From Our Partners: Submissions for Meyerhoff Prize

This prize was established in 1956 by Ralph and Jo Grimes of the Old Hickory Bookshop, Brinklow, MD, in memory of Murray Gottlieb, a New York antiquarian book dealer. Since 2010, this award has been sponsored by the MLA History of the Health Sciences Section. In 2016 it was renamed to honor longtime MLA member Erich Meyerhoff, AHIP, FMLA. Meyerhoff was a legendary figure in medical librarianship with a great devotion to the history of the health sciences. The purpose of the Meyerhoff Prize is to recognize and stimulate interest in the history of the health sciences. The prize is awarded annually for the best unpublished scholarly paper about a topic in the history of the health sciences. The author of the winning essay receives complimentary registration to the annual meeting, a certificate at the association’s annual meeting, and a cash award of $500 after the annual meeting. 

Eligibility: 

  • The author of a paper submitted for the Erich Meyerhoff Prize must be a member of the Medical Library Association. 
  • The submitted paper must treat some aspect of the history of the health sciences. 
  • The submitted paper may be under consideration for publication at the time of submission, but cannot have been published. 
  • The submitted paper must meet the requirements for submission to the Journal of the Medical Library Association. 

The deadline for submission is November 1, 2020. Click here more information and submission form.

Reminder! At least one author of the paper must be a member of the Medical Library Association. 

Digging Into Digital: The MHL

Together with LAMPHHS, we’re offering an online session all about the MHL!

Melissa Grafe, our immediate past president from the Historical Medical Library of Yale Medical School, Jessica Murphy from the Center for the History of Medicine at the Francis A Countway Library of Medicine, and Hanna Clutterbuck-Cook from the MHL and the Center will be guiding the session.

When: Friday, July 31th at 1 p.m. EST

What: We’ll spend about 30-45 minutes on an introduction to the MHL and strategies for diving into the MHL corpus, showing how to surface materials related to epidemics and diseases as an example (a hot topic for the upcoming fall semester!), and discussing other ways the MHL is promoting discovery of various parts of the collection.

In this Digging Into Digital session, we’ll dive into the rich and freely open collections digitized by the Medical Heritage Library, a non-profit collaborative digitization and discovery organization committed to providing open access resources in the history of healthcare and the health sciences. This session is tailored for library, archive, and museum professionals who provide history of medicine and health research help and classroom teaching. 

Please quickly register your email here:  https://forms.gle/YhBeBLpnibRJS2KX9

The session is open to people outside of LAMPHHS, so if you have colleagues who want to join in, they are welcome to do so.   We will use the email you share in registration to send you the Zoom link the day before the session. 

UCSF Library Artist in Residence

~Post courtesy Polina Ilieva, Head, Archives and Special Collections, UCSF Libraries.

We are excited to welcome the first-ever UCSF Library Artist in Residence, Farah Hamade.

There was a remarkable response to the call for submissions, and the committee reviewed twenty-seven applications from artists in the Bay Area, several US states, and Canada and representing diverse media formats, including ceramics, interactive wood sculpture, photography, bookmaking, videography, collage, comic books, painting, 3D installation, and others. Farah Hamade was named the inaugural UCSF Library Artist in Residence and commenced her yearlong project, The City is a Body: Systemic Vulnerabilities in the time of COVID-19 on June 1: https://www.library.ucsf.edu/news/meet-our-artist-in-residence/.

Introducing Our Summer 2020 Fellow: Kim Adams

Photograph of Kim Adams with her arms in the air in triumph in front of a homegrown sunflower
Kim celebrating a sunflower she grew in her backyard last year.  

For a few years running, there has been minor scandal about Joe Biden’s wife.  Jill Biden has a doctorate in education from the University of Delaware, and requests that she be addressed under her formal title: Dr. Biden.  While the Obama White House listed her as “Dr. Jill Biden” on their official website, several newspapers, including the New York Times, refused to honor her wish, referring to her as “Mrs. Biden.” The Washington Post remarked that it reserves the title of Dr. for medical professionals, “if you can’t heal the sick, we don’t call you doctor.” While there is ample room for sexism in refusing Dr. Biden her proper title, there is also a long history of intellectual warfare between the arts and the sciences. 

As the child of two physicians, I spent a lot of time defending my choice not to go to medical school, and instead pursue a PhD. When I earned my doctorate from the Department of English at NYU in the spring of 2019, I got a lot of well-meaning jokes about which Dr. Adams was the “real” doctor. It turns out the punchline might require a bit of medical history. At the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts conference last fall, a colleague told me that in the eighteenth century, it was reversed, “We were the real doctors, and they were not.”  

I like to imagine myself as someone who, like C.P. Snow, has a foot in each of these “two cultures”: standing with the “real” doctors of the past and the present.  Snow argued in 1959 that the intellectual life of Western culture was increasingly being split into two groups, the humanists and the scientists, who were utterly failing to communicate with each other: “one found Greenwich Village talking precisely the same language as Chelsea, and both having about as much communication with M.I.T. as though the scientists spoke nothing but Tibetan.” He observed this division not through an anthropological study of academic communities, but through the idiosyncrasies of personal experience: “plenty of days when I have spent the working hours with scientists and then gone off at night with some literary colleagues.” I, on the other hand, spend my working hours researching the Harlem Renaissance, and my evenings drinking with scientists (or at least I did before our current pandemic). Snow is a double agent: a scientist by day and a writer by night. I am another, newer kind of operative: a medical humanist.  

I have crafted a scholarly identity that combines literature and medicine with the goal of speaking a language understood on both sides of the cultural divide.  My dissertation, The Body Electric, examines the role of medical technology in American literature, from mesmerism to electroconvulsive therapy, Walt Whitman to Ralph Ellison.  Sharing this research with a wider audience, I recently published a piece on the medical history of vibrators. In it, I argue that vibrators were asexual medical quackery from the 1890s to the 1970s when feminists repurposed them for masturbatory liberation. Last spring, I worked with my peers to organize a conference on the cultural history of pharmacology, where we heard papers about anesthesia in nineteenth-century American novels, the opium trade in colonial Korea, and crisis nursing at twentieth-century rock concerts.  The conference confirmed my suspicion that the amazing material history of medicine deserves a wider audience. 

The Medical Heritage Library brings an extraordinary range of material from the history and culture of medical science to the broader reading public.  Scores of freely available, digital resources in the MHL collections, from medieval accounts of plague and quarantine, to early twentieth century studies of eugenics and “race suicide,” speak directly to our contemporary moment, and have a valuable role to play in shaping public discourse.  As the Summer Outreach Fellow, I look forward to extending the MHL’s mission to share these resources with humanists and scientists alike, building a common language among the multiple, vibrant, cultures of the broader reading public

From Our Partners: “They Were Really Us”: The UCSF Community’s Early Response to AIDS — A New Exhibition on Calisphere

~This post courtesy Polina Ilieva, Head, Archives and Special Collections, UCSF Libraries.

When HIV/AIDS first seized the nation’s attention in the early 1980s, it was a disease with no name, known cause, treatment, or cure. Beginning as a medical mystery, it turned into one of the most divisive social and political issues of the 20th century. The University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) was at the forefront of medical institutions trying to understand the disease and effectively treat early AIDS patients.

Drawing on materials from the AIDS History Project collections preserved in UCSF’s Archives and Special Collections, the UCSF Library presents “They Were Really Us”: The UCSF Community’s Early Response to AIDS, a new digital exhibition on Calisphere that highlights the ways UCSF clinicians and staff addressed HIV/AIDS from its outbreak in the 1980s to the foundation of the AIDS Research Institute in 1996. 

From medical professionals defining the disease and developing a model of care, to activists calling for treatments and public education, this exhibition amplifies the resilience of a community not only responding to its local needs, but also breaking ground on a larger scale with efforts that continue to impact HIV/AIDS care and research today. 

This exhibition, including the digitization of materials used in this exhibition, has been made possible in part by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (PW-253755-17) “The San Francisco Bay Area’s Response to the AIDS Epidemic: Digitizing, Reuniting, and Providing Universal Access to Historical AIDS Records,” awarded to the UCSF Library in 2017-2020.

About UCSF Archives and Special Collections

UCSF Archives and Special Collections identifies, collects, preserves, and maintains rare and unique materials to support research and teaching of the health sciences and medical humanities and to preserve UCSF institutional memory. The Archives serve as the official repository for the preservation of selected records, print and born-digital materials, and realia generated by or about the UCSF, including all four schools, the Graduate Division, and the UCSF Medical Center.

The Special Collections encompasses a Rare Book Collection that includes incunabula, early printed works, and modern secondary works. The East Asian Collection is especially strong in works related to the history of Western medicine in Japan. The Japanese Woodblock Print Collection consists of 400 prints and 100 scrolls, dating from 16th to the 20th century. The Special Collections also contains papers of health care providers and researchers from San Francisco and California; historical records of UCSF hospitals; administrative records of regional health institutions; photographs and slides; motion picture films and videotapes; and oral histories focusing on development of biotechnology; the practice and science of medicine; healthcare delivery, economics, and administration; tobacco control; anesthesiology;  homeopathy and alternative medicine; obstetrics and gynecology; high altitude physiology; occupational medicine; HIV/AIDS and global health.

About Calisphere

Calisphere provides free access to California’s remarkable digital collections, which include unique and historically important artifacts from the University of California and other educational and cultural heritage institutions across the state. Calisphere provides digital access to over one million photographs, documents, letters, artwork, diaries, oral histories, films, advertisements, musical recordings, and more.

Calisphere Exhibitions are curated sets of items with scholarly interpretation that contribute to historical understanding. Exhibitions tell a story by adding context to selected digital primary sources in Calisphere, thereby bringing the digital content to life. Calisphere Exhibitions are curated by contributing institutions and undergo editorial review. We are currently refining these processes, which are outlined in the Contributor Help Center. Please contact us if you’re interested in learning more about Calisphere Exhibitions.

Final words from our outgoing president, Melissa Grafe, Ph.D

I wanted to thank all our MHL users for the support you’ve shown us over the past 11 years.  We started in 2009 in an effort to bring a consortial model to digitization of medical heritage materials across different types of institutions.  I began co-chairing the MHL in 2015 after the death of our leader, Kathryn Hammond Baker, who was Deputy Director of the Center for the History of Medicine at the Countway Library at Harvard University.  Kathryn successfully guided the MHL in the early years, and with the governance committee, established our website, wrote several digitization grants, and generally set the path for our organization.  Being relatively new to the organization and working full-time as Head of the Medical Historical Library at Yale University, I knew I needed help to fill Kathryn’s large shoes.

Working with Emily Novak Gustainis, current Deputy Director of the Center and MHL co-chair, we expanded the MHL’s footprint with our amazing partners.  The MHL now has over 320,000 items in our Internet Archive instance and over 4,000,000 images drawn from these collections residing in our Flickr account.  With the addition of the Wellcome Library and the Bibliothèque interuniversitaire de Santé (BIU Santé) as international governance members, the MHL includes fabulous collections from these illustrious institutions, accounting for over half of the MHL corpus.  Our international and national governance members, including the National Library of Medicine, UCSF Library, the New York Academy of Medicine, the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University, the Cushing/Whitney Medical Library at Yale University (where I’m from), and the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine at Harvard, sustain the MHL, contributing funding, time, effort, collections, and resources to keep our organization going.  We also appreciate all the content contributors that tag their collection in Internet Archive with the MHL tag.

In 2018, with particular help from Beth Lander, College Librarian at the College of Physicians, the MHL embarked on a journey to become a stand-alone, incorporated non-profit, which we achieved in 2019, ten years after our founding.  I became the first president of the MHL in 2018, with my term ending on June 30th, 2020.  The MHL started a fellowship program in 2018 to bring fresh voices to bear on every aspect of our work.  Our fellows have delved into our user base to better understand ways to reach our audiences, created curated primary source sets on vaccination and disability, and analyzed the infrastructure supporting our Advanced search.  We are happy to introduce Kim Adams as our fellow for this year, who will be helping us expand our outreach efforts and organize our first virtual symposium.

Please join me in welcoming our new President, Emily Novak Gustainis.  She is an incredible person and will lead the MHL in amazing directions moving forward.  We look forward to your continued support as our users, and encourage you to share stories on how you use the MHL in your research, teaching, learning, and world.  Email us at medicalheritage@gmail.com.

In Support of #BlackLivesMatter

The Medical Heritage Library grieves for the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery, all brutally murdered in recent weeks. Systemic racism is a public health issue; our historical collection does not represent black or brown voices well; instead, they are often excluded, muted, ignored, and buried in the records. 

The Medical Heritage Library is the creation of elite academic institutions and as such has its foundation in a long tradition of academic complicity with institutionalized racism. We choose to work towards the end of systemic racism in our work and community. We stand in solidarity with those protesting police brutality and the deadly effects of systemic racism.

It can be a challenge to find historical texts related to race within the context of health and medicine in the Medical Heritage Library, and that is why we invite our users to help us identify texts contributing to a greater historical understanding. Send your findings to medicalheritage@gmail.com and we will compile the recommendations and make them available through our website (www.medicalheritage.org). 

Call for Papers!

~This post courtesy Beth Lander.

CALL FOR PAPERS

FHNN Virtual Conference

June 2020

Title:  Silences in the LAMS: Digital Surrogacy in the Time of Pandemic

Date:  October 12, 2020 (VIRTUAL)

Intro: The College of Physicians of Philadelphia, in conjunction with the CLIR-funded project For the Health of the New Nation (FHNN) through a partnership with the Philadelphia Area Consortium for Special Collections Libraries (PACSCL), invites proposals for a one-day, online conference on the use of digital primary sources.

In a time when the use of hard-copy primary sources has been all but eliminated, how are teachers, scholars, and other researchers using digital surrogates in their work? How has this digital format impacted the research process? What are the strengths and weaknesses of working solely with digital collections? How do (or don’t) digital surrogates manifest silences within archives?  This conference will explore these questions and more to examine the challenges and rewards of conducting or teaching history in a near virtual environment.

Session Formats

Presenting online creates new challenges, but it also offers new possibilities. While we suggest your proposal match one of the session formats below, we encourage presenters to use any digital presentation style that would engage and entice viewers.

Traditional Paper Presentation – 30-minute session of one fully prepared paper, with time for comments and discussion

Panel Discussion – 60-minute session consisting of three to five panelists discussing perspectives on a selected topic

Lightning Talks – 30-minute session of four to five 5-minute talks on a given topic

Proposal Evaluation:  The Program Committee invites proposals on the following topics, as they relate to digital archival collections: 

  • Archival silences 
  • Exclusions in the history of medical education 
  • Metadata and access 
  • Teaching with primary sources 
  • Loss of physicality 
  • Effective digital tools to mine content

    Presenters are encouraged, though not required, to use digitized materials from the CLIR Hidden Collections grant project, For the Health of the New Nation…, in their proposals.  

    Submitting a Proposal: Initial proposals require an abstract of up to 250 words as well as a preliminary title. If the abstract is accepted, full papers will be due this fall (see below for more details). 

    Submission form: https://forms.gle/i7pPgVLXMYLgtPHu7 

    Deadline for abstract submission:  July 1, 2020

    Date of acceptance notification:  July 15, 2020 

    RBM publication:  If your abstract is accepted, you may be asked to submit your full presentation for potential publication in RBM: A Journal of Rare Books, Manuscripts and Cultural Heritage, Spring 2021 issue.  Final selection for publication will be dependent on the number of submissions and input from the RBM editorial board. 

    Deadline for paper/presentation submission:  September 1, 2020

    RBM accepted papers due:  September 15, 2020

    Word limit for papers:  Papers must conform to the publication guidelines of RBM.  We suggest no more than 3500 words. 

    Review Committee members:

    Beth Lander, College Librarian/The Robert Austrian Chair, College of Physicians of Philadelphia
    Kelsey Duinkerken, Special Collections & Digital Services Librarian, Thomas Jefferson University
    Kelly O’Donnell, Ph.D., NEH Postdoctoral Fellow, Consortium for History of Science, Technology, and Medicine 

    Keynote Speaker:  Melissa Grafe, Ph.D.  John R. Bumstead Librarian for Medical History, Head of the Medical Historical Library 

    Contact names

    Beth Lander, College of Physicians of Philadelphia (blander@collegeofphysicians.org)
    Kelsey Duinkerken, Thomas Jefferson University (Kelsey.Duinkerken@jefferson.edu

    For the Health of the New Nation is supported by a Digitizing Hidden Special Collections and Archives grant from the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR). The grant program is made possible by funding from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

From Our Partners: Ferenc Gyorgyey Travel Grant

~This post courtesy Melissa Grafe.

Looking for funds to research at Yale’s Medical Historical Library? Apply for the Ferenc Gyorgyey Research Travel Award at the Medical Historical Library of the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University.

The Ferenc Gyorgyey Research Travel Grant is available to historians, medical practitioners, and other researchers outside of Yale who wish to use the Historical 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, a large medical imagery from popular publications donated by Bert Hansen, and smaller collections of patent medicine ephemera from noted collector William Helfand.

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 MAY 1ST, 2020.  They will be considered by a committee and the candidates will be informed by early June 2020.  Winners may be asked to do a blog post discussing their research.

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

Please apply through Yale University Grants & Fellowships website. The deadline is May 1st, 2020.

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

From Our Partners: Digitizing early medical education

~This post courtesy Chrissie Perella and Beth Lander.

We are pleased to announce that over 20,000 pages of lecture notes and related material has been digitized to date as part of “For the Health of the New Nation” grant.  “For the Health of the New Nation: Philadelphia as the Center of American Medical Education, 1746-1868” is a two-year project funded by CLIR and organized by the Philadelphia Area Consortium for Special Collections Libraries (PACSCL).  The initiative will digitize, describe, and provide access to 140,000 pages of lecture tickets, course schedules, theses, dissertations, student notes, faculty lectures notes, commencement addresses, opening addresses, and matriculation records, sharing not only the voices of the medical greats, but also the often unheard voices of students.


Some of the highlights included in our first batch of uploads to the Internet Archive include the Samuel Knox notes on lectures from the University of Pennsylvania (1783-1785), a two-volume set of notes on topics such as midwifery, symptoms of pregnancy and labor, typical and atypical births, and postnatal care.  These notes are one of the earliest sets of student lecture notes in the Library’s collection.  The contain Samuel Knox’s 1783 abstract of Colin McKenzie’s lectures on midwifery in 1773 at the University of Pennsylvania as well as Knox’s notes on Adam Kuhn’s materia medica lectures and Benjamin Rush’s chemistry lectures at the University of Pennsylvania, 1784-1785.  Although we may not have many (if any) patient records from 18th-century Philadelphia, these lecture notes can tell us a lot about preventive care and treatments for illnesses in contemporary times.  For example, Knox notes that “Bleeding [bloodletting] in the first three or four months prevents abortion.”  Bloodletting was not uncommon in late 18th century and early 19th century obstetrics.

Other materials digitized as part of “For the Health of the New Nation” give us insight into the lives of medical students.  The Forster family papers (1819-1880) include letters from James H. Stuart to his mother and brother, Benjamin, which concern his training and experiences as a medical student in Philadelphia at the University of Pennsylvania.  James earned his M.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1850.  He opened a medical practice in Erie, and later became an Assistant Surgeon in the U.S. Navy.  He was a member of Commodore Matthew Perry’s expedition to Japan in the 1850s, and was lost at sea off the Chinese coast in September 1854.

On 22 August 1846, James wrote his mother to say that his class had passed their examinations with “flying colors” and that Dr. Gray had “said it was the best examination he had ever seen.”

In a later letter, dated 12 March 1849, James asks his mother to send money for a book entitled “Wood’s Practice,” which he says at $5.50 is a cheap book.  We have two copies of this book, as well as several archival collections created by or relating to George B. Wood (1797-1879).

What else can we learn from student lecture notes and correspondence?  Check out these and other items digitized as part of the grant here: http://bit.ly/cpp_fhnn, and start exploring what medical students learned and how they lived in the early days of Philadelphia.  Keep an eye our Twitter account @CPPHistMedLib for updates!