Tag: titles

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1940 bibliography Books About the Blind gives a sense of not only the popular literature being collected, but also many unpublished masters’ and doctoral theses in the Migel holdings.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.

 

New to the MHL!

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Check out some of the latest additions to our collection!

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

Digital Highlights: CSI (circa 1905)

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Police procedurals — such as the popular CSI series and its spin-offs and imitators — were not the cultural presence in turn of the century America that they are today. The development of the detective story and the crime novel are fascinating topics in and of themselves, but so is the development of “legal medicine” — what we might now call “forensic pathology.”

Frank W. Draper was one of the original practitioners of legal medicine in Massachusetts. He held positions at Harvard University, first in 1877 as a lecturer in legal medicine under Professor Walter Channing and then in 1884 as a professor of the same subject. When the Office of the Massachusetts Medical Examiner was created in 1877 to replace the officer of the coroner, Draper was appointed as the first ME for the Commonwealth.

Draper wrote one of the original North American texts on legal medicine, A text-book of legal medicine in 1905 — as with many professors since his appointment, he had to create the textbook for the classes he taught.

Flip through the pages below or visit A text-book of legal medicine to read Draper’s full text.

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

Celebrating Nurses

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National Nursing Week closed formally yesterday but we figured we could stand another day of celebrating nursing professionals. Check out some of the titles we have on nurses and nursing below!

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

While We Were Out…

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…new items were being added to our collection steadily! Here are a few:

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

Digital Highlights: Pain Explained

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According to the posthumous biography written by Edith Ellis (wife of sexologist Havelock Ellis), James Hinton was born in 1822, in Reading, England, outside of London. During his career as a physician, Hinton wrote widely on a variety of subjects, medical, physiological, and ethical.

Among his many publications was The Mystery of Pain: A Book for the Sorrowful in 1880. Hinton made an appeal for learning from unavoidable pain that was firmly rooted in a Christian understanding of the utility of suffering.

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

Digital Highlights: Tour an “ultramodern” hospital in the year 1900

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QuarterCwithFHW_picOnly_009A Quarter of a Century with the Free Hospital for Women is a small picture book published in 1900, not long after the hospital had finished construction of its grand, new facility by a pond in Brookline, Massachusetts. The volume, held in the rare books collection at Harvard Medical School, Center for the History of Medicine, was recently digitized by the Brigham and Women’s Hospital Archives and made available online via the Medical Heritage Library. It will be of special interest to students of the history of institutional architecture, and to those interested in the history of the Brigham and Women’s Hospital. The Free Hospital for Women is one of BWH’s organizational “grandmothers.”

QuarterCwithFHW_picOnly_002If you’ve ever wondered what a state-of-the-art hospital looked like a hundred plus years ago, flip through the photographs in this little book. See elegant arches and woodwork, gas lights, fireplaces, a grandfather clock, and Tiffany windows. There is a patient sitting room with a piano, a dining room with linen tablecloth and flowers, patient ward beds with gauzy white curtains, and a sitting porch with a view of Riverdale Park. All together the hospital seems more like a resort found in the Berkshires than anything resembling hospitals as we have come to know them in the 21st century.

 

QuarterCwithFHW_picOnly_011Amazingly, this beautiful facility was designed exclusively forpoor women. From 1875 to 1919 those without means were taken care of by the FHW at no charge. By 1919 the hospital had become so successful at its core mission of treating the diseases of women that patients of all economic levels were eager to be admitted there and the by-laws were amended to allow some who could pay.

In 1966 the Free Hospital for Women and the Boston Lying-in, a local maternity hospital, merged to form the Boston Hospital for Women. In 1975, the Boston Hospital for Women merged with the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital and the Robert B. Brigham Hospital. By 1980, all three hospitals had centralized operations and moved to one location in the Longwood area of Boston. The original FHW building was sold to a luxury condominium development company, but the enduring medical legacy of the Free Hospital for Women was reflected in the new name chosen for the combined institutions, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, a teaching affiliate of Harvard Medical School.

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.

Digital Highlights: Bell’s Art

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Sir Charles Bell (1774-1842) is probably best known for his work in the human nervous system. He was one of the first to work out the detailed ramifications of human nerves and their myriad connections and interconnections. His work proved to be foundational in the field of neuroscience and resulted in the naming of at least one condition after him, Bell’s Palsy, a form of temporary facial paralysis.

Bell also had interest in the arts and some practical experience as an artist. This gave him some advantage in terms of describing his anatomical dissections and presenting them both to other medical professionals and the public. He also wrote an early book on the application of knowledge learned from medical dissection to art: The anatomy and philosophy of expression as connected with the fine arts. This was first published in 1806 but republished at least once later in the century after Bell had achieved a position of prominence in Victorian London.

Flip through the pages of Bell’s work below or follow this link to read The anatomy and philosophy of expression as connected with the fine arts.

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

Digital Highlights: Medical Education for Women

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This seemed like an appropriate highlight for a Friday in Women’s History Month: An appeal on behalf of the medical education of women from 1856.

The pamphlet — under 20 pages long — is a succinct summing up of the history of women as medical professionals. It only takes a few pages to do this because Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman admitted to a medical college in the United States, had received her degree less than a decade before this publication. The pamphlet appeals not only for a wider admittance of women to medical schools, but for the establishment of a hospital for women within New York City.

The proposed hospital — based on the New York Infirmary and Dispensary for women and children which had been opened in 1854 — was to be a teaching hospital as well as a straightforward place of treatment.

Flip through the pages below or follow this link to read An appeal.

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