Tag: photographs

Digital Highlights: Civil War photography from the Army Medical Museum

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Photograph and case history of Private Samuel Decker. He posed for this portrait at the Army Medical Museum along with the prostheses he developed after losing both hands to an artillery accident during the battle of Perryville. — vol. 5, image 5.

The Center for the History of Medicine recently digitized a remarkable collection of Civil War-era images titled Photographs of surgical cases and specimens. Nearly 150 years after it was first published, this six-volume set provides a sobering look at the state of the art in surgery during and after the war. Continue reading

Digital Connection: Historical Images from the NLM

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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

Digital Connections: The Otis Historical Archives

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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!