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Perspectives from the History of Medicine Division of the United States National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 May 2012

Jeffrey S. Reznick
Jeffrey S. Reznick
Affiliation:
Jeffrey Reznick, Deputy Chief, History of Medicine Division, National Library of Medicine of the National Institutes of Health, 8600 Rockville Pike, Bethesda, Maryland 20894-3819, USA. Email: [email protected]
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2011 marks the 175th anniversary of the United States National Library of Medicine (NLM) that traces its origins to 1836 and the commitment of the second US Army Surgeon General, Thomas Lawson (1789–1861), to purchase books and journals for active-duty medical officers. The occasion affords an opportunity to focus on the contributions of the NLM to the history of medicine and public health, and to look forward into the digital world of the twenty-first century as the NLM joins with like-minded institutions, scholars, educators, writers, students, and others to expand knowledge of medical and public health history for the advancement of scholarship across the disciplines and for the education of the general public. As more audiences become interested in medical and public health history, opportunities abound to broaden and deepen understanding of the past, present, and future of medicine and public health in order to help refine critical thinking about medicine and science, promote deeper understanding of medical and scientific concepts, and generally humanise medicine and public health by revealing the implications of disease and healthcare for individuals and communities in the United States and around the world.

Keywords

US National Library of Medicine (NLM)IndexCatDirectory of History of Medicine CollectionsImagesPubMed CentralDigital CollectionsExhibition ProgrammeTurning the PagesProfiles in ScienceMedical Heritage Library
Type
Articles
Information
Medical History , Volume 55 , Issue 3 , July 2011 , pp. 413 - 418
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2011. Published by Cambridge University Press

References

1 Wyndham D. Miles, A History of the National Library of Medicine: The Nation’s Treasury of Medical Knowledge (Bethesda, MD: National Library of Medicine, 1982).

2 This essay is based on the author’s presentation at ‘The Future of Medical History’ conference and articulates with others included in this special issue of Medical History and with Robert Peckham, ‘The History of Medicine: Challenges and Futures’, Perspectives on History: The Newsmagazine of the American Historical Association, 48, 8 (2010), 45–7.

3 Martha Fishel and Carol Myers, ‘The PubMed Central Archive and the Back Issue Scanning Project’, Journal of Interlibrary Loan, Document Delivery, and Electronic Reserve, 17, 3 (2007), 109–16. See also Robert Kiley, Martha Fishel and Carol Myers, ‘Biomedical Journal: The First 100 Years Online’, The Biochemist, 28, 1 (2006), 46–8.

4 A listing by date of all NLM/HMD online exhibitions and digital projects may be found at <http://www.nlm.nih.gov/projects/bydate.html>.

5 L. Johnson, R. Smith, H. Willis, A. Levine and K. Haywood, The 2011 Horizon Report (Austin, TX: New Media Consortium, 2011), available at <http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/HR2011.pdf>, accessed 28 March 2011.

6 The Medical Heritage Library is funded by a $1.5 million award from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to the Open Knowledge Commons, a non-profit organisation dedicated to building a universal digital library for democratic access to information. Project partners include the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University, the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University and the New York Public Library.

7 Complete visitor and research information is available at <http://www.nlm.nih.gov/about/visitor.html>, and the NLM/HMD staff directory may be found at <http://www.nlm.nih.gov/hmd/about/hmdstaff.html>.