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New to the MHL!

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Have you checked out the latest additions to the MHL? We have Naval oral histories and lots of cookbooks this week!

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

AAHM Workshop, Negotiating Access to Patient Related Materials: A Conversation between Archivists and Historians, Highlights Researcher Needs

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On Saturday, May 10, 2014 members of the Private Practices, Public Health project team hosted a lunch session at the 2014 annual meeting of the American Association for the History of Medicine in Chicago. The session, Negotiating Access to Patient Related Materials: A Conversation between Archivists and Historians, represents efforts by the Medical Heritage Library, Harvard Medical School, and Johns Hopkins University to develop best practices for archivists to speed access to patient-related and patient-generated records that are informed by the working realities of researchers and historians. keys

Session panelists included Phoebe Evans Letocha, Collections Management Archivist, Alan Mason Chesney Medical Archives at Johns Hopkins, who provided attendees with an overview of HIPAA and what has changed as a result of 2013 revisions to the Privacy Rule; historians Janet Golden, Rutgers University, and Cynthia Connolly, University of Pennsylvania, who shared with the audience their research experiences and difficulties using patient records to inform their research; and Emily R. Novak Gustainis, Head, Collections Services, Center for the History of Medicine, who presented on findings for the survey, Research Access to Protected Records Containing Health Information About Individuals, which sought to elicit information from researchers about what they want from descriptive guides to historical collections containing patient information. The session was moderated by Scott Podolsky, Director of the Center for the History of Medicine and newly elected AAHM Councilor.

Session participants generated a number of points for archivists to consider, including:

  • Opening up communications with institutional compliance officers to develop best practices for assessing the “real” risk using patient records for historical research presents to institutions
  • Developing better ways to communicate to institutional review boards (IRBs) that historians do not want to distribute research unethically
  • Forging a partnership between the American Association for the History of Medicine (AAHM), the Society of American Archivists (SAA), and a professional legal organization to help explain the different access laws to both archivists and researchers state by state and to help advocate for a more consistent researcher experience through more uniform laws
  •  Crowd-sourcing information on collections with restricted content through researcher participation to help future historians understand whether or not they should pursue an IRB

Feedback from the session will also be incorporated in to Gustainis and Letocha’s presentations at the August 2014 meeting of the Society for American Archivists as part of the session, Partners in Practice: Archivists and Researchers Collaboratively Improving Access to Health Collections.

Digital Highlights: Elizabeth Packard Ware, Asylum Activist

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Title page from Mrs. Packard’s first volume.

In 1860, Elizabeth Parsons Ware Packard (see references in the Alabama Law Review and Project Muse) was committed to an Illinois insane asylum by her husband, with the assistance of a personal friend who was a physician. Packard claimed that she had been incarcerated unjustly and, after three years of work, managed to have herself released, having convinced the authorities of her sanity (the judge’s final decision in the case is said to have taken less than ten minutes to make!) Upon returning home, however, her husband sought to finish the job by isolating her in their house, boarding her up not unlike a character in Jane Eyre.

Accounts vary, but Packard herself said that her husband had institutionalized her because her religious beliefs differed from his and, as a clergyman, he was worried for his reputation and income if she continued to speak out.

During her first bout of institutionalization, Packard was eventually allowed writing materials by the asylum superintendent, Dr. Andrew McFarland. She composed at least one weighty volume while still in the asylum: The Great Drama: or, the Millenial Harbinger, which is a largely personal treatise on her own experiences and religious convictions. She divides American religous belief into two main camps: Christians and “Calvinists.” She identifies herself as the former and her husband, unambiguously referred to as her persecutor or jailor, as the latter.

Packard also wrote more specifically about the asylum system in Modern Persecution: or, insane asylums unveiled and The prisoners’ hidden life.

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

The MHL Welcomes a New Content Contributor: University of Toronto Dentistry Library

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379 items from the University of Toronto H.R. Abbot Memorial Library and Dentistry Library have been added to the Medical Heritage Library.

The collection includes items such as Dentistry in the Bible and Talmud, The Teeth, and a large number of periodicals, including Oral Health  and The Dental Advertiser.

The Dentistry Library is formally known as the H.R. Abbott Memorial Library and the Dentistry Library, University of Toronto (UofT). The Memorial library was established in 1924, upon the death of Dr. Abbott’s sister, whose will provided for the establishment and maintenance of a dental library with a trust fund to be administered by the Royal College of Dentists of Ontario. The Dentistry Library was informally established in the late 1880s to support the curriculum needs of the students and faculty. It includes dental and some basic sciences titles. Currently, includes over 30,000 print monographs and periodicals, in addition to the rich health sciences electronic resources available of UofT Libraries.

The Medical Heritage Library (MHL) is a content centered digital community supporting research, education, and dialog that enables the history of medicine to contribute to a deeper understanding of human health and society. It serves as the point of access to a valuable body of quality curated digital materials and to the broader digital and nondigital holdings of its members. It was established in 2010 with funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation via the Open Knowledge Common to digitize 30,000 medical rare books. MHL principal contributors are The Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University, the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, the Cushing/Whitney Medical Library at Yale University, the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine at Harvard University, the National Library of Medicine, the New York Academy of Medicine, the Welch Medical Library, Library of the Institute of the History of Medicine, and the Alan Mason Chesney Medical Archives of the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions, and the Wellcome Library. The MHL also includes content contributions from Duke University, University of Massachusetts Medical School’s Lamar Soutter Library, and the Gerstein Science Information Centre, University of Toronto among others.