Historical Collections> History of the Health Sciences Websites

History of the Health Sciences Websites

Comprehensive Websites | Specialized Websites | Antiquarian Medical Book Dealers

A brief annotated guide to selected websites, including comprehensive and specialized websites, that pertain to the history of the health sciences.

Comprehensive Websites

Directory of History of Medicine Collections

A list of history of medicine libraries and collections in the US, Canada, and overseas, providing information on their collection strengths, interlibrary loan policies, and reference services.

History of the Health Sciences World Wide Web Links Page

The website provides links to a vast array of history of medicine-related Web pages, including those for organizations, libraries, databases, biographical materials, journals, listervs, and newsgroups.

History of Medicine Finding Aids Consortium

The site currently links to over 3,000 finding aids from 20 institutions that collect broadly in the area of the history of medicine and its allied sciences. A finding aid is tool created by archivists to give information about the contents of archival collections. Finding aids provide contextual information about collections along with detailed inventories to help researchers locate relevant materials.

Medical Heritage Library

Medical Heritage Library features quality historical resources in medicine, including over 10,000 digitized medical rare books, from some of the world's leading medical libraries.

Science Museum of London's Brought to Life: Exploring the History of Medicine

Provided by the Science Museum of London, it offers access to images of thousands of fascinating objects from the Museum's great medical collections. The site also incorporates detailed descriptions, introductions to major themes in the history of medicine and engaging multimedia.

Specialized Websites

UVa's Center for Nursing Historical Inquiry

This website allows users to search the Center’s history of nursing books and manuscript collections and provides links to other history of nursing websites.

College of Physicians of Philadelphia, Digital Historical Resources

This site provides bibliographic access to part of the tremendous history of medicine collection housed at the Philadelphia College of Physicians, as well as a listing of the 5,000 portraits in the Sturgis Collection, although there are no images attached to these electronic records.

Columbia University Health Sciences Library, Archives and Special Collections

This website provides an overview of the holdings and services in the Columbia University Health Sciences Library’s Archives and Special Collections. Special strengths include collections on or by Freud, Nightingale, and the history of anesthesiology and plastic surgery.

Contagion: Historical Views of Diseases and Epidemics

Created by the Harvard University Library's Open Collections Program with support from Arcadia, this site provides access to more than 500,000 pages of digitized books, serials, pamphlets, incunabula, and manuscripts. "The goal is to contribute to the understanding of the global, social-history, and public-policy implications of disease and to offer important historical perspectives on the science and the public policy of epidemiology today."

Dream Anatomy

This site features images from the collections of the National Library of Medicine from 1500 to the present.

Germ Theory Calendar

This site provides access to more than 800 items relating to the historical development of the germ theory of disease up through 1900.

Historical Anatomies on the Web

This site provides access to high quality images from important anatomical atlases in the National Library of Medicine's collection.

Index of Medieval Medical Images

This website provides access to some 2,500 images, with accompanying cataloguing, from medieval manuscripts up to 1500 AD that are housed in North American libraries and repositories.

Harvard University, Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Rare Books and Special Collections

This website presents information on the extensive history of medicine holdings in the Countway Library, the scope of available services for those wishing to visit the Countway, and links to exhibits -- electronic versions of exhibits formerly on display at the Countway.

Heirs of Hippocrates

The Hardin Library for the Health Sciences, University of Iowa is pleased to announce that the book catalog, “Heirs of Hippocractes” last published in 1990 (Third edition), is now available as an online database and offered to the public on the Internet at no charge. “Heirs” is an annotated bibliography of the historic books in the John Martin Rare Book Room and has become a source of authority for antiquarian book dealers, librarians, bibliographers, historians, and collectors from around the world. The online version, an important contribution to the history of medicine and printing, is much more than the full-text of the book; although it can be browsed, the content has been entered in the form of a database to allow for precision seaching and quick recall.

History of Medicine Division of the National Library of Medicine

NLM historical collections of material related to health and disease are among the richest in the world. Holdings include pre-1914 books, pre-1871 journals, archives and modern manuscripts, medieval and Islamic manuscripts, a collection of printed books, manuscripts, and visual material in Japanese, Chinese, and Korean; historical prints, photographs, films, and videos; pamphlets, dissertations, theses, college catalogs, and government documents.

The Margaret Sanger Papers Project

This site provides access to the edited papers of Margaret Sanger and to secondary sources about Sanger and the history of birth control.

Medicine and Madison Avenue

This website contains over 600 health-related advertisements printed in newspapers and magazines between 1911 and 1958, along with 35 documents relating to the creation and influence of health-related advertising.

New York University School of Medicine, The Literature, Arts, and Medicine Database: On-line Resources in Medical Humanities

This site provides access to literature and art pertaining to medicine and health care. Summaries of books and images of great medically-related art works are provided. One section of this Web page provides access to syllabi from a wide variety of medical humanities-related courses, including one section on history of medicine courses.

Office of National Institutes of Health (NIH) History, DeWitt Stetten, Jr. Museum of Medical Research

This website features historical resources on NIH history, virtual exhibits about particular topics in NIH history, and information about fellowships and grants.

Online Archive of American Folk Medicine

This website provides access to a vast quantity of information on a wide variety of medical folklore, with worldwide coverage. It is searchable by disease, folklore item, and belief system.

Paolo Mascagni’s Anatomia Universa

This site consists of 88 plates and a separate volume of text from Paolo Mascagni’s Anatomia Universa (Pisa, 1823-1832).

The Philip S. Hench Walter Reed Yellow Fever Collection Web Site, UVa Health Sciences Library

This Web site makes available some 5,500 primary documents from the Phillip S. Hench Walter Reed Yellow Fever Collection. This is an invaluable resource for anyone interested in the history of yellow fever, military medicine, tropical medicine, public health, biography, courtship, disease, biomedical ethics, or human experimentation.

Recent Dissertations in the Medical Humanities

This Web site provides a listing, updated monthly, of recent doctoral dissertations in the history of medicine, pharmacy, nursing, psychiatry, other aspects of the medical humanities, and women’s health issues.

Texas Medical Center, The John P. McGovern Historical Collections and Research Center

This site offers full electronic texts from the Texas Medical Center’s Rare Book Collection, which specializes in the history of medicine as it pertains to Texas and the works of Sir William Osler.

University of California, Berkeley, Bancroft Library, Bioscience and Biotechnology in History

The purpose of this Web site is to document the history of the AIDS epidemic, biological science, and the biotechnology industry from multiple historical perspectives. Unique to this database are the oral histories of leading San Francisco Bay Area scientists and AIDS leaders.

University of Tennessee Health Sciences Library, Memphis, Tennessee, Health Sciences Historical Collections

This Web site is a descriptive catalogue of the materials housed in the University of Tennessee’s Health Sciences Historical Collections, focusing on the history of medicine in Tennessee and the Mid-South.

Virginia Nursing Hall of Fame

The Virginia Nursing Hall of Fame had its genesis in 1998 when the Virginia Nurses Association Centennial Committee first discussed creating a memorial for those nurses whose achievements and dedication have profoundly influenced the profession. The Virginia Nursing Hall of Fame is designed to stimulate interest in the history of nursing in the Commonwealth and to perpetuate the legacy of those nurses who shaped health care in Virginia. This Web site provides information about Virginia Nursing Hall of Fame inductees.

Virginia Nursing History

This Web site contains information about the history of nursing in Virginia, including hyperlinks to “Highlights of Nursing in Virginia, 1900-2000”; a list of nursing schools in Virginia, past and present; the Virginia Board of Nursing; a history of Virginia nursing organizations; and listings of Virginia nurses who have achieved distinction in the profession.

Antiquarian Medical Book Dealers

Medical Antiquarian Book Sellers

Michael North, the author of this article— comprised of a survey and directory of dealers who specialize in antiquarian medical books and a selected list of online resources for the antiquarian medical book trade, provides valuable information for anyone interested in acquiring, appraising, or learning who is selling rare books. North’s research resulted in an insightful look at the antiquarian medical book trade and its practitioners, as well as providing useful contact information.