From Jacob Bigelow’s American medical botany, being a collection of the native medicinal plants of the United States, containing their botanical history and chemical analysis, and properties and uses in medicine, diet and the arts, with coloured engravings .. (1817)
As always, for more from the Medical Heritage Library, please visit our full collection!
As always, for more from the Medical Heritage Library, please visit our full collection!
From Jacob Bigelow’s American medical botany, being a collection of the native medicinal plants of the United States, containing their botanical history and chemical analysis, and properties and uses in medicine, diet and the arts, with coloured engravings .. (1817)
As always, for more from the Medical Heritage Library, please visit our full collection!
As always, for more from the Medical Heritage Library, please visit our full collection!
From “American medical botany, being a collection of the native medicinal plants of the United States, containing their botanical history and chemical analysis, and properties and uses in medicine, diet and the arts, with coloured engravings ..” (1817)
Dr Christy Henshaw, Digitisation Programme Manager for the Wellcome Library, recently announced that the Library has started to harvest Medical Heritage Library (MHL) content into the Wellcome digital library. Most of the MHL content – both UK-based and US/Canada-based – will be mirrored on the Wellcome Library website.
MHL collaborators are thrilled that the MHL content will be even more accessible to its global community of users. Unlike the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA), which holds copies of MHL metadata and points users to the digital objects in the Internet Archive (IA), the Wellcome Library is ingesting digital objects and metadata. The mirrored MHL content in the UK MHL provides a back up should there be any problems with MHL content in IA’s San Francisco-based repository.
The Wellcome is going slowly to begin with as it irons out various issues. There are currently 36 books available via the Wellcome player and it should be harvesting more content soon. The collection so far, largely from MHL collaborator Brandeis University, can be viewed here.
Catalog records for MHL-generated content include attribution of the contributing MHL collaborator in the “Note” field and Internet Archive (IA) digital object identifier in the “Reference number” field. This identifier can be used to trace the book back to the IA version that the Wellcome has harvested. Other metadata is drawn from the MARC records held by the IA.
For more on the Wellcome’s UK MHL initiative, see their blog post The UK MHL is on its way!
Lets have a little color this month with images for every Monday in March from Jacob Bigelow’s American medical botany, being a collection of the native medicinal plants of the United States, containing their botanical history and chemical analysis, and properties and uses in medicine, diet and the arts, with coloured engravings .. (1817)
As always, for more from the Medical Heritage Library, please visit our full collection!
The London School of Tropical Medicine was founded by Sir Patrick Manson, the “father of tropical medicine” and
‘Two dozen anti-plague rules’ from Japanese textbook on plague, with, Pathogenic horticulture : in two parts (1905)
opened in 1899 at the Seaman’s Hospital in London’s Albert Dock. In 1921 the Athlone Committee recommended the creation of an institute of state medicine, which built on a proposal by the Rockefeller Foundation to develop a London-based institution that would lead the world in the promotion of public health and tropical medicine. Thus the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine was formed and granted its Royal Charter in 1924. The Library and its collections can be found in the LSHTM building in Keppel Street, Bloomsbury, built for us between 1926 and 1929.
We were the third library to send titles to the UK-MHL project for digitisation, the books included in the project reflect the School’s work on infectious diseases and its activities in public health, epidemiology, and tropical medicine. Since we started filling crates in November 2014 we have sent just under 1,000 titles from our collection, half of which are already digitised and available to view. By the end of the project, we hope to have approximately 3,000 items digitised and available to view.
There are two main collections of rare books and pamphlets: a general collection of pre-1900 items, some of which were donated and others purchased by staff on formation of the Library at the Seaman’s Hospital. A second collection was collected by Dr Richard J. Reece on smallpox and vaccination and donated by his widow. The Reece collection does not just contain works by notable vaccination physicians such as Edward Jenner, the surgeon and pioneer of smallpox vaccination, but also contains the furious outpouring of pamphlets by the 19th century’s opponents and sceptics to vaccination. Already digitised are texts by William Tebb, Alfred Wallace, and Charles Creighton. Alexander Paul, in The vaccination problem in 1903 and the impracticability of compulsion, describes the ‘conscientious objector to compulsory vaccination’ as ‘hounded from pillar to post as a free trader in smallpox’.
‘The conscientious objector’ from The vaccination problem in 1903 and the impracticability of compulsion / by Alexander Paul (1903)
Parallels with the current debates around vaccination are not hard to find.
The School was closely associated with the British Colonial Office in its early years, and the rare book collections reflect that colonial past. There are reports and publications from Africa, India, and Ireland. Look out for more items to come.
Of course, there are a significant number of reports by UK local and national government on sanitation, epidemics and social conditions in Britain from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. They include the social investigator Charles Booth’s analysis of the origins of poverty in London, collected through surveys and house to house visits, Life and labour of the people in London.1 It found that up to a third of London’s inhabitants were living in poverty, documenting the changing city of the early twentieth century. The physician Sir Thomas Oliver, (1853–1942) served on a number of official enquiries into industrial disease, including those recommending the restrictions on female employment in the lead industry and the banning of damaging substances from pottery glazes. He was the editor of Dangerous trades: the historical, social, and legal aspects of industrial occupations as affecting health. Many more items from our collections on all aspects of public health are scheduled to be digitised throughout 2015, including texts by John Simon and Edwin Chadwick.
Our most popular titles so far are various volumes from The Golden Bough, James Frazer’s seminal anthropological text examining the waning of belief in magic and witchcraft as science has replaced the old stories about how the world works. Although his evolutionary sequence is no longer accepted, he compared and synthesised a wide range of religious and magic practices.
We are excited to be able to make these texts more widely available through the Medical Heritage Library project and hope that people will find them useful for a wide variety of tasks. We would love to hear from anyone who has used any of our texts, tweet us @LSHTMLibrary.
Frontispiece from Tropical diseases : a manual of the diseases of warm climates / by Patrick Manson (1898)
1. Jose Harris, ‘Booth, Charles (1840–1916)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, Jan 2008 [accessed 24 Feb 2015], doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/31966.
From George Shaw and James Francis Stephens’ General zoology: or, Systematic natural history (1800) (Volume 4, Part 2) and we’ll be posting images from this work every Monday this month!
As always, for more from the Medical Heritage Library, please visit our full collection!
We are delighted to be able to offer our readers this cross-posting from The New York Academy of Medicine blog series on Innovation in Digital Publishing.
There are so many opportunities and—if we’re honest—challenges for innovation in digital publishing it’s hard to pick one and stick with it, but that’s exactly what I’m going to do because some things are worth sticking with. Open access is the best facilitator of, and the biggest opportunity for, innovation in digital publishing. Publishing research open access means anyone in the world with an Internet connection can read it, instead of just the comparatively infinitesimal group of people who have access to a reasonably wealthy university library. Opportunities don’t get much bigger than that.
Much of the research the Wellcome Trust funds is in the biomedical sciences, but we also support research in the medical humanities. This is frequently published in monographs, and monographs now commonly have print runs in the low to mid hundreds. You won’t find these books in the public library or your local bookshop. You might find them in your university’s library if you’re lucky enough to have access. You will probably find them online but you might balk at the price. This lack of access is a problem!
We believe the research we fund is outstanding, and think everyone should be able to access it (and build upon it). Accordingly, we recently extended our open-access policy to include monographs (and book chapters). The first monographs covered by this policy are only just being published open access, but initial usage data gives some indication of the opportunities open access affords. For example, Fungal Disease in Britain and the United States 1850-2000 by Aya Homei and Michael Worboys was published open access with Palgrave Macmillan in November 2013, and made freely available through PMC Bookshelf and OAPEN (as well as the publisher site and e-retailers like Amazon). So far, the free ePub version has been downloaded from Amazon 300 times. Another 600 PDF copies have been downloaded drom the publisher and repository sites, and nearly 3,000 individuals have accessed the HTML chapters. The true readership across digital platforms may be much greater yet, as the Creative Commons Attribution license (CC BY) means readers and other content providers and aggregators can share the work. Readers who prefer the printed page have also purchased hard and paperback copies from Palgrave.
Innovative open access publishing can provide avenues other than the traditional monograph or research article to disseminate research. Mosaic is a Wellcome Trust initiative that publishes longer narrative-based science journalism under the CC BY license. This license allows other platforms to take the content and republish it—with remarkable results. An article by Carl Zimmer on why we have blood types was republished on the BBC, io9, Pacific Standard, and The Independent, among others. Stories have been translated into Spanish, French, Polish, and Hungarian. The point is not just that more people read it, but that the content can be taken to the many different places where the people who are interested in this topic gather.
From George Shaw and James Francis Stephens’ General zoology: or, Systematic natural history (1800) (Volume 3, Part 2) and we’ll be posting images from this work every Monday this month!
As always, for more from the Medical Heritage Library, please visit our full collection!
