On August 10th, 2011, MHL project members met at the College of Physicians of Philadelphia to discuss the future of the MHL project. This was the first meeting under our NEH Digital Humanities Startup Grant. Continue reading
We would love to know what you think of the Medical Heritage Library: how did you find us? What do you do with the material we have available? Is there anything you wanted to find and didn’t?
So we’ve put together a brief — eight question — user survey. Please help us out and give us your feedback!
Either click on the link above or go to the Talk to Us! page on the navigation bar at the top of the blog. Thanks!
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
