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Dr. Shrady Says: The 1890 Russian Influenza as a Case Study for Understanding Epidemics in History

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We are pleased to present the first in a three-part series by E. Thomas Ewing, Professor of History and Associate Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, and Sinclair Ewing-Nelson, a student of applied math and history of science and medicine at Yale University and Veronica Kimmerly, who graduated from Virginia Tech in 2014, with degrees in math, German, and engineering, and is now studying in a graduate program at Edinburgh University in Scotland. You can find out more about the Russian flu project in the other parts of this series and at the project’s website!

Part One: Anticipating an Epidemic

In early January 1890, an especially widespread outbreak of influenza that had quickly spread across Europe now seemed likely to reach the United States. Responding to this perceived danger, the Medical Record, a weekly journal, published an editorial on January 4, 1890, by Dr. George F. Shrady, which proclaimed with great certainty that a disease “of such a mild type” did not pose any serious danger to the American people. Continue reading

New to the MHL!

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We’ve got lots of new material coming into the MHL:

As always, you can visit our full collection here and our state medical society journals collection here.

Website Update

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We’re on the brink of changing our website over to a new design — please be patient as some of our links have broken and will not be updated until we update the entire site. If you have any questions, please email hanna_clutterbuck (at) hms (dot) harvard (dot) edu and we apologize for any inconvenience!

The MHL Welcomes a New Partner: The Osler Library

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The Medical Heritage Library is pleased to announce our first new partner of 2016: the Osler Library of the History of Medicine at McGill University.

The Osler Library of the History of Medicine at McGill University, Montreal, Canada, opened in 1929 to house the collection of rare medical and other books donated by Sir William Osler (1849-1929), the renowned physician and McGill graduate and professor. Initially comprising 8000 titles listed in the Bibliotheca Osleriana, the collection – one of the world’s outstanding ones – has grown to around 100,000 works including rare monographs, journals, archives and prints, as well as scholarly publications about the history of the health sciences and related areas. To date, the Library has scanned 152 items, all of which are available on the Library’s own Internet Archive site as well as in the MHL collection.

Making the Osler Library’s items available through the MHL not only enriches the MHL collection, but makes the Osler’s items searchable through the MHL’s Bookworm and full-text search tools.

We’re delighted to be able to include the Osler’s material in our collection and will be tagging more as the Library continues to scan items.

Images from the Library

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Full page black and white illustration of six different plants

From John Hill’s The useful family-herbal : or, an account of all those English plants which are remarkable for their virtues, and of the drugs which are produced by vegetables of other countries; with their descriptions and their uses, as proved by experience … (1789).

As always, for more from the Medical Heritage Library, please visit our full collection!

Images from the Library

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Black and white diagrams of the human skull from various angles

From Emil Harless’ Lehrbuch der plastischen anatomie : enthaltend die gesetze fur organische Bildung und kunstlerische Darstellung der menschlichen Gestalt im allgemeinen und in den einzelnen Situationen (1856-1858).

And this is our last post of 2015! The blog and Twitter feed will be shuttered until January 4th. We hope you all have a lovely mid-winter break and we’ll be back with you in 2016!