Used MHL Material? Tell Us About It!

Have you used Medical Heritage Library material in a class? Presentation? Article? Website? Just for the heck of it to learn something new?

We’d love to hear your story about it and learn a little more about you, too!

Please take our brief (only nine questions — when we say brief, we mean it!) survey and tell us a story about how you’ve used our collection!

BIU Sante Connects European Users to the MHL

Gérard de Lairesse’s original drawing for Govert Bidloo’s Anatomia humani corporis … (Amsterdam, 1685). Courtesy of the Bibliothèque Interuniversitaire de Santé.

The Bibliothèque Interuniversitaire de Santé (BIU Santé) in Paris, the largest medical library in France with important history of medicine collections and programs, is connecting its users to the Medical Heritage Library by harvesting MHL’s metadata from Internet Archive to allow searching of its content. Continue reading

Mesmerism

Title page of James Esdaile's "The Introduction of Mesmerism."

Included in portion of Yale University’s Cushing/Whitney Medical Library anesthesia collection uploaded to the MHL, is an intriguing selection of materials regarding mesmerism in medicine, or the act of putting patients in a hypnotic state before a medical procedure and forgoing the use of anesthesia. Continue reading

Digitizing Dorothea Lynde Dix at the National Library of Medicine

Portrait of Dorothea Lynde Dix, from NLM’s Images from the History of Medicine database.

Dorothea Lynde Dix (1802-1887) was one of the most influential lay social reformers to focus on the care and treatment of the mentally ill in 19th-century America. After starting a career as a school teacher in Massachusetts, Dix became aware of the abject conditions under which mentally ill persons in the state were held and treated: many of them kept restrained in dank prisons with little or no clothing, heat, or treatment. Campaigning first in Massachusetts and Rhode Island and then around the country, she approached numerous private donors, state legislatures and the US Congress to make funding available to build humane facilities for the mentally ill. Continue reading