Five preeminent medical libraries, including the HS/HSL, are collaborating on a project to digitize state medical journals. The Medical Heritage Library (MHL), is a digital resource on the history of medicine and health developed by an international consortium of cultural heritage repositories. The MHL has received funding in the amount of $275,000 from the National Endowment for the Humanities for its proposal, “Medicine at Ground Level: State Medical Societies, State Medical Journals, and the Development of American Medicine and Society.” Additional funding has been provided by the Harvard Library.
This project will create a substantial digital collection of American state medical society journals, digitizing 117 titles from 46 states, from 1900 to 2000. The HS/HSL holds close to 95 of the titles.
State medical society journals document the transformation of American medicine in the twentieth century at both the local and national level. The journals have served as sites not only for scientific articles, but also for medical talks (and, often, accounts of discussions following the talks), local news regarding sites of medical care and the medical profession, advertisements, and unexpurgated musings on medicine and society throughout the twentieth century. Once digitized and searchable as a single, comprehensive body of material, this collection will be a known universe, able to support a limitless array of historical queries, including those framed geographically and/or temporally, and offering new ways to examine and depict the evolution of medicine and the relationship between medicine and society.
The other four participants are: The College of Physicians of Philadelphia; the Countway Library of Medicine at Harvard University; the Center for the History of Medicine and Public Health at The New York Academy of Medicine; and the Library and Center for Knowledge Management at the University of California at San Francisco (UCSF).