From Christopher Heath’s A manual of minor surgery and bandaging: for the use of house-surgeons, dressers and junior practitioners (1897).
As always, for more from the Medical Heritage Library, please visit our full collection!
At the end of last July, the Wellcome Library, a MHL partner, announced the creation of the UK MHL project. The project plans to digitize about 15 million pages worth of content from ten partners, including UCL (University College London), the University of Leeds, the University of Glasgow, the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, King’s College London and the University of Bristol and the libraries of the Royal College of Physicians of London, the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh and the Royal College of Surgeons of England.
Over the summer, the Wellcome worked with the Internet Archive to create a large scanning center on Euston Road, capable of housing over a dozen scanning units and thousands of books in process. Fourteen staffers work at the Euston center and they’re currently working through materials from University College London, London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, Glasgow University Library, and the Wellcome.
Christy Henshaw, Digitization Programme Manager at the Wellcome, has written a great blog post walking us through the process of selection and digitization:
The work begins with the hard copy books in their home libraries. Partner libraries select the books and check condition, size, and suitability for digitisation. They provide accurate inventories, information on special handling requirements where necessary, and carry out any necessary repairs or preparations such as splitting any pesky uncut pages and marking the start and end of books or pamphlets that are bound together. They carefully pack the books into large crates for shipment – and may prepare anything from 4 – 15 crates in a single shipment.
Read the rest of her post here!
Packing books at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh to send to the Euston Scan Centre. Image credit: Iain Milne.
From the Annual Report of New York Hospital Department of Psychiatry-Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic (1937).
As always, for more from the Medical Heritage Library, please visit our full collection!
After Lisa Mix’s post on hospital reports, the series of annual reports from the Payne-Whitney psychiatric clinic caught my eye this week.
The report for 1935 is the third annual for the department and is a detailed write-up of clinic activities. As of the end of December 1935, for example, they had 70 in-patients, male and female. The statistics for the year described discharged patients as ‘Recovered,’ ‘Much Improved,’ ‘Improved,’ and ‘Unimproved’ — most patients fell into the latter two categories. In terms of patients admitted, the table of diagnoses shows the largest number of cases (53) under ‘schizophrenia.’ Not all patients were either admitted to the clinic for long-term stays or even accepted by the clinic for treatment; the out-patient department statistics show 49 cases rejected.
The report goes on to detail the kind and number of treatments given to patients, the staff training offered at the clinic, and a brief financial health report.
Flip through the pages of the report below or follow this link to read Annual Report of New York Hospital Department of Psychiatry-Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic for 1935.
Here in the US, we’ve just come back from two weeks of much-needed and refreshing vacation — but that doesn’t mean we don’t have new titles for you!
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 Medico-Legal Bulletin (1906).
And that’s our last post for 2014! We’re going to be on break until January 4, 2015. Enjoy your holidays, academic break, travels, research, or TV catch-up. If your research or relaxation plans include medical history, though, our full collection is available 24/7 as is the full-text search tool.
As always, for more from the Medical Heritage Library, please visit our full collection!
Since becoming an MHL contributor in 2013, the Medical Center Archives of NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell has been steadily adding materials, funded by a series of “micro-grants” from the Metropolitan New York Library Council (METRO) Digitization Grant Program.
I reported on materials digitized in our first micro-grant in my post here. In subsequent projects, we’ve focused on more specific topical materials. Among materials digitized in our second project were reports from several maternity and children’s hospitals:
• New York Asylum for Lying-In Women (merged with New York Infant Asylum in 1899)
• New York Infant Asylum (merged with Nursery and Child’s Hospital in 1909 to form New York Nursery and Child’s Hospital)
• Nursery and Child’s Hospital (merged with New York Infant Asylum in 1909 to form New York Nursery and Child’s Hospital)
• New York Nursery and Child’s Hospital (merged with New York Hospital in 1934)
• Manhattan Maternity & Dispensary (merged with New York Hospital in 1932 and became the NYH Department of Pediatrics)
• Lying-in Hospital of the City of New York
You can see that there are some complex administrative relationships between the various hospitals. All eventually became part of the New York Hospital, now NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center.
From Annual Report – The Society of the Lying-in Hospital of the City of New York 1900
Reports from these hospitals form a chronicle of women’s health care, practices surrounding childbirth, and child care through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, documenting changes over time – but they are so much more than that.
I find them especially fascinating, as they paint a vivid picture of life in New York City in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They are a resource for demographic studies, presenting aggregate data on demographics such as the national origins of patients and the occupations of patients’ husbands. On this list of occupations from 1900, you’ll see occupations that no longer exist, such as “egg handler”. You can see the full list here and turn the pages for data on wages, number of living children, and more.
From New York Infant Asylum Annual Report 1872
The reports are a valuable resource for studying social history and treatment of immigrants and the poor. This statement from 1872 on the mission of the New York Infant Asylum also says much about attitudes toward women, sex, and the poor.
You can read the full statement here.
Some of the hospitals include reports of “cases visited” (such as this one from the Lying-In Hospital, 1914) that tell evocative stories of tenement life.
From Annual Report – The Society of the Lying-in Hospital of the City of New York 1914
Read more here!
We just began work on our third METRO micro-grant, and recently added the annual reports of the New York Hospital Westchester Division (formerly Bloomingdale Asylum for the Insane, then Bloomingdale Hospital). The reports, such as this one from 1943, present a picture of treatment of the mentally ill at that time.
Over the next six months, we’ll be adding annual reports from various departments, as well as several hospital publications. So please check back at our page!
From Henry Thomas’ Arnica, calendula, cantharides, ledum, ruta, and rhus tox as external remedies in cases of accident, etc.: with an appendix on the uses of camphor (1859).
As always, for more from the Medical Heritage Library, please visit our full collection!
