Tag: news

Digital Highlights: Oral Histories

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The United States Navy Bureau of Medical History Office has made a number of transcripts and recordings of oral histories available through the Medical Heritage Library.

Interviews were conducted with through the 1990s and 2000s with doctors, nurses, corpsmen, and NCOs who had been involved in a variety of historical events throughout the 20th century.

Joseph Brennan of the 6th Naval Beach Battalion, was present at the D-Day Normandy beach landings.

Doctor Walter Burwell served on the USS Suwanee in the Pacific during World War II while the Japanese were conducting kamikaze attacks on ships.

Ruby Brooks was a nurse aboard the USS Haven during the evacuation of survivors of Dien Bien Phu from Saigon during the Vietnam war.

James Bray was a corpsman in World War II and was captured as a prisoner of war.

Doctor James Chandler, serving in Vietnam, can list “removed live rocket-propelled grenade from patient” on his resume.

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

 

 

 

The MHL Welcomes New Content Contributor: The University of Illinois Chicago Library of the Health Sciences

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The University of Illinois Chicago recently added 16 items to the Medical Heritage Library’s collection. The titles include Plexus, the official publication of the College of Physicians and Surgeons in the Medical Department of the University of Illinois at the end of the 19th century. Other titles include The Swedish Covenant Hospital and Home of Mercy, and the Medical and dental colleges of the west : historical and biographical: Chicago as edited by H.G. Cutler in 1896, a valuable resource for those interested in 19th century medical education and services in the Chicago area.

The Special Collections and University Archives Department at the Richard J. Daley Library houses collections of rare books, manuscripts, maps and photographs, with particular strength in the social, political and cultural history of Chicago. The collections at the Library of the Health Sciences-Chicago document Chicago’s rich history as a center for the education and practice of the medical arts.

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 The Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University, the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, the Cushing/Whitney Medical Library at Yale University, the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine at Harvard University, the National Library of Medicine, the New York Academy of Medicine, the Welch Medical Library, Library of the Institute of the History of Medicine, and the Alan Mason Chesney Medical Archives of the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions, and the Wellcome Library. The MHL also includes content contributions from Duke University, University of Massachusetts Medical School’s Lamar Soutter Library, and the Gerstein Science Information Centre, University of Toronto among others.

BUMED’s historians upload 2000th item to Medical Heritage Library

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After slightly more than a year of uploading material to the Medical Heritage Library, the US Navy’s Bureau of Medicine and Surgery’s 2000th item appeared online today (May 19). A Series of Reports to the Nursing Division of the activities of the Nurse Corps Officers serving aboard the U.S. Naval Hospital in the Repose is now easily available for research. The reports from CDRs Angelica Vitillo and M.T. Kovacevich back to Captain Ruth Erickson, Director of the Navy Nurse Corps, and her successor CAPT Veronica Bulshefski date from 8 November 1965 to 2 December 1966. They are in turns informative, chatty and sad.

” Our first direct casualty which arrived Saturday, the nineteenth, was a nineteen year old bilateral mid-thigh amputee who to date has received over 45 pints of blood.” (28 February 1966)

” The improvements we have initiated in our individual staterooms have contributed to maintaining a high state of moral among the nurses, One of the base shops at Hunters Point allowed us to misappropriate an assortment of very colorful and feminine looking bedspreads for our rooms.” (13 December 1965)

“Death claimed the life of a very young man who had extensive chest wounds on Monday, the seventh and a thirty three year old arm amputee with other extensive wounds on Tuesday the eighth. Some of our young nurses are feeling these losses acutely.” (9 March 1966)

These letters join a soon-to-be complete set of over 1000 issues of 70 years of Navy Medicine magazine; oral histories with veterans of World War 2, Korea and Vietnam; a growing collection of audiovisuals including one on the Navy’s humanitarian efforts after the Vietnam War; and many other items.

A small selection of our photographs may  be found on Flickr at https://www.flickr.com/photos/navymedicine/.

Patient Records Survey

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As part of a joint effort to develop best practices for enabling access to special collections containing protected health information (PHI) and other types of access-protected (“restricted”) records, the Center for the History of Medicine, Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, and the Alan Mason Chesney Medical Archives of the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions are conducting a survey to determine what information researchers need to determine whether or not to pursue access to restricted health records, such as medical records, psychiatric/mental health records, and photographs taken as part of medical treatments. Continue reading

The MHL at the HSS

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The weekend before Thanksgiving, we were delighted to be a part of the 2013 History of Science Society meeting in Boston, Massachusetts. Kathryn Hammond-Baker (from the Center for the History of Medicine at the Countway Library) and Hanna Clutterbuck (Project Co-ordinator for the MHL) staffed our table on Friday and Saturday, giving out candy, postcards, and chatting with conference attendees about the MHL. Continue reading

Tracing the Footsteps of a Giant

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Barbara Starfield in Venice, Italy for the 23rd Patient Classification Systems/International Conference November 8, 2007. Photo is courtesy of the Alan Mason Chesney Medical Archives

Barbara Starfield in Venice, Italy for the 23rd Patient Classification Systems/International Conference November 8, 2007. Photo is courtesy of the Alan Mason Chesney Medical Archives

Staring up at the 76 boxes in Barbara Starfield’s collection occupying an entire wall of shelving—or 91 cubic feet—in the Alan Mason Chesney Medical Archives, I immediately wondered how I would ever be able to piece together the life’s work of a world-renowned researcher and academic.  Continue reading