UK Medical Heritage Library is a sub-set of the Medical Heritage Library (archive.org/details/medicalheritagelibrary).
UK Medical Heritage Library partners include:
The State Medical Journals Collection encompasses 97 state medical journals collectively held and digitized by the following members of the Medical Heritage Library; The College of Physicians of Philadelphia; the Countway Library of Medicine at Harvard University; the Center for the History of Medicine and Public Health at The New York Academy of Medicine; the Health Sciences and Human Services Library, University of Maryland, the Founding Campus (UMB); and the Library and Center for Knowledge Management at the University of California at San Francisco (UCSF).
Journals found in the collection have been provided free of charge by individual journal publishers agreeing to open access to journal content currently under copyright. When digitization is complete, the collection will include 97 titles dating from 1900-2000, comprising over 2,700,000 pages in over 3,800 volumes. State medical society journals document the transformation of American medicine in the twentieth century at both the local and national level.
The Medical Heritage Library received funding for digitizing state medical journals from the National Endowment for the Humanities (grant number: PW-228226-15), with additional funding provided by the Harvard Library and the Arcadia Fund.
Search State Medical Society Journals in our Internet Archive collection.
Browse a preliminary list of State Medical Journals by state!
You can engage with MHL collections in a variety of ways, starting with browsing the full collection at the Internet Archive (IA). The Internet Archive’s own simple and advanced search functions can be used with the MHL collection from that page.
And you can visit the MHL’s Flickr page here; this consists of images harvested via PixPlot from titles in the MHL collection on IA. Each image is linked back to the original volume.
The Medical Heritage Library, Inc. is actively seeking new collaborators! If your institution has materials related to medical history that are or will be digitized, please get in touch with us.
The MHL is made up of voting and non-voting members. Voting members must be non-profit institutions representing medical heritage collections in good standing with the jurisdiction of its formation. Voting members are allowed to appoint one individual to serve on the MHL’s Governing Board; these members have one vote each. Non-voting members may also appoint an individual for representation on the Board but these members have no vote.
Both voting and non-voting members must receive a simple majority in a Governing Board vote in order to join the MHL, Inc. Payment of dues (to be established by the Governing Board) or in-kind work (to be decided upon by the Governing Board) is required from each member.
For more information, please contact the Project Co-ordinator, Hanna Clutterbuck-Cook, at hanna_clutterbuck@hms.harvard.edu.
Any institution that dedicates resources or staff time to achieve MHL goals and objectives. This includes the partners currently digitizing materials and also those organizations that are contributing expertise. Because grant projects are labor-intensive (far beyond grant-sponsored personnel), any participant in such a project would be considered a principal contributor. Principal contributors have a demonstrated commitment to the MHL, thus governance council members are drawn from this group; participation is co-terminus with the contribution.
Any institution that adds existing digitized materials to the MHL. Such organizations will be asked to issue a press release about the content contribution, link to the MHL, distribute MHL print materials, display a flyer, and inform us of opportunities for collaboration, such as co-sponsoring a presentation about the MHL to appropriate constituencies.
Any institution that publicizes the MHL and promotes its use and development. Our goal is to obtain the participation of history of medicine special collections and other organizations in promoting the use of MHL collections. We hope that contributors will link to the MHL, distribute MHL print materials, display a flyer, and inform us of opportunities for collaboration, such as co-sponsoring a presentation about the MHL to appropriate constituencies
The Medical Heritage Library, Inc. is a collaborative digitization and discovery organization committed to providing open access resources in the history of healthcare and the health sciences.
Medical Heritage Library, Inc. is overseen by its board of directors, duly elected by the membership. For more information, please see the full bylaws of the corporation.
If you are planning a novel research project that could make use of our data, please contact the MHL!
You can always extract data from the Medical Heritage Library collection using the Internet Archive’s own advanced search tool. Just make sure you’re searching using the collection tag “medicalheritagelibrary” along with your other search terms.
With the partnership of Helge Holzmann and Vinay Goel at the L3S Research Center and the Internet Archive, the MHL has been working on a tool to allow researchers to take advantage of an Apache Spark framework enables easy data extraction as well as derivation.
The MHLonArchiveSpark tool on GitHub includes all the required elements to work with MHL collections via this framework. Users will need some familiarity with ‘command line’ coding; familiarity with the Scala or Apache Spark commands list is recommended.
Currently, users must have access either to a computer cluster or server or use a Docker container in order to run ArchiveSpark. Using ArchiveSpark in a Docker environment can be done using a laptop or desktop computer. Using Docker will automatically create a Jupyter Notebook where work can be done with the MHL collections.
For those already familiar with Apache Spark environments, an example of the MHL project can be found here. We are working to make ‘recipes’ for searches available for users.
The MHL is interested in working with researchers and educators to:
Additionally, we have started to reach out to Library Science and other programs with prospective ideas for hackathons and data challenges:
Make ArchiveSpark with MHL more intuitive by developing a user-friendly interface (or other mechanism) for making ArchiveSpark functionality more broadly accessible. MHL constituencies come from a variety of academic disciplines and have varying levels of comfort and familiarity with utilizing tools like ArchiveSpark (https://github.com/helgeho/MHLonArchiveSpark). In a nutshell, this project seeks to make ArchiveSpark workflows broadly accessible to the public, which typically require users to:
Products of this project could include creating a number of canned recipes for searching content
with ArchiveSpark and considering new approaches to searching the dataset for the purpose of extraction and analysis easier for researchers. An online tutorial will be available in advance of the hackathon.
Connect Index Cat to journal articles that have been digitized by the MHL. This challenge involves matching Index Cat entries with full text articles residing in the Medical Heritage Library
The Index-Catalogue of the Library of the Surgeon-General’s Office (Index-Catalogue) is a multi-part printed bibliography or list of items in the Library of the Surgeon-General’s Office, U.S. Army. It contains material dated from the 1400s through 1950 and is an important resource for researchers in the history of medicine, history of science, and for clinical research. The Index-Catalogue was published in five (5) series in sixty-one (61) volumes from 1880 to 1961. Since it is a list of holdings for a specific library, it does not claim to be an index of all material published in medicine. By 1895, however, the Surgeon-General’s Library was the world’s largest medical library. Therefore, its catalog became a major source for accessing medical literature. The scope of Index-Catalogue extends beyond medicine and includes, for example, the basic sciences, scientific research, military medicine, public health, and hospital administration. Language coverage is international with citations in European and Slavic languages, Greek script, and Romanized Chinese and Japanese titles – some with English translations. The catalogue covers a wide assortment of materials including: books, journal articles, dissertations, pamphlets, reports, newspaper clippings, case studies, obituary notices, letters, portraits, as well as rare books and manuscripts (see https://www.nlm.nih.gov/hmd/indexcat/)
The software platform for IndexCatTM is IBM InfoSphere Data Explorer (DE). As installed by NLM, it permits simultaneous searching across all collections in the IndexCatTM database. XML data is available from the IndexCat™ database. It reflects both the Index-Catalogue and eTK/eVK2 collections.The data are available to all both within and outside the United States. There is no charge for obtaining the files.
Create an index of archaic medical terminology using medical dictionaries found in the Medical Heritage Library, map those terms to contemporary medical terminology (such as the Unified Medical Language System, and index the Medical Heritage Library corpus to facilitate the discovery of published content from the perspective of contemporary medicine. Research using history of medicine primary resources requires a highly specialized vocabulary of medical terms. At the outset of a research project, humanities scholars, behavioral scientists, students of the history of medicine and others may not possess the full assemblage of biological and medical terminology needed to uncover a comprehensive body of primary source material. Even for a researcher who is knowledgeable of archaic medical terminology, the specificity of contemporary medical terms and the increasing degree of specialization within medicine presents barriers to the analysis of an idea or process over time and its impact on society. By applying semantic web technology and the lexical tools of the Unified Medical Language System , we can enable a more lexically open discovery process that supports multi-disciplinary approaches to history of medicine sources. Technical documentation for the UMLS API is available here: https://documentation.uts.nlm.nih.gov/. Alternatively, the scoping of the project could be limited to MeSH subject headings.
The Medical Heritage Library (MHL) has four working groups designed to advocate for, advance public awareness of, and improve access to MHL resources.
This group focuses on metadata clean-up and enrichment in the existing MHL, Inc. collections. Contact Melissa Grafe.
This group focuses on securing funding for MHL, Inc. projects. Contact Emily Gustainis.
This group focuses on promoting the MHL via our social media platforms and thoughtful use of promotional items including postcards, stickers, and bookmarks. Contact Emily Gustainis.
This group focuses on bringing in new partners and new content as well as developing the use of the current MHL, Inc. collections. Contact Melissa Grafe.
Two other Working Groups (Non-Profit Status and World War I Online Exhibit) have completed their work and are no longer active.
The following is a list of reports submitted to our funders between 2009 and 2018. All links will take you to a downloadable file on our public Google Drive. For additional information, please contact medicalheritage@gmail.com.
National Endowment for the Humanities, Medicine at Ground Level: State Medical Societies, State Medical Journals, and the Development of American Medicine and Society: 2014-2017
Andrew W. Mellon Foundation via the Council on Library and Information Resources Hidden Collections Program, Private Practices, Public Health: 2013-2014
National Endowment for the Humanities, Humanities Collections and Reference Resources, Expanding the Medical Heritage Library: Preserving and Providing Online Access to Historical Medical Periodicals: 2012-2014
National Endowment for the Humanities Digital Start-Up Grant, Planning for an Innovative Partnership: the Medical Heritage Digital Collaborative: 2011-2012
Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Medical Heritage Library Phase I: 2010-2011
