Tag: news

The Migel Library Joins the MHL

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M.C. Migel keeps watch over the collection from above the original card catalog.

M.C. Migel keeps watch over the collection from above the original card catalog.

The Medical Heritage Library is pleased to announce the addition of titles from the Migel Library of the American Printing House for the Blind.

The M.C. Migel Library at the American Printing House for the Blind is one of the largest known collections of materials related to visual impairment in the United States.  The library holds over 20,000 items that range in scope from original research to fiction with characters or authors who are visually impaired.  While a majority of the collection is historical, we continue to acquire large numbers of new and relevant items in various formats.  The collection includes journals, agency reports, proceedings, organizational newsletters, and a large amount of non-English language materials.  The Library is also unique in that it contains thousands of individually cataloged periodical articles that are not thought to be organized by the subject of visual impairment anywhere else.  The Migel Library’s online catalog includes items from the Barr Research Library at APH.  The Barr Library began in the 1970s as a collection of materials used or authored by the Research Department at APH.  As a result, many of its 4,500 items are unique manuscripts that were researched and created at APH.

The Migel Library was started as a circulating collection at the American Foundation for the Blind (AFB) in New York in the 1920s.  A reference library for the field was a major priority of AFB’s first director, Robert Irwin.  In 1926, the AFB board granted him $1,000 to start the collection.  Book donations flooded in from around the country at such a rate that Irwin needed to hire a full time librarian, Helga Lende, in 1929.  Lende’s knowledge of the German, French, Spanish, and Scandinavian languages was essential to developing such an inclusive collection – especially considering the amount of blindness research coming out of Europe following the First World War.  Lende’s 1940 bibliography Books About the Blind gives a sense of not only the popular literature being collected, but also many unpublished masters’ and doctoral theses in the Migel holdings.  By the time Helga Lende retired in 1964, the library had become one of the largest collections in the world in its area of specialty.  The Library was named after philanthropist Moses Charles Migel in 1963.  Having been inspired by his experiences with blinded soldiers while serving with the Red Cross in World War I, Migel helped found AFB in 1921, and headed their board until 1945. The general stacks of the Migel Library were formally transferred from AFB to the American Printing House for the Blind in Louisville, KY, in 2009.

Helga Lende, Librarian from 1929 to 1964.

Helga Lende, Librarian from 1929 to 1964.

Digitization of materials began in 2010 as a limited, grant-based project consisting of our most significant items.  Thanks to further funding through APH, we have been able to pursue a continuous digitization program for the foreseeable future.  We are reviewing the stacks item-by-item to digitize every eligible volume.  This includes the small pamphlets and articles that, while unique, were passed-over during the first phase of the project in the interest of efficiency.  Our Internet Archive page now includes 2,270 items and we are steadily adding to the number. All future items will be automatically tagged as part of the MHL and thus made available through the MHL’s Internet Archive page, as well forming part of the corpus for the MHL’s full-text search tool and Bookworm.

Annotated photo album, Industrial Home for the Blind, Light Buoy Industries, ca. 1928.

Annotated photo album, Industrial Home for the Blind, Light Buoy Industries, ca. 1928.

About the MHL: The Medical Heritage Library (MHL) is a digital curation collaborative among some of the world’s leading medical libraries, promoting 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. The MHL’s growing collection of digitized medical rare books, pamphlets, journals, and films number in the tens of thousands, with representative works from each of the past six centuries, all of which are available here through the Internet Archive.

 

In Case You Missed It….

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We had a wonderful time at the Archivists and Librarians in the History of the Health Sciences and American Association for the History of Medicine conferences in New Haven, Connecticut, last week. If you were there, we hope you did, too!

In case you happened to miss them, here are a few highlights from our time…

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

Medical Heritage Library Awarded NEH Grant for Digitization of State Medical Society Journals, 1900 – 2000

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The Medical Heritage Library (MHL), a digital resource on the history of medicine and health developed by an international consortium of cultural heritage repositories, has received funding in the amount of $275,000 from the National Endowment for the Humanities for its proposal “Medicine at Ground Level: State Medical Societies, State Medical Journals, and the Development of American Medicine and Society.“ Additional funding has been provided by the Harvard Library.

The project, led by the Countway Library’s Center for the History of Medicine, will create a substantial digital collection of American state medical society journals, digitizing 117 titles from 46 states, from 1900 to 2000, comprising 2,500,369 pages in 3,579 volumes. State medical society journal publishers agreed to provide free and open access to journal content currently under copyright. Once digitized, journals will join the more than 75,000 monographs, serials, pamphlets, and films now freely available in the MHL collection in the Internet Archive.  State medical society journals will provide additional context for the rare and historical American medical periodicals digitized during the recently completed NEH project, Expanding the Medical Heritage Library: Preserving and Providing Online Access to Historical Medical Periodicals. Full text search is available through the MHL website. MHL holdings can also be accessed through DPLA (dp.la), and the Wellcome Library’s UK-MHL.

Five preeminent medical libraries, including three founding members of the MHL, are collaborating on this project: The College of Physicians of Philadelphia; the Countway Library of Medicine at Harvard University; the Center for the History of Medicine and Public Health at The New York Academy of Medicine; the Health Sciences and Human Services Library, University of Maryland, the Founding Campus (UMB); and the Library and Center for Knowledge Management at the University of California at San Francisco (UCSF).

State medical society journals document the transformation of American medicine in the twentieth century at both the local and national level. The journals have served as sites not only for scientific articles, but for medical talks (and, often, accounts of discussions following the talks), local news regarding sites of medical care and the medical profession, advertisements, and unexpurgated musings on medicine and society throughout the 20th century. When digitized and searchable as a single, comprehensive body of material, this collection will be a known universe, able to support a limitless array of historical queries, including those framed geographically and/or temporally, offering new ways to examine and depict the evolution of medicine and the relationship between medicine and society.

Project supporter and former president of the American Association for the History of Medicine, Professor of History Nancy J. Tomes, Stony Brook University, notes, “the value of this collection lies precisely in the insights state journals provide on issues of great contemporary interest. They shed light on questions at the heart of today’s policy debates: why do physicians treat specific diseases so differently in different parts of the country? Why is it such a challenge to develop and implement professional policies at the national level? How do state level developments in health insurance influence federal policy and vice versa? How do factors such as race, class, gender, and ethnicity affect therapeutic decision making? How have methods of promoting new therapies and technologies changed over time? These are issues of interest not only to historians but to political scientists, sociologists, and economists.

Not only will the state journals be of great use to researchers, but they also will be a great boon to teachers. I can easily imagine using the collection to engage medical students, residents, and practicing physicians in the conduct of historical research.”

Digitization will begin in August 2015; the project will be completed in April 2017.

About the Medical Heritage Library:

The MHL (www.medicalheritage.org) 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 to digitize 30,000 medical rare books. For more about the Medical Heritage Library, its holdings, projects, advisors, and collaborators, and how you can participate, see http://www.medicalheritage.org/.

About the NEH/Digital Humanities Program:

Created in 1965 as an independent federal agency, the National Endowment for the Humanities supports research and learning in history, literature, philosophy, and other areas of the humanities by funding selected, peer-reviewed proposals from around the nation. For more on the NEH Office of Digital Humanities visit http://www.neh.gov/odh/.

Mount Sinai Archives Digitize “Journal”

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An artistic illustration from an article by Ely Perlman, “Near Fatal Allergic Reactions to Bee and Wasp Stings: A Review and Report of Seven Cases,” v. 22, 1955, p. 377.

An artistic illustration from an article by Ely Perlman, “Near Fatal Allergic Reactions to Bee and Wasp Stings: A Review and Report of Seven Cases,” v. 22, 1955, p. 377.

The Mount Sinai Archives of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai has been fortunate the last two years to receive funding from the Metropolitan New York Library Council (METRO) to have the Internet Archive (IA) digitize items from our collections and then link them to the Medical Heritage Library.  Of special note, as a part of our recent grant, we have digitized The Mount Sinai Journal of Medicine, initially known as the Journal of The Mount Sinai Hospital.  The time frame covered is from its founding in 1934 to 2010.

The Mount Sinai Journal was one of the many hospital publications that began in the 20th century.  It was first and foremost a clinical journal, with many case reports, summaries of Clinical Pathological Conferences, and articles on treatments and techniques. Through these volumes, one can see the evolution of medicine, with emphasis on those areas in which Mount Sinai has long been interested: cardiology, hematology, and gastroenterology. On these pages, the topics of sulfa drugs, penicillin, insulin, and the vitamins appear and then disappear as they are absorbed into everyday practice. After World War II, when Mount Sinai created a large Psychiatry department, newly independent from Neurology, articles on psychiatric topics begin to appear with regularity.

Sprinkled in with the clinical pieces are essays based on scientific lectures that occurred at Mount Sinai.  The Hospital had endowed lectures that brought notable clinicians and scientists to its halls each year.  These lectures were one of the reasons the Journal was created.  The staff felt that it was important that the institution share the knowledge that was given or created at Mount Sinai with the broader community.  As a result, in these pages you will find lectures by Nobel laureates such as Sir Henry Dale, Selman Waksman, Albert Einstein, and Peyton Rous, as well as other leading lights in medicine, including Macdonald Critchley, Hugh Cabot, and Homer Smith.

The Journal also attracted many foreign authors, who usually appeared in Festschrift issues honoring a Mount Sinai physician in his golden years. This speaks to the early 20th century practice of American doctors spending time abroad for post-graduate training.  This was a norm for Mount Sinai’s leading physicians, and over time, strong bonds grew with physicians and scientists in Europe, particularly Vienna and Germany.  These ties were particularly vital in the 1930s and 40s, as Mount Sinai doctors worked to bring colleagues to America to escape the Nazi threat.

Mount Sinai’s efforts to create a school of medicine in the 1960s are reflected in the Journal.  Articles on medical education appear, followed by essays about the School itself.  In October 1968, when the newly opened School held a dedication celebration, the speeches by four Nobel laureates – Beadle, Medawar, Crick and Pauling – were published in the Journal (1969, v.36).  The creation of the School is what necessitated the name change from the Journal of the Hospital, to the more general Mount Sinai Journal in 1970.  (You can read a history of the Journal by Niss and Aufses that was published in 2007, v. 74.)

Later issues of the Journal often revolved around specific themes and these were sometimes published as separate monographs.  Theme volumes included topics such as medical ethics, social work, or other areas in which the Medical Center was particularly interested.

Of course, the most covered topic of the Mount Sinai journals has always been Mount Sinai itself.  Here you find biographical pieces, reminiscences about earlier Mount Sinai days, and histories of various departments.  As such it is a wonderful resource for the Mount Sinai Archives, and all people who are interested in the history of American hospitals in the 20th century.

Browse over 3,000 digitized volumes of historical medical journals!

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Over the past two years, we have posted a few updates on the MHL’s collaborative project to digitize significant American medical journals, primarily dating from 1797 to 1923. This project, “Expanding the Medical Heritage Library”, was generously funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities (grant # PW‐51014‐12) and included MHL partners The College of Physicians of Philadelphia, Columbia University Libraries, Harvard’s Countway Library, and Yale’s Cushing/Whitney Library.

We’re proud to say that the project has not only been completed, but that we’ve exceeded our goal of digitizing 1.7 million pages! While we encourage you to explore the full-text search tool available on our website, you can now also browse over 3,000 volumes that comprise our 336 journal titles. If you’d rather browse by date or search all fields, we encourage you to download the CSV file, also available on the journals browse page.

This browse function is a true product of MHL collaboration. Partners worked together to fill-in gaps in each others’ journal runs and to standardize our metadata so that the user could browse a full title run of a digitized journal without needing to worry about where the physical item was located.

Many of the journals selected reflect emerging specialties in the nineteenth century, such as dermatology and pediatrics, and many complete (or nearly complete) runs of significant local and state journals are now freely available for browsing, including the New York Medical Journal and the Maryland Medical Journal.

Stay tuned for more updates, including information about an improved full-text search tool that will allow users to extract even more from our digitized journals!

The Sawin Library Joins the MHL

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Doctor Robert Blizzard with an unidentified child patient.

Doctor Robert Blizzard with an unidentified child patient.

We are happy to announce free access to the complete run of the journal, Growth, Genetics, and Hormones, 1985-2010. The digitization of Growth, Genetics, and Hormones was a joint venture between the Pediatric Endocrine Society and the Endocrine Society.

 Growth, Genetics, and Hormones was first published in 1985.  The quarterly publication was developed, primarily, to provide a close look at current – and often controversial – topics in endocrinology, genetics, and metabolism and their potential clinical applications. To ensure that this goal was met several nationally and internationally respected authorities in genetics, endocrinology, anthropometrics, pediatrics, pharmacology, and metabolism served on the Editorial Board.  For the inaugural issue, the eminent investigators who served on the editorial board included – Dr. Robert M. Blizzard of the University of Virginia School of Medicine;  Dr. Jorgen Bierich of the University of Tobingen, West Germany; Dr. Judith Hall of the University of British Columbia Medical School; Dr. Fima Lifshitz of Cornell University School of Medicine; Dr. David Rimoin of the University of California at Los Angeles; and Dr. Alan Rogol of the University of Virginia School of Medicine.  Dr. Robert M. Blizzard served as editor-in-chief until his retirement in 2004, at which time Dr. Fima Lifshitz became editor-in-chief.  Dr. Lifshitz held this position until the final issue of Growth, Genetics, and Hormones was published in 2010.  This journal provides a picture of the most important developments in the study of growth, genetics, and hormones over a twenty-five year period.

Wellcome Library Begins Harvest of MHL Content for the UK MHL

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americanmedicalb13bige618

From “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)

Dr Christy Henshaw, Digitisation Programme Manager for the Wellcome Library, recently announced that the Library has started to harvest Medical Heritage Library (MHL) content into the Wellcome digital library. Most of the MHL content – both UK-based and US/Canada-based – will be mirrored on the Wellcome Library website.

MHL collaborators are thrilled that the MHL content will be even more accessible to its global community of users. Unlike the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA), which holds copies of MHL metadata and points users to the digital objects in the Internet Archive (IA), the Wellcome Library is ingesting digital objects and metadata. The mirrored MHL content in the UK MHL provides a back up should there be any problems with MHL content in IA’s San Francisco-based repository.

The Wellcome is going slowly to begin with as it irons out various issues. There are currently 36 books available via the Wellcome player and it should be harvesting more content soon. The collection so far, largely from MHL collaborator Brandeis University, can be viewed here.

Catalog records for MHL-generated content include attribution of the contributing MHL collaborator in the “Note” field and Internet Archive (IA) digital object identifier in the “Reference number” field. This identifier can be used to trace the book back to the IA version that the Wellcome has harvested. Other metadata is drawn from the MARC records held by the IA.

For more on the Wellcome’s UK MHL initiative, see their blog post The UK MHL is on its way!

Guest Post: Digital Publishing – Communities

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We are delighted to be able to offer our readers this cross-posting from The New York Academy of Medicine blog series on Innovation in Digital Publishing.

The overwhelming tendency toward openness in digital networks presents both opportunities and challenges for contemporary scholarship, and in particular for the traditional structures that have facilitated and disseminated scholarship such as membership-based scholarly societies. Some of the challenges are obvious, and have been discussed in many other fora. The increasing demand for free access to products around which revenue models have long been built, for instance, challenges organizations to reinvent their fundamental orientation toward their stakeholders. For scholars, the network’s openness presents an increasing potential for information overload and an increasing difficulty in finding the right texts, the right connections, the right conversations at the right time.

All of these challenges are of course balanced by opportunities, however, as the network also presents the possibility of greatly improved access to scholarship and more fluid channels for ongoing communication and discovery amongst scholars. These opportunities suggest that an important role for scholarly societies will be in facilitating their members’ participation in these networks, helping to create new community-based platforms and systems through which their members can best carry out their work. Insofar as scholarship has always been a conversation—if one often conducted at a most glacial pace—the chief value for scholars should come in the ability to be full participants in that conversation: not simply getting access to the work that other scholars produce, but also having the ability to get their work into circulation, in the same networks as the work that inspired it, and the work that it will inspire. For this reason, the value of joining a scholarly society in the age of the network is less in getting access to content the society produces (the convention, the journal) than in the ability to participate.

However, this opportunity points toward a deeper, underlying challenge, for societies and scholars alike: building and maintaining communities that inspire and sustain participation. This is nowhere near as easy as it may sound. And it’s not just a matter of the “if you build it, they won’t necessarily come” problem; problems can creep up even when they do come. Take Twitter, for instance, which developed a substantial and enthusiastic academic user base over a period of a few years. Recently, however, many scholars and writers who were once very active and engaged on Twitter have begun withdrawing. Perhaps the drop-off is part of an inevitable evaporative social cooling effect. Perhaps at some point, Twitter’s bigness crossed a threshold into too-big. Whatever the causes, there is an increasing discomfort among many with the feeling that conversations once being held on one’s front porch are suddenly taking place in the street and that discussions have given way to an unfortunate “reign of opinion,” an increasing sense of the personal costs involved in maintaining the level of “ambient intimacy”that Twitter requires and a growing feeling that “a life spent on Twitter is a death by a thousand emotional microtransactions.”

Gartner Hype Cycle, by Jeremy Kemp. Shared under CC BY-SA 3.0 license.

What is crucial to note is that in none of these cases is the problem predominantly one of network structure. If we have reached a “trough of disillusionment” in the Twitter hype cycle, it’s not the fault of the technology, but of the social systems and interactions that have developed around it. If we are going to take full advantage of the affordances that digital networks provide—facilitating forms of scholarly communication from those as seemingly simple as the tweet to those as complex as the journal article, the monograph, and their born-digital descendants—we must focus as much on the social challenges that these networks raise as we do on the technical or financial challenges. To say, however, that we need to focus on building community—or more accurately, building communities—is not to say that we need to develop and enforce the sort of norms of “civility” that have been used to discipline crucial forms of protest. Rather, we need to foster the kinds of communication and connection that will enable a richly conceived panoply of communities of practice, as they long have in print, to work in engaged, ongoing dissensus without reverting to silence.

MHL Partners Talk Publishing Innovation

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The Wellcome Trust and The New York Academy of Medicine co-sponsored a panel at the recent American Historical Association meeting in New York City. The panel discussion aimed to explore (broadly!) the possibilities and challenges of the creation and publishing of research in an digital environment.

The panel was chaired by Stephen Robertson of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media; as one might imagine, it was enthusiastically Tweeted by those present. In case you happened to miss it (like me!), here’s the Storified version, courtesy of NYAM.

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

Research travel grant for Yale’s Cushing/Whitney Medical Historical Library

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gyorgyey

Ferenc Gyorgyey, 1979, courtesy of Yale Medicine.

The Historical Library of the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University is pleased to announce its eighth annual Ferenc Gyorgyey Research Travel Award for use of the Historical Library.

The Medical Historical Library, located in New Haven, Connecticut, holds one of the country’s largest collections of rare medical books, journals, prints, photographs, and pamphlets. Special strengths are the works of Hippocrates, Galen, Vesalius, Boyle, Harvey, Culpeper, Priestley, and S. Weir Mitchell, and works on anesthesia, and smallpox inoculation and vaccination. The Library owns over fifty medieval and renaissance manuscripts, Arabic and Persian manuscripts, and over 300 medical incunabula.  The notable Clements C. Fry Collection of Prints and Drawings has over 2,500 fine prints, drawings, and posters from the 15th century to the present on medical subjects.  The library also holds a great collection of tobacco advertisements, patent medicine ephemera, and a large group of materials from Harvey Cushing, one of the founding fathers of neurosurgery.

The 2015-2016 travel grant is available to historians, medical practitioners, and other researchers who wish to use the collections of the Medical Historical Library:  http://historical.medicine.yale.edu/.  There is a single award of up to $1,500 for one week of research during the academic fiscal year July 1, 2015 – June 30, 2016.  Funds may be used for transportation, housing, food, and photographic reproductions. The award is limited to residents of the United States and Canada. Applicants should send a completed application form, curriculum vitae and a description of the project including the relevance of the collections of the Historical Library to the project, and two references attesting to the particular project. Preference will be given to applicants beyond commuting distance to the Historical Library.  This award is for use of Medical Historical special collections and is not intended for primary use of special collections in other libraries at Yale.  Applications are due by Monday, MAY 4th, 2015.  They will be considered by a committee and the candidates will be informed by JUNE 8th, 2015. An application form can be found on our website: http://historical.medicine.yale.edu/us/grant

Applications and requests for further information should be sent to:

Melissa Grafe, Ph.D
John R. Bumstead Librarian for Medical History
Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library
Yale University
P.O. Box 208014
New Haven, CT 06520-8014
Telephone: 203- 785-4354
Fax: 203-785-5636
E-mail: melissa.grafe@yale.edu

Additional information about the Library and its collections may be found at: http://historical.medicine.yale.edu/