The Medical Library is History (original) (raw)
Related papers
Journal of the European Association for Health Information and Libraries, 2021
Preserving the history of medicine is an important task for health sciences librarians. In this regard, the provision of special collections can play a significative role. This article presents the initiative of the University of Rome Campus Bio-Medico Library (UCBML) in creating valuable sources for the history of medicine through the establishment of several special collections. The aim of this article is to highlight the importance of special collections to promote issues relating to the field of medical history.
2015
This lecture and accompanying workshops started with the inventories of three physicians and used their libraries to talk both about the changing culture of learned medicine in the high Middle Ages, but also about the ways the new riches in digitization allow us to move from single physical manuscripts to reconstructed libraries and intellectual milieus. We focused on the libraries of "Johannes," an Italian medical scholar of the late 12th century; Richard de Fournival, a French cleric and physician (d. 1260); and Astruc de Sestiers, a Jewish physician who died in 1439. Comparing these inventories with medical manuscripts in Harvard's collections, we can see not simply the overlapping worlds of Muslim, Christian, and Jewish physicians, but also common changes in medical culture that transcended linguistic divides. http://isites.harvard.edu/fs/docs/icb.topic635929.files/GreenPosterBig.pdf Included as a second attachment here is the HANDOUT from the workshops, presented on 26 Feb 2015.
Medicina nei Secoli, 2023
This article illustrates the impact of bibliographic collections of medical history (what we can also call “rare medical books”) on medical education. The authors have carried out an analysis of academic experiences – largely Anglo-American – where these resources have been used on the educational level. These collections represent an underestimated and underutilised educational potential, especially in Italy, despite the considerable historical wealth and heritage of books and literature available. Furthermore, the article highlights some possible methodological strategies for a systematic enhancement of the collections in the context of the didactic curriculum of medical studies: the development of a systematic scientific alliance between professor and librarian for a pedagogical use of the collections; the direct involvement in academic programs through didactic planning of the use of historical-medical library material; and the use of historical-medical bibliographies as tools for research and understanding the evolution of medical knowledge, to date little used in historical-medical teaching. With specific reference to countries such as Italy, defined by a noteworthy wealth of historical-medical book collections, there is a potential that paradoxically still awaits to be adequately utilised, with the exception of some pioneering and learned experiences. This situation is due to the lack of pedagogical pathways and approaches elaborated according to a common strategy among teachers, researchers and librarians.
Financing North American medical libraries in the nineteenth century
Bulletin of the Medical Library Association, 2001
Culture not only justifies the existence of libraries but also determines the level of funding libraries receive for development. Cultural appreciation of the importance of libraries encourages their funding; lack of such appreciation discourages it. Medical library development is driven by culture in general and the culture of physicians in particular. Nineteenth-century North American medical library funding reflected the impact of physician culture in three phases: (1) Before the dawn of anesthesia (1840s) and antisepsis (1860s), when the wisdom of elders contained in books was venerated, libraries were well supported. (2) In the last third of the nineteenth century, as modern medicine grew and as physicians emphasized the practical and the present, rather than books, support for medical libraries declined. (3) By the 1890s, this attitude had changed because physicians had come to realize that, without both old and new medical literature readily available, they could not keep up ...
Medical humanities have a central role to play in combating biopiracy. Medical humanities scholars can articulate and communicate the complex structures of meaning and significance which human beings have invested in their ways of conceiving of health and sickness. Such awareness of the moral significance of medical heritage is necessary to ongoing legal, political, and ethical debates regarding the status and protection of medical heritage. I use the Indian Traditional Knowledge Digital Library as a case study of the role of medical humanities in challenging biopiracy by deepening our sense of the moral value of medical heritage.
Medical Museums Past, Present and Future
The Bulletin of the Royal College of Surgeons of England, 2011
It is tempting, especially for those working in them, to think that the turbulence experienced by medical museums in the past two decades has been unprecedented. However, these fascinating collections have always been subject to change: in ownership, in purpose, in audience. Museums are not static mausolea but are dynamic, vibrant entities that grow, shrink and adapt to shifting circumstances. As our own Hunterian Museum approaches the bicentenary of its opening here in Lincoln's Inn Fields, it seems a good time to reflect on the key historical shifts, to assess where medical museums are now and to suggest where they might go next.
MEDICINE IN THE ARCHIVES: RESOURCES FOR RESEARCHING MEDICAL HISTORY TOPICS (2005/6)
The full citation is: Monica H. Green, "Medicine in the Archives: Resources for Researching Medical History Topics," Medieval Feminist Forum 40 (2005–6), 60–67 and 83–86. This piece was written to offer a brief and basic introduction to researching topics in medieval medical history to students and non-specialist scholars in Medieval Studies. The essay is particularly concerned to provide guidance in two areas where specialized knowledge of sources and methods are needed: (1) the history of medical ideas, which usually involves examination of medical texts; and (2) the history of medical practices and practitioners, which can be researched both through medical texts and a variety of other sources. A more general overview of the state of the field can be found in my later essay: Monica H. Green, “Integrative Medicine: Incorporating Medicine and Health into the Canon of Medieval European History,” History Compass 7, no. 4 (June 2009), 1218-45, doi: 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2009.00618.x. Note that these two essays only address at an elementary level two areas of research that have veritably exploded in the 2010's: the increasing availability of openly-accessible digitized copies of medieval manuscripts (allowing access to a host of medieval medical texts that have never been critically edited or previously published in any form); and bioarchaeological and genetics work, that is now transforming our ability to study the history of disease in the Middle Ages. Both of these topics are subjects of my on-going research.