History of the Health Sciences Web Sites

Comprehensive Web Sites | Specialized Web Sites | Antiquarian Medical Book Dealers

Web sites beginning with an asterisk (*) were featured in the luncheon workshop, “Unlocking the Promise of the Internet: A Sampling of the History of Medicine Websites,” at the 2002 American Association of the History of Medicine Conference.

Comprehensive Web Sites

The History of the Health Sciences World Wide Web Links Page

The Web site 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.

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.

MedHist: The History of Medicine Gateway

MedHist is a gateway to evaluated, quality Internet resources relating to the history of medicine and allied sciences, covering all aspects of the history of health and the development of medical knowledge. A wide and varied range of quality international sites are included. The gateway also incorporates the MedHist Events Database (http:medhist.ac.uk/events/ ) that provides an electronic calendar listing national and international conferences, workshops, and seminars relating to the history of medicine and allied sciences. MedHist was developed and is managed by the Wellcome Library for the History and Understanding of Medicine in the U.K.

Specialized Web Sites

Center for the Study of the History of Nursing

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

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 Web site 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.

The 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.

The Graphic IMMI

This Web site is currently under construction. Eventually the goal is to provide 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 Web site 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.

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

Office of the United States Public Health Service (USPHS) Historian

The Web site of the Office of the Public Healh Service Historian now includes images from its collection that may be downloaded. The photographs are on the “Resources” page under “Images and Other Audiovisuals.” The photographs cover a 100-year span, ranging from the late nineteenth to the late twentieth century. They are organized in six categories: research, health care, disease control, education, war and disaster, and safety. So far as is known, all images are in the public domain and may be used by students, researchers, and teachers. Users are asked to credit the Department of Health and Human Services when using an image. More images will be added. The Web site contains other resources that can help scholars of both the history of medicine and the history of the federal government. The “Resources” page, under “Printed Materials,” has links to articles on subjects ranging from bioterrorism to the militarization of the Commissioned Corps of the Public Health Service. The “FAQs” page also contains questions and answers relating to the general history of the Public Health Service.

Online Archive of American Folk Medicine

This Web site 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 is currently under construction. It will contain vast amounts of 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 Internet 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. This survey and directory is the fourth undertaken for and published in The Watermark, and the first to provide information about Internet resources; the Internet has come to play an increasingly large role in the antiquarian book trade in the years since the last survey and directory were published in 1994.