Wellcome Film is an online digital collection of moving images on 20th-century healthcare and medicine owned and now digitized by the Wellcome Library in London. The project chronicles the history of medicine over the last 100 years and has been freely available in Internet Archive since 2010. The earliest footage dates from the era of founder, Sir Henry Wellcome (1853-1936) who was an American-born pharmaceutical magnate. Included is rare footage from Gebel (or Jebel) Moya in the Sudan 1912-13 showing scenes of everyday life, archaeological digging, communal sports and recreation. Later decades are represented by films featuring breakthrough medicine such as surgical techniques and drug treatments.
The Medical Heritage Library (MHL) 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 via the Open Knowledge Common to digitize 30,000 medical rare books. MHL principal contributors are Johns Hopkins University, New York Academy of Medicine, the New York Public Library, and the Wellcome Library. The MHL has since grown to include content contributors Duke University, University of Massachusetts Medical School’s Lamar Soutter Library, and the Gerstein Science Information Centre, University of Toronto.
The MHL is proud to announce that it has added Wellcome Film to its online content in IA and looks forward to working more with the Wellcome Library in the future.
As always, for more from the Medical Heritage Library (including the new material from the Wellcome), please visit our full collection!