Celebrating Nurses

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!

Mount Sinai Archives Digitize “Journal”

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.

Browse over 3,000 digitized volumes of historical medical journals!

Over the past two years, we have posted a few updates on the MHL’s collaborative project to digitize significant American medical journals, primarily dating from 1797 to 1923. This project, “Expanding the Medical Heritage Library”, was generously funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities (grant # PW‐51014‐12) and included MHL partners The College of Physicians of Philadelphia, Columbia University Libraries, Harvard’s Countway Library, and Yale’s Cushing/Whitney Library.

We’re proud to say that the project has not only been completed, but that we’ve exceeded our goal of digitizing 1.7 million pages! While we encourage you to explore the full-text search tool available on our website, you can now also browse over 3,000 volumes that comprise our 336 journal titles. If you’d rather browse by date or search all fields, we encourage you to download the CSV file, also available on the journals browse page.

This browse function is a true product of MHL collaboration. Partners worked together to fill-in gaps in each others’ journal runs and to standardize our metadata so that the user could browse a full title run of a digitized journal without needing to worry about where the physical item was located.

Many of the journals selected reflect emerging specialties in the nineteenth century, such as dermatology and pediatrics, and many complete (or nearly complete) runs of significant local and state journals are now freely available for browsing, including the New York Medical Journal and the Maryland Medical Journal.

Stay tuned for more updates, including information about an improved full-text search tool that will allow users to extract even more from our digitized journals!

Year One of “Expanding the Medical Heritage Library” Is Complete!

We have just submitted our first year report on our second National Endowment for the Humanities-funded grant, “Expanding the Medical Heritage Library: Preserving and Providing Online Access to Historical Medical Periodicals.” Under this grant, we have been digitizing numerous 19th century American medical journals (approximately 1,863 volumes so far!) and we’ve excerpted some of the highlights below.

The College of Physicians of Philadelphia
The College staff were particularly excited about a number of our selections. Among the most significant contributions were 147 volumes comprising the four leading 19th‐century homeopathy journals (American homoeopathist/American homoeopath/American physicianHahnemannian monthly, Homoeopathic physician, and Homeopathic recorder). Additionally, we included the entire run of the Transactions of The College of Physicians of Philadelphia, which includes a complete run of all volumes published throughout more than 200 years (volumes were published in 1793 and 1841‐2002). As the holder of the journals’ copyright, the College of Physicians agreed to release these volumes freely into the public domain for this project. The Transactions include proceedings from meetings, lists of Fellows, and detailed appendices that collectively describe how the College of Physicians shaped and engaged with emerging American medical trends.

Columbia University Libraries/Information Services
Columbia digitized 71 titles, the bulk of which came from the last quarter of the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th. These were years when U.S. medicine came of age – from its disorganized, underfunded, and generally unscientific state in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War to a powerful, scientifically cutting‐edge, and lavishly financed medical establishment by the end of the First World War. Many of the journals Columbia chose to digitize were created by emerging specialties such as dermatology and venereology; pediatrics; and neurology/psychiatry. They also concentrated on public health and climatology journals knowing that these cover an unusually broad range of topics that appeal to researchers in a wide range of disciplines. Additionally, they included many New York City journals since their holdings of these were usually complete. These included the Brooklyn Medical Journal and its successor, the Long Island Medical Journal (1888‐1922); the long‐running and influential New York Medical Journal (1865‐1922); and two New York German‐language journals: the New Yorker Medicinische Monatsschrift (1852‐53) and the New Yorker Medizinische Presse (1885‐1888).

Yale University’s Cushing/Whitney Medical Library
The titles Yale chose represent a variety of themes, from deafness to dentistry. Yale choose the journals, in collaboration with partners, based on perceived need, as many of the titles were not fully available digitally, allowing Yale to fill in gaps. A significant title selected by Yale was the American Annals of the Deaf and Dumb, a Connecticut journal that holds importance as one of the oldest journals in English that focuses on the education of the deaf.

Digital Highlights: New York Journal of Medicine

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Chest x-rays illustrating an article on pulmonary abscess from 1922 New York Journal of Medicine.

New titles from our National Endowment for the Humanities-funded grant to digitize medical journals are going up in our collection on the Internet Archive regularly.

A recent addition is the New York Medical Journal, in a run from 1865 to 1922. The 1865 volume includes an obituary on Abraham Lincoln and articles, notes, and communications on abortion, uterine surgery, scurvy, and diabetes. The volume itself is set in close type with narrow margins. There is no obvious front page graphic or header to identify the journal and it plunges directly into its first article without preamble or introduction.

The 1922 volume, by comparison, includes a very polished title page and front page header. The title page identifies three other titles — the Medical Record, the Philadelphia Medical Review, and the Medical News — which are presumably being published as part of the Journal title. As an odd parallel, the first article in the 1922 volume is also about gynecological surgery, in this case about the use of radium for certain conditions.

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

 

The College of Physicians of Philadelphia begins digitizing with Internet Archive

The Historical Medical Library of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia has just completed its first book shipment to the Internet Archive. The College is one of four sub-grantees in the NEH grant awarded to the MHL via the Open Knowledge Commons. With this shipment, The College begins digitizing over 500,000 pages of rare American medical journals, some of which only exist in a handful of libraries nationwide. Continue reading

New Titles in the MHL

The MHL is pleased to announce that the first titles from our new National Endowment for the Humanities-funded digitization grant are going live in our Internet Archive collection.

If you glance through the list in the “This Just In” section of our Internet Archive page, you’ll see titles like the Thomsonian Botanic Watchman, the Confederate States Medical and Surgical Journal, the Photographic Review of Medicine and Surgery, the Aesculapian Register, and the New England Botanic Medical and Surgical Journal.

The current titles are the result of the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine‘s first month of digitization but check back frequently for more titles from the Countway, the Yale Cushing/Whitney Medical Library, the Columbia Health Sciences Library, and the College of Physicians of Philadelphia.

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

Medical Heritage Library Awarded NEH Grant for Digitization of Historical Medical Journals

American Journal of Insanity, v. 1, n. 1, 1844

The Medical Heritage Library (MHL), through the Open Knowledge Commons (OKC), has received funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities for a two-year project to digitize and preserve historical American medical journals. The digitized journals will be made freely available to researchers through the Medical Heritage Library collection in the Internet Archive. Continue reading