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Digital Highlights: Nightmare Studies

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First page of Chapter 8 of "An essay..."

Almost everyone has nightmares. A lucky few, perhaps, have very rare or mild bad dreams; others may have them in such vivid form as to invade the waking world and become a serious problem rather than an occasional disturbance. Still, having one serious nightmare is enough to make you want to avoid having another!

John Bond, the author of An essay on the Incubus, or Night-mare, suffered from nightmares so extensively according to his own statement that he began to study the phenomenon and put together his researches in this book, publishing it in England in 1753. Bond traces the history of the nightmare back to pre-Grecian times, beginning with an examination of the word itself and the progress of a nightmare: Continue reading

Resources

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Reading room of the Wellcome Library. (Photo by JL Phillips.)

Over the last couple of months, we’ve been working on a resource list for you here on the website. You can get to it by navigating to the “Tools for Digital Research” page on the navigation bar at the top of the page.

Lori Jahnke and I have been putting together a list of tools you can use to analyze text, take notes and organize your research, connect with other researchers, and, of course, check out more great online collections.

We’ve done our best to describe these links accurately and make sure they’re up-to-date, indicating which services require payment or purchase, what tools will allow you to do, and what sort of materials online collections might feature, for example. Continue reading

Open Data Summer Project

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If you happen to have some free time on your hands this summer, why not consider entering the JISC Discovery Programme‘s Open Data Challenge?

The aim of the challenge is to use material from one of ten rich data-sets to create a software application which will allow users to discover “treasures” that might otherwise go missed in the mass of data. Entrants can draw upon data-sets from the British Library, the UK’s National Archives, circulation data from UK university libraries, and data from the Tyne and Wear Museums collections. Continue reading

Googling the British Library

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Digitisation is opening up the British Library's collectionIn an announcement made earlier this month, the British Library and Google made public their joint agreement to allow the Google Books scanning service access to over 200,000 volumes from the British Library. This will encompass over 40 million pages of out-of-copyright material. While Google recently experienced a major setback to its scanning projects with the failure of the author settlement, the prospect of free access to some of the British Library’s unique materials is creating excitement in the digital libraries and digital humanities communities. Continue reading

Digital Highlights: Food and Fitness

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Title page from Keeping Fit.

Published in 1914, Orison Swett Marden’s Keeping Fit is a part-handbook, part-sermon, and part-“to do” list.

Marden himself was a leading exponent of “New Thought” in the late 19th and early 20th century. “New Thought” believers argued that thought had a direct influence on life: if you thought you were happy, successful, and well-liked, the odds were in favor of all three of those things being true. “New Thought” also had some similarity with Christian Science insofar as the philosophy held that sickness was a matter of wrong thinking and bodily infirmity could be cured with proper mental effort. Continue reading

I saw the internet today…

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I just returned from the International Linked Open Data in Libraries Archives and Museums (LOD-LAM) Summit in San Francisco, CA . This was an intensive two-day conversation of what the internet could look like if libraries, archives, and museums unleashed their high quality metadata on the semantic web. How would the web differ from the way we know it today as primarily a tool for consumers?

The web as we know it now is built to display information that is easily interpreted by humans. The semantic web extends the human-readable world of web pages to the realm of machine-readable metadata allowing computers to process information more intelligently. In other words, the semantic web helps machines understand your data better and respond to complex requests based on human meaning. While we are still a long way from achieving this goal as Tim Berners-Lee envisioned it, the awareness that cultural memory organizations (e.g. libraries, archives, and museums) can play a pivotal role in transforming the consumer web to something far grander and more useful is slowly spreading.

The potential benefit to research is enormous. Imagine the rich catalog and finding aid data from each of the collaborating MHL institutions accessible in one place, linked to digitized content, as well as demographic, geographic, and other data sources. 100 digital archivists, librarians, scholars, publishers, and technologists converged on Japan town San Francisco last week to not only discuss this future, but to lay out a plan of action for building linked open data on the web. During these two days, I imagined wonderful things for the future of research as we discussed transforming hierarchies to open networks of information that could be manipulated and accessed in a variety of ways.

To catch a glimpse of what lies ahead for researchers, check out Mendeley–finally, a reference manager that can outsmart a TiVo. It is true, quite literally, that I saw the internet on Friday. I stood next to the servers of the Internet Archive. Perhaps it was the abundance of red bean paste I ingested after lunch, or the afternoon light streaming through the chapel windows of the former Christian Science Church, but I felt awed and humbled by the blinking lights as people from around the world accessed this incredible repository of human knowledge.

For more information on the summit and ongoing activity check out the LOD-LAM blog or the Google Group. Join the community and help us move linked data forward in the coming year.

Lori Jahnke
S. Gordon Castigliano CLIR Fellow
The College of Physicians of Philadelphia

Digital Highlights: American Surgeons in Paris

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Inscription by Dr. Elliott C. Cutler to President Emeritus Eliot on flyleaf of journal.

In spring 1915, a deputation of surgeons and nurses from the Harvard Medical School travelled to Paris to join the service at the American Ambulance Hospital, giving medical aid to injured soldiers from battles taking place across Europe. The unit had been invited by Dr. Joseph Blake, one of the surgeons already working in Paris.

One of the surgeons who came from Harvard was Dr. Elliott Carr Cutler. In 1916, he put together a journal of the expedition, publishing it as A Journal of the Harvard Medical School Unit to The American Ambulance Hospital in Paris. The unit totalled 17, including surgeons, medical staff, and four nurses to work at the Hospital at Neuilly.

The Journal starts with the departure of the unit from Boston in March 1915 and concludes with an epilogue written in Canada in July of the same year, after the unit had taken over the hospital service for the intervening three months.

Cutler describes the trip, the difficulties the unit had even in getting into France through Spain (customs officers insisted on opening some boxes of chocolates that had been given as gifts and the Harvard unit only retained them with difficulty), and the final arrival and work at the Hospital. The unit took over all aspects of the Hospital work, including devising a filing system to record and store patient information. Some of the doctors took opportunity of their time in France to make tours, some to historical sites, including Versailles, but often visiting other hospitals and medical services, some very close to the front, or the front itself, under appropriate supervision from armed services.

The day-to-day medical services given to wounded soldiers receive attention, too. Cutler is dispassionate in recording what cases are brought in and what can be done for them, even saying once when discussing some discharged soldiers who were returning for further work on old wounds, “It was a considerable blow to our hopes for more cranial work, though to be sure they were wounded in the head.” (32) Despite this early breeziness, as time goes by Cutler is clearly affected by what he is seeing. As the major “season” for battles over the spring and summer advances as the weather improves, Cutler notes that the wounds become worse and the number of patients higher. Long days in the surgery are mentioned and Cutler sometimes waxes philosophical about what the overall “point” of the war might be, when the major outcome seems to be shattered bodies.

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

Digital Highlights: Diseases of Genius

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Title page from the Inaugural Essay on Genius and Its Diseases.

According to Thomas Middleton Stuart’s 1819 essay on Genius and Its Diseases there are four reasons for mental genius to become disordered: inactivity, imperfection, artificial excitement, and excessive exercise. Having cited such examples for genius as Newton, Franklin, and Homer, Stuart’s suppositions as to the sources of mental disturbance seem reasonable!

The essay was originally written to complete Stuart’s medical degree. The title page notes that it was “submitted to the examination of Samuel Bard…” and several other faculty members of the “College of Physicians and Surgeons of the University of the State of New York.” Stuart devotes most of his text to enumerating and discussing the causes and types of mental disease arising from genius and only in the last few pages turns to prevention and healing, finishing his argument by citing “…the writings of Rush…” as key to healing the mental upset that will undoubtedly follow from ignoring or abusing the call of genius.

What may seem somewhat odd to the modern reader is that Stuart spends comparatively little time in defining his subject matter. The actual definition of genius delays his argument for only a few pages; he finally settles on a definition borrowed from Dr. Johnson, “…‘a mind of superior general powers.‘” Stuart deepens the definitely by adding that invention seems to be a key component of genius; given that he includes no men (or women) best known for visual talent and very few literary figures in his list of figures he considers to be geniuses, invention is a key commonality between the other men he discusses.

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

Digital Resources Session Draws Sold Out Crowd

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Representatives of Medical Heritage Library (MHL) collaborating institutions presented a lunchtime session at the American Association for the History of Medicine annual meeting on Saturday, April 30th.

Michael North, National Library of Medicine (NLM), introduced the NLM’s improved Directory of History of Medicine Collections (http://www.cf.nlm.nih.gov/hmddirectory/index.cfm). The directory includes 200 repositories globally and is now searchable by subject and location. It is possible to refine searches, adding subjects or locations to assist users in prioritizing repositories to visit. He also demonstrated a new NLM resource, Digital Collections (http://collections.nlm.nih.gov), a repository for preservation and access to historical biomedical materials. Michael discussed one type of digital collection, 28 digitized films issued by the military during WWII, mostly related to hygiene, that have been transcribed so are fully searchable and accessible.

Stephen Novak, Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library, Columbia University, discussed Archive Grid (http://archivegrid.org/web/index.jsp), a portal to find archival collections held by thousands of repositories globally. Search results can be sorted by location, relevance, and repository. Links to finding aids appear in search results. Stephen noted that the NLM’s Finding Aids Consortium (http://www.nlm.nih.gov/hmd/consortium/index.html) provides access to a narrower—and highly relevant—body of finding aids drawn from twelve major history of medicine libraries.

Jack Eckert, Countway Library, discussed finding digitized books. In addition to commercial sources, there are a number of freely available collections of digitized books in the history of medicine. BASE (Bielefeld Academic Search Engine) (http://www.base-search.net/) offers open access web resources from 1700 repositories around the world.  HATHI Trust (http://www.hathitrust.org/home) provides access to  8.6 million volumes with full text search; while only 27% of these are in the public domain, many more can be used for educational and research purposes. Google Books (http://books.google.com/) has an unfortunate user interface and scanning quality issues. It does provide deep searching across a wide variety of materials. Specialized sources include the Bibliothèque numérique Medica – Histoire de la santé  at BIU Santé, Paris (http://www.bium.univ-paris5.fr/histmed/medica.htm), which covers science and medicine, and Taubman Medical Library’s Homeopathy Collection (http://quod.lib.umich.edu/h/homeop/). The Medical Heritage Library (http://www.archive.org/details/medicalheritagelibrary/) offers 9,000 medical rare books currently, with more coming. The online book reader provides tabbed access to search terms and a number of other functions. Books can be downloaded in a variety of formats.

Lori Jahnke, College of Physicians of Philadelphia, discussed the next steps for the MHL. In addition to digitizing new material, we are turning our attention to aggregating existing content and to developing an access environment that will facilitate cross-disciplinary study and digital scholarship in the history of medicine. Among our goals is linking primary sources with secondary literature, image repositories, film, and datasets. We plan to draw upon tools such as the Unified Medical Language System to improve the richness of content description, which will enable concept mapping as part of a more efficient discovery process. As the wealth of historical resources on the web grows so must our efforts in creating a coherent  access environment that supports scholarly needs.

Jeremy Greene, Department of the History of Science, Harvard University, a member of the MHL’s scholarly advisory committee, opened the audience discussion by asking, how are we using digital resources, what do we need in terms of sources and tools, and how should the availability of these materials influence the training of new scholars? He described several ways in which digital sources are commonly employed: as a way to locate resources that are remote to the user, which are then printed; a convenient format to carry and use digital objects, which are downloaded, read, and annotated on the user’s computer; and as sources for objects that are downloaded then combined in single documents or databases for more powerful search and manipulation. These methods provide important efficiencies for scholars, but don’t use technology to extend the effectiveness of the scholar’s work. How can we get to the next level?

Audience members responded to the presentations and comments with a number of ideas about how digital resources and tools could be more useful. Some of these include:

– Projects tend to follow the subject strengths of collections. Scholars also want to cross-reference such holdings with materials in other formats and subjects.

– History of medicine should be presented in relation to social history, cultural history, and related fields.

– Projects need to be aware of other digital projects such as those undertaken by Google and others, leverage those projects, and demonstrate their value.

– Scholars need meta-tools for searching—not more silos. Will MHL bring materials together via a search tool?

– We need to bring the museum into the library – add artifacts and 3-D images to text repositories under single search tools.

– Lack of annotation is an obstacle for scholarly use of digital objects; what tools are available to support this activity?

– Who decides what gets digitized? Where do the resources come from?

– Scholars are accustomed to organizing paper files; what is the best way to organize the digital materials we download? What software can support organization?

We will be following up on the questions and ideas raised by participants. The MHL is committed to ongoing scholarly engagement to improve the library’s ability to support the work of students and scholars.