Going through back issues of journals is a first step for many researchers embarking on a new project. Large databases like JSTOR and ProQuest can be very important for this kind of work but they are also expensive and many smaller, non-academic libraries cannot afford them or do not have enough users interested to make a license worth their while. Continue reading
The LOUISiana Digital Library has 22 participating libraries, archives, museums, and other historical organizations contributing material to document the history and culture of Louisiana. The LDL has a wide variety of resources available, including textual documents, photographs, video clips, and medical illustrations. Included in this vast amount of material is a great deal to do with the history of medicine and science, both in Louisiana and elsewhere. Continue reading
We’ve recently added a few new resources to our Tools for Digital Research page and wanted to take a minute to draw them to your attention.
The Giant’s Shoulders: This is a monthly collation of author-submitted blog posts from other blogs on the history of science and medicine. For an example, check out the most recent one from around Halloween time, hosted by the Early Modern Experimental Philosophy blog at the University of Otago, featuring posts on anecdotes about vampires, the history of witches, Alfred Russell Wallace, and the prevalence of syphilis among Romans. Submissions are open for the next monthly round-up!
Medical Museion: The website includes the digital content from the realworld Medical Museion, located in Copenhagen and includes a virtual museum and blog content.
UCL Museums & Collections: A blog covering material from University College London’s collections, including the Grant Museum of Zoology, the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology, and the Science Collections.
Morbid Anatomy: A blog from the Morbid Anatomy Library and Cabinet collection in New York, a research library and private collection open to interested researchers by appointment. Morbid Anatomy covers topics including medical museums, cabinets of curiosity, and the history of medicine, death, and society.
The NLM, as well as being a valued partner in the MHL, has also created a great database of medical images, Images from the History of Medicine.
The database features a variety of images, including postcards, broadsides, posters, public health advertisements, and caricatures among others. Images features almost 70,000 images from the historical collections at NLM. The bulk of the images are from prior to World War II, but later public health images are also included, such as images from public health campaigns against drug abuse and AIDS. The collection is also international, featuring image material from a number of countries in various languages. Continue reading
Trove is a discovery project from the National Library of Australia, aggregating a wide variety of content all to do with Australian history. The Library itself describes Trove as “supports the discovery and annotation of items in Australian collections. The term “Australian collections” encompasses libraries, archives, university repositories and major online collections such as biographical databases, digitised book collections and digitised newspaper collections.” Continue reading
For those of us doing research online, tools that help us take notes, highlight, excerpt, and generally track our work are always worth checking out.
For this week’s “Digital Connection,” I’d like to suggest a couple of online tools I’ve found helpful in various projects. Continue reading
The Old Bailey Online may not seem like the most obvious resource for researchers interested in the history of medicine. According to the project’s mission statement, it “…makes available a fully searchable, digitised collection of all surviving editions of the Old Bailey Proceedings from 1674 to 1913, and of the Ordinary of Newgate’s [prison chaplain] Accounts between 1676 and 1772. It allows access to over 197,000 trials and biographical details of approximately 2,500 men and women executed at Tyburn, free of charge for non-commercial use.” The website also provides access to digital images of pages from the Proceedings and Ordinary’s Accounts. There’s an additional resource for those particularly interested in the accounts from the Newgate chaplain at the London Lives: Ordinary’s Accounts site, a sister project to the Old Bailey Online. Continue reading
In a new series on the MHL blog, I’m going to be putting together a semi-regular series on other collections and tools that you might find useful. If you think there’s something I missed — something that should have a home on our “Tools for Digital Research” page, maybe? — please let me know! The email is medicalheritage (one word) at gmail dot com.
This week, I want to point out the Embryo Project Encyclopedia. Continue reading
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
You may be familiar with the photo hosting site Flickr for hosting or browsing travel, work, or personal photographs, but many archives and special collections repositories are using the service to draw attention to their collections.
In the field of medical history, for example, the Otis Historical Archives, part of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology’s National Museum of Health and Medicine, has put up hundreds of photographs, postcards, and cartoons.
The material includes photographs from the Civil War, World War I, World War II, and bodies such as United States Navy’s Bureau of Medicine and Surgery. Also found here are topical collections such as Mirrors which collects 61 images of wounded patients posing to display their scars or injuries; in each case, a mirror is being used to point to some aspect of the wound that might not otherwise be noticed or readily seen by the viewer of the photograph. (For some interesting observations on the Mirrors set, check out this post from The Sterile Eye, a blog dedicated to medical photography.)
Highlights include of the Otis Archives material on Flickr:
General Pershing's dentures
World War II mess kit cleanliness poster
General Henry Barnum, gunshot wound
Colonel Frank Townsend examines the bullet that killed Lincoln and the probe used to examine the President
Thanks to Assistant Archivist Laura E. Cutter for sharing the great work of her repository with us!
