Recurso: Medical Heritage Library
DIGITIZATION COLLABORATIVE PROVIDES OPEN ACCESS TO OVER 100 YEARS OF AMERICAN MEDICAL HISTORY THROUGH THE INTERNET ARCHIVE
The Medical Heritage Library has completed its National Endowment for the Humanities-funded initiative
Medicine at Ground Level: State Medical Societies, State Medical Journals, and the Development of American Medicine,
1900-2000
Boston, MA, October 2, 2017.
The Medical Heritage Library
has released 3,907 state medical society journal volumes free of charge
for nearly 50 state medical societies, including those for the District
of Columbia and Puerto Rico, through the Internet
Archive (http://www.medicalheritage.
Project supporter
and former president of the American Association for the History of
Medicine, Distinguished Professor of History Nancy J. Tomes, Stony Brook
University, notes: “The value of this collection
lies precisely in the insights state journals provide on issues of
great contemporary interest. They shed light on questions at the heart
of today’s policy debates: why do physicians treat specific diseases so
differently in different parts of the country?
Why is it such a challenge to develop and implement professional
policies at the national level? How do state level developments in
health insurance influence federal policy and vice versa? How do factors
such as race, class, gender, and ethnicity affect therapeutic
decision making? How have methods of promoting new therapies and
technologies changed over time? These are issues of interest not only to
historians but to political scientists, sociologists, and economists.”
The digitized
collection offers unprecedented, centralized access to one of the
richest resources concerning the evolution of American medicine and will
open the texts to new forms of analysis in the digital
humanities, such as those supporting the investigation of health trends
and outcomes over time and region, as well as visualizations.
Journals were
digitized between 2015 and 2017 through the National Endowment for the
Humanities (grant number: PW-228226-15), with additional funding
provided by the Harvard Library and the Arcadia Fund, as
well as Harvard Medical School. All publications found in the
collection are provided free of charge by individual journal publishers
agreeing to open access for content currently under copyright. Created
in 1965 as an independent federal agency, the National
Endowment for the Humanities supports research and learning in history,
literature, philosophy, and other areas of the humanities by funding
selected, peer-reviewed proposals from around the nation. For more on
the NEH Office of Digital Humanities visit
http://www.neh.gov/odh/.
Beyond the Internet
Archive’s portal through which MHL content is delivered, the Medical
Heritage Library hosts state-by-state links to the journals (http://www.medicalheritage.
About the Medical Heritage Library
Founded in 2010
with funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to digitize 30,000
medical rare books, the Medical Heritage Library (MHL) is a digital
curation collaborative among some of the world’s leading medical
libraries that promotes free and open access to quality
historical resources in medicine. The MHL’s goal is to provide the
means by which readers and scholars across a multitude of disciplines
can examine the interrelated nature of medicine and society, both to
inform contemporary medicine and strengthen our understanding
of the world in which we live. The MHL’s growing collection of
digitized medical rare books, pamphlets, journals, and films number over
200,000, with representative works from each of the past seven
centuries, all of which are available through the Internet
Archive. Information about the MHL may be found on our website, www.medicalheritage.org.