Continue reading »]]> Here are some of the news stories that have come across our desks at the MHL recently…

…from Ryan Cordell’s blog ( via Digital Humanities Now), a post on digital humanities, interdisciplinarity, and “curricular incursion.”

…an article from the UK’s Guardian newspaper about the merging of books and the internet.

…a great blog post from the American Historical Association about the History of Vaccines website at the College of Physicians of Philadelphia (one of our MHL partners!)

…the Rutgers University British Studies Center is holding a free conference on Science and Method in the Humanities on March 2, 2012.

…if you’re going to be in or around Newcastle in the UK, the Northern Centre for the History of Medicine, supported by the Wellcome Trust, is offering a series of lectures with one on the 22nd of February (today!) on sugar and the British Empire.

…can illness be edifying?

…and the most recent edition of the Giants’ Shoulders blog carnival! We will be hosting the carnival ourselves later in the spring, so stay tuned for more on that.

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

Continue reading »]]> In an earlier post on this blog, we talked about the English attempts to locate Sir John Franklin, unsuccessful searcher after the Northwest Passage. Franklin left England in 1845 with two ships, the Erebus and Terror, on his second attempt to locate the Passage, one of the rocs’ eggs of nineteenth century navigation. The second voyage resulted in a worse disaster than the first — Franklin and some of his men had staggered back overland from the first attempt; the second resulted in the total loss of both ships and men.

The fate of the Franklin expedition was a source of considerable mystery, since the ships were merely listed as ‘missing’ for years. Multiple voyages were launched in search of Franklin and his ships, including the expedition Robert Goodsir shipped with.

The English were not the only ones going in search of Franklin, however. Noted American explorer Elisha Kent Kane shipped out on each of the Grinnell Expeditions — the first in 1850 and the second in 1853. The first voyage did result in the location of the first winter camp the Franklin expedition made during their attempted retreat. Kane himself experienced the full hardship of contemporary Arctic exploration, including scurvy and having to abandon icebound ships and retreat across ice and wintry land to safety. He successfully escaped the ice and wrote his memoir of the expeditions in the later 1850s.

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

Continue reading »]]> Wondering how our collection is looking lately? Well, we’ve been adding lots of material and we have over 28,000 items for your research!

We’ll be making some more specific announcements about these new additions in the near future but, for the minute, here’s a great quick overview of what we’re up to:

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Colored plate from De Becker's "The Nightless City."

In 1899, Joseph Ernest De Becker published an expose of the geisha quarter of the Japanese capital of Tokyo — then named Yedo — called the yoshiwara. De Becker ended up with a tome of over 500 pages, detailing the history, architecture, and customs of the quarter and including several beautiful color prints and many illustrations in black and white.

De Becker’s avowed aim was to discuss the degredation caused by having a known “prostitute’s quarter” in a large city like Tokyo. Indeed, he starts his book with a brief, vituperative prologue warning his readers not to be complacent and think that “you, as a race, have any monopoly of virtue” (12) over the Japanese. Interestingly, De Becker mentions infamous English publisher and author W.T. Stead’s “Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon” in defence of his thesis, urging his readers to seek out the piece, published in the Pall Mall Gazette in London in 1885.

Stead created an international scandal with his demonstration of the availability and cheapness of girl prostitutes in the city of London — indeed, he was put on trial for his alleged “purchase” of a girl for five pounds.

De Becker’s volume is not as inflammatory as Stead’s Gazette writing, but it does seem as if his careful descriptions of prices to be paid for each type of prostitute or service; what food could be expected by a client making a late-night visit; and his precise explanations of Japanese terms might be taken as a guidebook rather than a serious warning.

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

Continue reading »]]> If you’re looking for a way to get involved in a digital humanities project, DHCommons might be just the website you’re looking for.

An initiative of centerNet, an constituent organization of the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations, DHCommons is a hub website seeking to connect scholars with digital humanities projects. A quick scan through the Projects page shows a wide range of projects, including “Digital Thoreau” to create an online, enriched version of Walden, ”Civil War Washington” which intends to include medical and scientific turning points and discoveries in its study of the Civil War, and “The Eighteenth Century Common,” for scholars of the eighteenth century to explore ways to communicate with a non-scholarly audience.

Collaboration opportunities range from beta testing, design, and data entry to proofreading and “general digital humanities consulting.” You can volunteer to collaborate as an individual — possibly as a student, faculty member, IT specialist, or librarian — or as part of a group if, for example, you’re a teacher with a class looking for a project.

You can  meet up with DHCommons at THATCamps across the United States and in Europe as well as at other events.

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

Continue reading »]]> We’ve added a few new things to our Tools for Digital Research page…

…the Darwin Correspondence Project. Staff in the UK and US have been working on transcribing and making available  online Charles Darwin’s copious correspondence.  About 15,000 letters are available on the site now, transcribed and described with a variety of searchable metadata including places, people, and scientific terms.

…the Transportation Library Menu Collection from Northwestern University. The collection includes over 400 menus from national and international airlines, cruise ships, and railroads.

…the Online Books Page from the University of Pennsylvania is a great aggregator site if you’re looking to get a sense of what books are available online in a particular subject or by a particular author. If you’ve already been to Project Gutenberg and the Internet Archive, this is a perfect third stop.

…and if you’ve already checked out our suggestions and want a little more help, try the Guide to Finding Interesting Public Domain Works Online from the Public Domain Review. This is a really helpful primer if you’re relatively new to online research or looking for some tips on how to conduct a more efficient search.

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