Search Results for: Medical Heritage Library

An Announcement from the Medical Heritage Library, Inc.

Closure Announcement
After fifteen years of dedicated service and collaboration, it is with heavy hearts that we announce the closure of the Medical Heritage Library, Inc. effective June 30, 2024. Over the years, our organization has been committed to digitizing the holdings of some of the world’s leading medical libraries and promoting free and open access to quality historical resources in medicine and health. We encouraged innovation and promoted opportunities for knowledge-sharing across a broad, interdisciplinary constituency.

We are immensely proud of the impact we have made together in partnership with our professional community of librarians, archivists, and historians. Together, we digitized 355,872 rare books and historic American medical journals, including nearly 50 State Medical Society journals. Our efforts have contributed to the accessibility and preservation of invaluable resources for teaching and learning, including primary source sets and reference shelves on Anti-Black Racism in Medicine, Disability Studies (Disability; Disability, Music Technology, and Education, and Disability Technologies), Influenza, LGBTQUIA+, Tuberculosis, and the History of Vaccines. Our educational sessions promoted the digital humanities and methodologies to enable responsible access to historical health information, and encouraged the public to connect their experiences of healthcare to the past to create a more informed and equitable future. 

Founded in 2010, current members of the Medical Heritage Library include The Cushing/Whitney Medical Library at Yale University, the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard University, the National Library of Medicine, Osler Library of the History of Medicine at McGill University, UCSF Library, and Wellcome Collection. Previous Medical Heritage Library institutional members include The Bibliothèque interuniversitaire de Santé (Biu Sante), The College of Physicians Philadelphia, Columbia University, the Gerstein Science Information Centre, University of Toronto, the Health Sciences and Human Services Library, University of Maryland, The New York Academy of Medicine, and The Alan Mason Chesney Medical Archives of the Johns Hopkins Institutions. We want to recognize and thank all of our partners, our user community, and our many funders, including the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Council on Library and Information Resources, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. We also thank the Internet Archive for its continued commitment to hosting, preserving, and making freely accessible Medical Heritage Library content.

The Medical Heritage Library’s collection will continue to be available in the Internet Archive and conference videos will remain posted on YouTube. Audiovisual materials, records, and (to the extent possible) social media of the Medical Heritage Library, will be archived at the Center for the History of Medicine, Countway Library, Harvard Medical School, which will make the MHL’s website available via its Archive-It Collection. In the coming weeks, we will be working diligently to ensure a smooth transition and to responsibly conclude our operations. If you have any questions or concerns, please do not hesitate to reach out to us at medicalheritage@gmail.com. 

Thank you for your many years of support.

We are, with gratitude,

Polina Ilieva, President, University of California San Francisco
Melissa Grafe, Treasurer, Yale University
Emily R. Novak Gustainis, Governance, Harvard University
Christy Henshaw, Governance, The Wellcome Collection
Beth Lander, Immediate Past President, Philadelphia Area Consortium of Special Collections
Krista Stracka, Governance, National Library of Medicine
Mary Hague-Yearl, Governance, McGill University

The Ruth Lilly Medical Library Joins the Medical Heritage Library

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We’re delighted to welcome our new partners at the Ruth Lilly Medical Library and to share this introductory post from Brandon Pieczko, Digital and Special Collections Librarian.

The Medical Heritage Library has a new contributor, the Indiana University School of Medicine’s
Ruth Lilly Medical Library. Beginning in May 2022, the library began contributing select digitized
items to the Medical Heritage Library to improve the discoverability of print materials from its
History of Medicine Collection.

Photograph of Ruth Lilly Medical library reading room
History of Medicine Collection Research Room

The History of Medicine Collection is a special collection unit within the Ruth Lilly Medical Library located in Indianapolis, Indiana. As part of the Indiana University School of Medicine,
the mission of the History of Medicine Collection is to support the research, learning, and educational success of Indiana University students, faculty, and community members by
collecting, preserving, interpreting, and providing access to unique materials documenting the history of medicine; medical education, training, research, and practice; and health and disease
treatment and prevention in the state of Indiana and beyond. The collection includes archival records and manuscripts from Indiana University School of Medicine faculty and alumni, researchers, professional organizations, advocates, and practitioners in the medical and health care professions; a significant number of medical instruments and other artifacts; audiovisual recordings in a variety of formats; and rare and early print books, periodicals, and other publications (1542 – present) in multiple languages (e.g., English, French, German, Latin, Russian) on various subjects including anatomy and physiology, surgery, obstetrics and gynecology, pediatrics, pathology, pharmacology, psychiatry, military medicine, medical ethics, and public health.


To date, the Ruth Lilly Medical Library has uploaded 37 issues of the Indiana University School of Medicine yearbook to the Internet Archive, as well as an incredibly detailed notebook containing pathology lecture and laboratory notes written by an Indiana Medical College student between 1903 and 1904. Looking ahead, the library plans to contribute additional digitized resources from its History of Medicine Collection including early medical school commencement programs and a series of monthly bulletins published by the Indiana Department of Health between 1899 and 1925.

Drawing of pulmonary tuberculois from medical student's pathology lab notes, 1904
Drawing of pulmonary tuberculosis from medical student’s pathology lab notes, 1904

In addition to the print materials it is contributing to the Medical Heritage Library, the Ruth Lilly Medical Library has also digitized a large number of audiovisual recordings from its holdings and
made them made available for direct online streaming through Indiana University’s Media Collections Online, a digital repository developed specifically to provide access to digitized and born-digital media. Since November 2020, the library has uploaded nearly 200 items to Media Collections Online including public health, disease awareness, and emergency preparedness
programs produced by local, state, and national organizations; demonstrations of dissections, surgeries, and other medical procedures developed to inform medical student education; and recordings of history of medicine guest lectures and student and faculty conference presentations.

Still from a video recording of lecture on minority healthcare delivered by Dr. Joycelyn Elders at IU School of Medicine in 2000
Still from a video recording of lecture on minority healthcare delivered by Dr. Joycelyn Elders at IU School of
Medicine in 2000

The History of Medicine Collection also contains a variety of artifacts ranging in date from the late 18th to early 21st century including surgical and dissection kits; diagnostic equipment like
microscopes, ophthalmoscopes, hemocytometers, sphygmomanometers, and stethoscopes; as well as a disarticulated (Beauchene) skull and a life-size model of a human skeleton. Some of these artifacts have been digitized using photogrammetry scanning techniques to create 3D
models that researchers and learners can interact with dynamically online. These models have been uploaded to a designated collection in Sketchfab, the 3D modeling platform the Ruth Lilly Medical Library also uses to provide access to the anatomical models it creates for use in medical education. To date, the library has uploaded models of 12 historical artifacts to the collection and plans to expand this digital project to include additional artifacts from the History of Medicine Collection.

3D model of an English pewter bleeding bowl, circa 1840s
3D model of an English pewter bleeding bowl, circa 1840s

The Ruth Lilly Medical Library is excited to join the Medical Heritage Library and hopes that its contributions will benefit both the library and the MHL’s broader mission to provide open
online access to digital history of medicine resources.

Call for Papers: Medical Heritage Library Conference 2020

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The Medical Heritage Library is hosting an online conference to celebrate a decade of digitizing primary resources in the history of medicine on Friday November 13, 2020. 

The Medical Heritage Library is a digital curation collaborative among some of the world’s leading medical libraries. The conference seeks to highlight research, teaching, and learning outcomes for our open-access collection of texts, films, images, and audio material in medical and health sciences and related subject matter. These materials represent a wide range of historical periods, linguistic traditions, and scientific cultures, and we encourage proposals that reflect the scope of our medical heritage collections. We seek to forge new relationships and strengthen existing ones with scholars, educators, and allied health professionals, in medical humanities, digital humanities, library and information science, medical history, art history, critical race studies, cultural studies, disability studies, philosophy, and bioethics.  

We invite proposals on a range of topics related to our collections, including, but not limited to:

Affect management and practitioner burnout

Collections as data

Disability studies and medicine

History of sexuality

Local and indigenous medical knowledge

Lung disease and cigarette smoking

Medical museums

Medicine and the arts

Medicine and literature

Patient experience(s)

Public health

Race science and medicine

State medical societies

Teaching the pandemic(s)

Vaccines and anti-vaccination

Women and medicine

We ask that proposals reference at least one work digitized by the Medical Heritage Library, or discuss how the collections informed the research behind the presentation. Please see our website at www.medicalheritage.org and our Internet Archive collections archive.org/details/medicalheritagelibrary for more details.  

We welcome proposals of non-traditional presentation formats, such as workshops, lightning talks, collaborative discussions, digital demonstrations, and creative performances, as well as traditional academic papers and panels.  

Please submit an abstract of 300 words or less and a bio of 100 words or less through our abstract submission form by September 18, 2020. Make sure to note the intended form of your contribution, and provide an email contact for all authors. If you have any questions, please contact us at conference.mhl@gmail.com 

We look forward to reading your submissions.

NLM and Medical Heritage Library to Expand Public Access to Collections

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The National Library of Medicine (NLM) signed a three-year memorandum of understanding with the Medical Heritage Library (MHL) to promote free and open access to quality historical resources in medicine and the human health sciences.

Under the agreement, the MHL will include digitized NLM historical materials and associated metadata in its free and open archive of historical resources. Additionally, staff of the organizations will exchange expertise to ensure and share accurate metadata for the materials, data-driven analyses of usage of the materials, as well as transparent and open engagement efforts with researchers who could benefit from knowing about the free availability of the materials.

MHL—a nonprofit organization—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.   Through the partnership with the MHL, the NLM strengthens its connections to U.S. and international peer institutions and their communities, including Harvard University, the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, the New York Academy of Medicine, the Wellcome Library in London and the Bibliothèque interuniversitaire de Santé in Paris.

NLM holds collections spanning ten centuries of global medical history. “This agreement supports the shared goals of NLM and MHL to open these collections to new audiences and provide access that supports a variety of current and developing research methods,” said Jeffrey S. Reznick, PhD, Chief of the NLM History of Medicine Division.

“This agreement with the NLM strengthens the MHL’s core mission, as a collaborative digitization and discovery organization committed to providing open access resources in the history of healthcare and the health sciences,” said Melissa Grafe, PhD, President of the Medical Heritage Library and Head of the Medical Historical Library at Yale. “Since 2010, the NLM’s world-renowned collections have been—and with this memorandum of understanding will continue to be—a core part of the nearly 300,000 freely and openly available digitized items in the Medical Heritage Library, used in research and education throughout the world.”

Since its founding in 1836, the National Library of Medicine https://www.nlm.nih.gov has played a pivotal role in translating biomedical research into practice and is a leader in information innovation. NLM is the world’s largest medical library, and millions of scientists, health professionals and the public around the world use NLM services every day.

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“Ever-evolving: introducing the Medical Heritage Library, Inc.”

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We’re delighted to announce that our vice-president, Emily Gustainis, has published a new article in the Journal of the Medical Library Association about the MHL:

The Medical Heritage Library, Inc. (MHL), is a collaborative digitization and discovery organization committed to providing open access to history of medicine and health resources. Since its founding in 2010, it has aspired to be a visible, research-driven history of medicine and health community that serves a broad, interdisciplinary constituency. The MHL’s goal is to make important historical medical content, derived from leading medical libraries, available online free of charge and to simplify and centralize the discovery of these resources. To do so, it has evolved from a digitization collaborative of like-minded history of medicine libraries, special collections, and archives to an incorporated entity seeking not just to provide online access to digital surrogates, but also to embrace the challenges of open access, the retention and use of records containing health information about individuals, and service to the digital humanities. This organizational expansion was further spurred by the MHL’s recently completed National Endowment for the Humanities grant, “Medicine at Ground Level: State Medical Societies, State Medical Journals, and the Development of American Medicine” (PW-228226-15), which received additional financial support from Harvard University Medical School and the Arcadia Fund through the Harvard University Library.

Click through to read the full article here.

The Medical Heritage Library wants your feedback!

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The Medical Heritage Library is gearing up for its next round of strategic planning. To ensure that we’re meeting the needs of our users, we need to hear from you!

Please take a few minutes to take our short survey and let us know how you’re finding and using  MHL content and what you think our priorities should be.

Don’t know about the Medical Heritage Library? Even better! We’re a digital curation collaborative among some of the world’s leading medical libraries that promotes free and open access to quality historical resources in medicine through the Internet Archive. We recently incorporated and are in the process of obtaining 501(c)(3) status. This is a perfect time to check out our content and let us know what you think!

UK Medical Heritage Library

The UK Medical Heritage Library brings together books and pamphlets from 10 research libraries in the UK, focused on the 19th and early 20th century history of medicine and related disciplines. This ongoing digitisation project is funded by Jisc (http://www.jisc-content.ac.uk/) and the Wellcome Library (http://wellcomelibrary.org). The UK Medical Heritage Library is a sub-set of the Medical Heritage Library (archive.org/details/medicalheritagelibrary).

UK Medical Heritage Library partners include:

  • King’s College London
  • London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine
  • Royal College of Physicians of London
  • Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh
  • Royal College of Surgeons of England
  • University of Bristol
  • UCL (University College London)
  • University of Glasgow
  • University of Leeds
  • Wellcome Library

Laying our hands on the 100,000th item in the Medical Heritage Library

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The Medical Heritage Library collection has more than doubled in size in the past year, with the upload of its 100,000th item this month. In October 2014, 10 new institutions from the United Kingdom joined the project and have so far contributed 30,000 titles to the growing collection, including its 100,000th item.

This milestone was achieved by the digitisation of Recent Developments in Massage by Douglas Graham, published in 1893 and originating from the collections of the Royal College of Physicians in Edinburgh. This work is an update to and summary of Graham’s much longer (and denser) 1890 publication A Treatise on Massage. Graham describes a wide range of massage techniques to ease symptoms and treat diseases such as diabetes, diarrheoa, fever, and ulcers.

Interestingly, Graham even recommends massage to treat diseases of the eye, as well as sight problems including near and far-sighted eyes, and astigmatic eyes.

How do you massage an eye? Graham describes three methods, which start off mild and then become eye-wateringly severe:

Massage Simple,

which is done by moving the lids, under slight pressure, in a radial direction away from the centre of the cornea, and by circular friction, under slight pressure upon the upper lid, around the sclera-corneal margin and adjacent surfaces.

Massage Medicated,

is done in the same manner as Massage Simple of the eye, with the addition of lotions or ointments introduced inside the lids. [In the case of treating ulcers in this way, Graham recommends cocaine as an anaesthetic].

Massage Traumatique,

is as near like rubbing the inside of the lids with sand-paper as can be imagined. It is used for granulations of the conjunctiva and opacities of the cornea. The conjunctiva is at first rendered insensitive by means of cocaine. A finger or thumb is then rendered antiseptic in a solution of corrosive sublimate, and after this it is dipped into some finely pulverized boracic acid. The lid is then turned up or down, and the massage is as strong as can be tolerated for two or three minutes. A profuse flow of blood is occasioned thereby, but very soon, in place of the rugous surface which was felt at first, there is a smooth and soft surface, showing that the granulations have been rubbed off.

You can read through the whole book below or follow this link to read Recent Developments in Massage.

The Medical Heritage Library collection brings together a huge curated collection of works related to health and medicine in the 19th and 20th centuries, drawn from some of the most important medical history libraries in North America and the United Kingdom.

And 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/.