Tag: about

1,000,000 = 35,000

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Title page of Secrets of the Invisible World Disclosed...

The secrets of the invisible world disclos'd ... by Andrew Moreton, a.k.a. Daniel Defoe is one of the many early works dealing with interactions between the spirit and material worlds in the collections digitized so far.

The Center for the History of Medicine is happy to report that we recently contributed our one-millionth page of content to the Medical Heritage Library. Beyond the simple fact of that number, which represents a fraction of our eventual contributions to the project, a million pages of digitized content means that local patrons and MHL users around the world now have free and open access to over 3,000 rare and historically-significant medical texts previously available only to members of the Harvard community and visiting researchers. Users can now download full-color, high-resolution page images of medical charts, photographic plates, engravings, maps, atlases and a wide variety of other types of content from the book collections at the Countway Library, including, of course, hundreds of thousands of pages of printed text published between the 16th and 20th centuries (all of which are fully keyword-searchable).

Subject areas covered in our contributions thus far include: Military medicine, General surgery and surgical history, Spiritualism,Sanitation, Hygiene, Tropical medicine, Medical jurisprudence,Psychology, Gynecology, Phrenology, Crimes, criminology,Electrotherapeutics, Climatology, and Homeopathy, among others.

As we pass the one-million mark, it is important to note that statistics regarding the progress of our contributions to the MHL are not the only cause for celebration. More importantly to all of us here at the Center, the 3,000+ books that we have digitized so far have already been downloaded over 35,000 times, a number that helps to illustrate both a significant demand for these materials and the perceived utility of their digitized copies to those users who seek them out.

In the coming year we intend to triple the number of items digitized thus far, and in so doing to assure that these materials are available to the public on-line and in perpetuity. The work to come remains considerable–each individual book needs to be reviewed, selected, cataloged, digitized, and finally checked for quality before returning to our stacks. But the numbers we have gathered from our users up until this point one thing clear: it’s worth the effort!

For more from the Medical Heritage Library, please visit our full collection!

(Cross-posted from the Center for the History of Medicine blog.)

Discoveries in the Rare Book Stacks

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René Joseph Bertin's work on syphilis, the Traité de la maladie vénérienne (Paris, 1810) showing the armorial binding of the Emperor NapoleonResearchers from the Harvard-Longwood community and beyond benefit from the Medical Heritage Library, a growing collection of freely available digital texts.

Jack Eckert, Public Services Librarian, reports that, for the Center for the History of Medicine, one of the unintended benefits of the selection process for digitization is the unexpected discoveries made in the collection.  During a close and thorough examination each item considered for scanning, staff encounters and documents imperfections, incomplete sets, unrecorded titles bound with others, and corrects inaccurate cataloging information.  While this sort of information enhances the accuracy of the catalog, we are finding unexpected treasure as well. A large percentage of the rare book collection was acquired for its current informational value at the time, and little attention was paid to marks of ownership, provenance, and annotation.  But these are some of the very aspects that now enhance the rarity and value of the works.

For example, pioneer psychiatrist James Jackson Putnam (1846-1918) owned and donated a number of titles concerning the treatment of neuroses with electricity.  Many of our homeopathic titles were formerly part of the library of the Massachusetts Homeopathic Medical Society and contain inscriptions and annotations by local leaders in the movement, and physician Edward Jackson (1803-1884) was also clearly interested in homeopathy and owned a number of works on this subject.  A number of titles derive from the collection of the Boston Medical Library of 1805, and still more were part of the original library at Harvard Medical School and donated by James Jackson (1777-1867) and other members of the early faculty.  While Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s interest in the water-cure was known to scholars and historians, we were until recently unaware that several of our hydropathic titles were part of his own library.

Probably the most exciting discovery we’ve made in our own collection to date is a copy of René Joseph Bertin’s work on syphilis, the Traité de la maladie vénérienne (Paris, 1810) which has an armorial binding of the Emperor Napoleon.  The book was probably part of the collection of noted dermatologist Edward Wigglesworth (1804-1876), whose library was donated to the Boston Medical Library in 1897.

To see these and other titles digitized for the Medical Heritage Library, see http://www.archive.org/details/medicalheritagelibrary.

For more from the Medical Heritage Library, please visit our full collection!

(Cross-posted from the Center for the History of Medicine blog.)

Forests, trees, and digitization

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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) From the collections of the Columbia University Libraries digitized for the Medical Heritage Library.

As the medical profession continues to wrestle with the ethics, logistics, and implications of randomized controlled trials, I’ve become happily involved with an informal international collaborative group, led by Iain Chalmers (editor of the James Lind Library), in examining the history of controlled trials before the famous 1948 British Medical Research Council study of streptomycin for tuberculosis.

At the most basic level of full-text searching, digitization enables scholarship that simply could not be performed otherwise. With the British Medical Journal, Lancet, JAMA, and the NEJM fully digitized, our group can now perform full-text searches for such terms as “alternate patient(s)” or “alternate case(s)” to trace the deeper history of both the development and resistance to such methodologies. Such forest-revealing tools of course still require tree-level contextualization (or pick another metaphor; or, if interested in the history of particular medical metaphors, feel free to trace them as well over time!), but the possibilities for answering novel questions are seemingly endless, and limited chiefly by the texts that have been digitized, the metadata applied to them, and the accessibility of the resources to scholars.

Imagine the scholarship that could be conducted if all the other venerable collections of medical history across the country and world were digitized.  But how? And where to start?

The Center for the History of Medicine has been a proud founding contributor to the Medical Heritage Library, a digital curation collaborative among some of the world’s leading medical libraries, with the intention to digitize and make freely available over 30,000 volumes over the next 18 months. We intend for this to serve as a nucleus for more comprehensive and collaborative long-term digitization of medical sources of all kinds, and to develop a platform through which digital scholarship in the history of medicine can itself evolve.

Indeed, as we develop our open-access Medical Heritage Library, it’s our hope that scholars will go beyond full-text searching to devise novel queries and approaches to what will be an expanding universe of available materials. Please join us in creating this new world. Visit the MHL page on the Internet Archive website, formulate your own searches, see what turns up, and let us know what we can do further to facilitate your research.

Scott H. Podolsky
Director, Center for the History of Medicine
Countway Library

Internet Archive to Change Derivatives

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The Internet Archive has been studying the usage stats of the DjVU and Black/White PDFs. The demand and activity with these file formats is very low, so the Internet Archive will halt the derivation of these two file formats.  In addition to the ‘Read online’ option, the Internet Archive will continue to offer:

PDF (color)
EPUB
Kindle
Daisy
Full Text

If users are concerned about this change, please  contact us at medicalheritage@gmail.com.

Medical Heritage Library

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The Medical Heritage Library is a digital curation collaborative among some of the world’s leading medical libraries.

The MHL promotes free and open access to quality historical resources in medicine. Our goal is to provide the means by which readers and scholars across a multitude of disciplines can examine the interrelated nature of medicine and society, both to inform contemporary medicine and strengthen understanding of the world in which we live.

Current digitization partners are:

We’re working on a site and tools for access to the collections. Digitized books are available as they are completed at
http://www.archive.org/details/medicalheritagelibrary/

Be sure to check back often as new content is added daily!

The Medical Heritage Library was instigated by the Open Knowledge Commons, which was awarded $1.5 million dollars in start-up funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to begin digitization at partner libraries.

Please contact us if you are interested in our work at:

info at knowledgecommons.org