Spotlight on: Medical History of British India

In this series, I’ll be highlighting a digital resource or collection of primary resource materials in the history of medicine. You can find a lengthy list of these at our history of medicine subject guide and feel free to share any resources you’ve found useful!

Medical History of British India is a fascinating digital collection from the National Library of Scotland. The materials digitized for this collection consist mostly of documents from the India Papers Collection. The India Papers Collection is made up of central British Imperial and British Indian government publications from the mid-19th century until the first decades of the 20th century. The Medical History of British India project has digitized and made available online the many volumes of reports relating to public health, disease, and medical research. It even includes 146 volumes (40,000 pages!) on veterinary medicine. The online collection is divided into 6 primary subject areas: disease, institutions, drugs, veterinary, mental health, and vaccination. You can browse by these sub-collections, or browse by other criteria such as form and genre (includes images, maps, and texts), place, subject, person and organization, and time period. All of the digitized volumes are also fully text searchable, a great research benefit. Another interesting feature is that you can download up to 30 images to create a custom PDF, which brings together only the pages you need.  The About the collection page gives a great introduction to all of the major subjects covered—click on the link to Institutions and you will get lots of good background information about the organization of medical research, hospitals, and healthcare services in British India.

 

 

 

New resource: Scientific Instrument Society

Back issues of the Bulletin of the Scientific Instrument Society from The British Society for the History of Science are now freely available online.

There’s no search capability, but back issues from 1984 to 2004 are available for download as PDF from the Scientific Instrument Society’s website.

Here’s one example of historical medical instruments found on the pages of the Bulletin: Roland Wittje, “Centrifuges and Ultracentrifuges in Medical, Chemical and Microbiologic Laboratories,” Bulletin of the Scientific Instrument Society 80 (2004).

Engraving of medical instruments, likely to replace broken bones, by Carlo Cesi, 1626-1686. From the Osler Library Prints Collection, OPF000047.

Engraving of medical instruments, likely to replace broken bones, by Carlo Cesi, 1626-1686. From the Osler Library Prints Collection, OPF000047.

 

 

Spotlight on: Wellcome Film

In this series, I’ll be highlighting a digital resource or collection of primary resource materials in the history of medicine. You can find a lengthy list of these at our history of medicine subject guide and feel free to share any resources you’ve found useful!

The Wellcome Library, one of the world’s most important medical libraries, is home to a number of specialized collections representing the history of medicine and medicine in society, including a substantial Moving Images & Sound collection.  A digitized collection of these films dating from 1912 on called Wellcome Film in particular is a fantastic resource in the history of public health and medical training during the 20th century and makes its A/V material freely available to researchers for download as part of the Internet Archive, (they have a YouTube channel as well).

Check out the Wellcome’s film of the month for February, a 1954 short technical film entitled “Relief of Pain in Childbirth.”