Tag: Yale Cushing/Whitney Medical Library

From Our Partners: Ferenc Gyorgyey travel grant for research at Yale’s Cushing/Whitney Medical Historical Library

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~Post courtesy Melissa Grafe.

Looking for funds to research at Yale’s Medical Historical Library? The Medical Historical Library of the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University is pleased to announce its twelfth annual Ferenc Gyorgyey Research Travel Award.

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 anatomy, 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 larger Prints, Posters and Drawings collection contains over 7,000 additional images, some related to international public health, protest and activism and social justice.  The Library also owns an extensive Smoking and tobacco advertising collection, the Robert Bogdan collection of Disability photographs and postcards, medical imagery from popular publications donated by Bert Hansen, and smaller collections of patent medicine ephemera from noted collector William Helfand.

The 2019-2020 travel grant is available to historians and other faculty, medical practitioners, graduate students, and other researchers who wish to use the collections of the Medical Historical Library.  There is a single award of up to $1,500 for one week of research during the academic fiscal year July 1, 2019 – June 30, 2020.  Funds may be used for transportation, housing, food, and photographic reproductions. The award is limited to residents of the United States and Canada.

Applicants will need to apply through our fellowship site, and upload a curriculum vitae and project description, including the relevance of the Medical Historical Library collections to the project, as well as provide two references attesting to the particular project. Preference will be given to applicants beyond commuting distance to the Medical 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, APRIL 29TH, 2019.  They will be considered by a committee and the candidates will be informed by early June 2019.  Winners may be asked to do a blog post discussing their research.

The application period is now open!  Please apply online by April 29th, 2019.

Requests for further information should be sent to:

Melissa Grafe, Ph.D
Head of the Medical Historical Library and 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: https://library.medicine.yale.edu/historical

From Our Partners: “Explore Medieval and Renaissance Medical and Scientific Manuscripts”

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~ This post courtesy Melissa Grafe

The Cushing/Whitney Medical Library is pleased to announce that our medieval and Renaissance manuscript collection is now online!  The effort to digitize the manuscripts and make them freely available worldwide was generously funded by the Arcadia Fund.

Scream of mandrake root killing a dog
The scream of mandrake root killing a dog. MS 18, ca. 1400.

The manuscripts contain early medical and scientific knowledge on a variety of topics, including surgery, gynecology, medicine, herbs and remedies, anatomy, healthful living, astronomy, and mathematics.  They are handwritten in Latin, Italian, Greek, German, and English.  Some are illustrated, like MS18, De herbis masculinis et feminis [and other botanical and zoological works, including the Herbarium of Apuleius].  Turning the pages of this manuscripts reveals numerous hand-colored drawings of plants and animals, including the mandrake root. The mandrake root was valued for a variety of medical uses, including as an aid for reproduction. Mandrake root, as depicted in Harry Potter and in legend, would let out an ear piercing, killer scream when uprooted.   Other manuscripts are filled to the very edges of the paper with text, including marginalia and commentary, like MS11, which has 24 different texts including Aristotelian treatises.

image of medieval manuscript
Opening of the Bamberg Surgery. MS 10, 2nd half of the 12th cent., f. 26v.

The earliest work is the Bamberg Surgery, dating from the 12thcentury and purchased, like most of this collection, by Library founder and famed neurosurgeon Dr. Harvey Cushing.  As medieval medical scholar Monica Green writes, “The Bamberg Surgerydoesn’t get a lot of love in histories of surgery, because of its patchwork character. As [George] Corner himself said, “it is a notebook, a partially organized collection of notes, memoranda, prescriptions, and excerpts from other books.” 

Please explore these manuscripts on Cushing/Whitney Library site on Internet Archive, as part of the Medical Heritage Library.   You can also find other Arcadia-funded digitized texts, including Yale Medical School theses and early Arabic and Persian books and manuscripts, in this collection.  The Library plans to make the medieval and Renaissance manuscripts available through Findit, Yale University Library’s Digital Collections site.

From Our Partners: Ferenc Gyorgyey Research Travel Award

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Looking for funds to research at Yale’s Medical Historical Library? The Medical Historical Library of the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University is pleased to announce its twelfth annual Ferenc Gyorgyey Research Travel Award.

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 anatomy, 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 larger Prints, Posters and Drawings collection contains over 7,000 additional images, some related to international public health, protest and activism and social justice.  The Library also owns an extensive Smoking and tobacco advertising collection, the Robert Bogdan collection of Disability photographs and postcards, medical imagery from popular publications donated by Bert Hansen, and smaller collections of patent medicine ephemera from noted collector William Helfand.

The 2019-2020 travel grant is available to historians, medical practitioners, and other researchers who wish to use the collections of the Medical Historical Library.  There is a single award of up to $1,500 for one week of research during the academic fiscal year July 1, 2019 – June 30, 2020.  Funds may be used for transportation, housing, food, and photographic reproductions. The award is limited to residents of the United States and Canada. Applicants will need to apply through our fellowship site, and upload a curriculum vitae and project description, including the relevance of the Medical Historical Library collections to the project, as well as provide two references attesting to the particular project. Preference will be given to applicants beyond commuting distance to the Medical 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, APRIL 29TH, 2019.  They will be considered by a committee and the candidates will be informed by early June 2019.  Winners may be asked to do a blog post discussing their research.

The application period is now open!  Please apply online by April 29th, 2019.

Requests for further information should be sent to:

Melissa Grafe, Ph.D
Head of the Medical Historical Library and 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: https://library.medicine.yale.edu/historical

Now online, decades of medical student theses available for download

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~This story is courtesy Jenny Blair and Yale Medicine.

In the spring of 1952, Jocelyn Malkin, M.D. ’52, completed her student thesis on laryngeal cancer. Using punch cards, Malkin encoded clinical characteristics of 235 patients suffering from the malignancy, including race, religion, family history, and “excessive voice use.” She then threaded the cards onto a sorter shaped like an ice pick, looking for clear-cut risk factors. One stood out starkly: tobacco use.

After seeing her own thesis results, Malkin recalls, she “nagged” her husband to quit his cigarette habit. Later, as a psychoanalytic institute leader in Washington, D.C., she refused to allow light-ups in meetings.

“Everybody smoked—it was considered very, very cool,” she says. “I was very unpopular because I made a fuss about it.” Thanks to her thesis, Malkin was far ahead of her time. Not until 1957 did the U.S. Surgeon General issue its first report on the health consequences of smoking. Tobacco use is now known to be the most important laryngeal-cancer risk factor.

Malkin’s historic typewritten thesis is freely available online, along with hundreds of other newly digitized Yale medical student theses. Although hard copies of most recent and many older theses are available to peruse in the medical library, digitization and open access means a much larger audience.

“What we’re doing now just opens them up to the world,” says Melissa Grafe, Ph.D., the John R. Bumstead Librarian for Medical History at the Cushing/Whitney Medical Library.

The world has responded. Over 80,000 downloads of Yale medical student theses have taken place by readers in 187 countries, over half at educational or governmental facilities. The theses are available at both the Medical Heritage Library, an online consortium of major medical libraries that digitizes materials and makes them freely available via Internet Archive, and from Yale’s in-house repository, Eli Scholar.

With the first evidence of a thesis requirement appearing in an 1839 catalog, the Yale School of Medicine is perhaps the longest-lived such directive of its kind. Many theses go on to be edited and published in medical journals, but many others have long languished on shelves, largely unread.

Digitization has been underway since 2002, when the medical library and the YSM Office of Student Research placed some of that year’s theses online as part of the Yale Medicine Thesis Digital Library project. Four years later, submitting a digital copy became mandatory of all students. Living alumni were first invited to participate in 2012, and the project has rolled along since then via outreach at alumni events.

But in 2017, a grant to Yale University Library by the Arcadia Fund, one intended to preserve at-risk cultural materials, made it possible to digitize many more.

On July 12, 2017, John Gallagher, director of the Medical Library, with the assistance of Deborah Jagielow, director of Alumni Affairs, emailed some 3,000 alumni from the Class of 2009 and before, inviting them to participate. Within five hours, close to 400 replies had come in granting permission. Eventually, nearly 1,200 alumni agreed to allow digitization, including the families of four who had died.

Grafe and her colleagues then packed up 51 boxes of hard-copy theses and mailed them to Princeton, New Jersey, where, over October, November, and December, the Internet Archive scanned them in (and then mailed them back). Yale library staff then embarked on a quality-control check, making sure all the scans were legible and the data attached to each thesis were accurate.

“Even though it was a short timeline, it was a careful process,” Grafe says. “We wanted to make sure that the alumni who entrusted us with digitizing their material were happy with what they saw [and] received something they could share.”

Topics trend over time, she adds.

“In the late 80s and early 90s, I saw a batch of theses having to do with HIV and AIDS, and in recent years there’s been some global health emphasis,” she says. By contrast, in the 1960s and 70s, patient care and community health were popular.

A quick browse turns up theses on West Nile myeloencephalitis (1955), fetal electrocardiography (1957), cross-cultural psychiatry (1966), concentration camp survivors’ guilt (1971), health care for migrant farmworkers (1975), athletics in hemophilia (1980), detective fiction (1980), children’s fear of needles (1982), childbirth in literature (1987), professional courtesy (1996), and spirituality in HIV care (2001).

There are also many 19th-century theses in elaborate copperplate handwriting, including “On Diabetes Mellitus,” “On Gonorrhea,” and “On The Therapeutic Application of Ice.”

Everything is faithfully preserved as a PDF, including linen-bound covers, blank pages, and librarians’ penciled notations on title pages. Malkin’s includes a copy of the cards she used, notched with their telltale punch-outs. So far, it has been downloaded 50 times.

The digitization project is ongoing. Though theses written prior to 1923 are in the public domain, the library continues to seek permission from alumni or living relatives for any written after that. Interested alumni can fill out an online form.

Ferenc Gyorgyey Research Travel Grant

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~This post is courtesy Melissa Grafe, Head of the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Historical Library at Yale University.

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

The Ferenc Gyorgyey Research Travel Grant is available to historians, medical practitioners, and other researchers who wish to use the collections of the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library. In any given year the award is up to $1,500 for one week of research.  Funds may be used for transportation, housing, food, and photographic reproductions. The award is limited to residents of the United States and Canada.

The Medical Historical Library holds one of the country’s largest collections of rare medical books, journals, prints, photographs, and pamphlets. It was founded in 1941 by the donations of the extensive collections of Harvey Cushing, John F. Fulton, and Arnold C. Klebs. Special strengths are the works of Hippocrates, Galen, Vesalius, Boyle, Harvey, Culpeper, Haller, Priestley, and S. Weir Mitchell, and works on anatomy, 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, and the collection has expanded to approximately 10,000 items.  Themes include social justice, war, drug use, reproductive rights, HIV/AIDS, activism, and more.  Although the Historical Library does not house the official archives of the Medical School, it does own a number of manuscript collections, most notably the Peter Parker Collection, papers of Harvey Cushing, and the John Fulton diaries and notebooks. The Library also owns an extensive Smoking and tobacco advertising collection, the Robert Bogdan collection of disability photographs and postcards, medical imagery from popular publications donated by Bert Hansen, and smaller collections of patent medicine ephemera from noted collector William Helfand.

The application deadline is April 29th, 2018.  A committee will review applications and grant recipients will be notified in early June. Please apply through Yale University Grants & Fellowships website. 

A complete application comprises:

  • Research proposal (of up to 2000 words)
  • Curriculum Vitae
  • Budget
  • 2 letters of reference

Please email Melissa Grafe, Head of the Medical Historical Library, with any questions:melissa.grafe@yale.edu

Images from the Library

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It’s a grey day here in Boston on this first posting Monday of 2018, so I thought to brighten it up a bit with one of my favorite herbals.

Color title page of a reprint of Nicholas Culpeper's herbal

This is from an 1852 reprint of Culpeper’s complete herbal : with nearly four hundred medicines, made from English herbs, physically applied to the cure of all disorders incident to man; with rules for compuounding them: also, directions for making syrups, ointments, &c, a work originally published in the seventeenth century by English physician Nicholas Culpeper.

The herbal has a long reprint history as you can see from the 18 different versions we have in the MHL collection.

Medicine in World War I Online Exhibit

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In commemoration of the centennial of America’s entry into World War I in April 1917 through to the Armistice in November 1918, partner institutions contributing to the Medical Heritage Library have developed this collaborative online exhibit on medicine, surgery, and nursing in the war, with texts and images drawn from the digital corpus of the MHL. A significant amount of professional medical and surgical literature was produced even as the conflict continued to rage, and many personal narratives of physicians and nurses and histories of hospitals and army medical units were also published in the years immediately after the war.  A selection of this material is incorporated into the exhibit.

Medicine in World War I is divided into several broad categories: common diseases of the battlefield and camps; injuries and prosthetic devices; shell-shock and stress; military nursing; and the Spanish influenza epidemic.   There are also sections of bibliographic references with links to items in the Medical Heritage Library and a short list of other exhibits devoted to World War I and medicine.

Yale Medicine Goes to War

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Melissa Grafe, current co-chair of the MHL Governance Committee and John R. Bumstead Librarian for Medical History at the Cushing/Whitney Medical Library, participated in two video presentations for the Yale Office of Public Affairs and Communications to commemorate the WWI centennial and the Medical Library’s exhibits on the war.

Yale Goes to War – Profiles in Medicine
and

Yale Goes to War – Mobile Hospital No. 39
 

Check out more MHL resources on World War I here.

Founding Gallaudet: Origins and Activism

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~This post courtesy of Katie Healey and Caroline Lieffers, doctoral students in Yale’s Program for the History of Science and Medicine, with additions by Melissa Grafe, John R. Bumstead Librarian for Medical History, Head of the Medical Historical Library.

Title page of An Address in Behalf of the Columbia Institution for the Instruction of the Deaf and Dumb and the Blind by Edward M. Gallaudet, 1858.

Title page of An Address in Behalf of the Columbia Institution for the Instruction of the Deaf and Dumb and the Blind by Edward M. Gallaudet, 1858.

In 1856, Amos Kendall, former postmaster general of the United States, became guardian to several deaf children. Concerned by their limited educational prospects, he donated two acres of his estate in the capital to establish the Columbia Institution for the Instruction of the Deaf and Dumb and Blind, to be run by Edward Miner Gallaudet. The blind students were soon moved to a separate school in Baltimore. Not satisfied with just secondary education, Kendall convinced Congress to grant the school the authority to award college degrees. In 1864, President Lincoln signed the college’s charter and President Grant signed the diplomas of its first graduates, establishing a tradition of presidential signatures that continues on its diplomas today. The college was renamed Gallaudet College in 1894, in honor of Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet, and became Gallaudet University in 1986. Continue reading