History of Medicine

From the National Library of Medicine

An Interactive Annotated World Bibliography of Printed and Digital Works in the History of Medicine and the Life Sciences from Circa 2000 BCE to Circa 2020

The papers of nurse, educator, philanthropist, and lecturer Clara Barton (1821-1912) consist of 62,000 items (81,608 images), most of which were digitized from 123 reels of previously produced microfilm. Spanning the years 1805-1958, with the bulk dating from 1861 to 1912, the collection contains correspondence, diaries and journals, reports, addresses, legal and financial papers, organizational records, lectures, writings, scrapbooks, biographical material, printed matter, memorabilia, and other papers.

The Medical Heritage Library, Inc. is a collaborative digitization and discovery organization committed to providing open access to the history of medicine and health resources.

The MHL, a specialized research collection stored in the Internet Archive, currently includes nearly 60,000 digital rare books, serials, audio and video recordings, and ephemera in the history of medicine, public health, biomedical sciences, and popular medicine from the medical special collections of 22 academic, special, and public libraries.

Medicine and health archives section of the World Digital Library (WPL)

The NLM History of Medicine Division (HMD) collects, preserves, makes available, and interprets for diverse audiences one of the world’s richest collections of historical material related to health and disease.

Digital Collections is the National Library of Medicine’s free online archive of selected book, serial, archives and manuscripts, and film resources. Much of the content in Digital Collections is in the public domain and freely available worldwide.

The museum’s collections document the technologies and techniques employed to prevent, diagnose, and treat infectious disease over the past 200+ years. They shed light on the impact of infectious disease on individuals and communities, the work of medical professionals and scientists, and the role of government in public health.

A digital collection from the New York Public Library

The Science Museum Group cares for a diverse and internationally significant collection of 7.3 million items from science, technology, engineering, medicine, transport and media. On the Science Museum Group collection website, you can find material published from our object and archival collections, with over 350,000 objects and 45,000 archival documents published online.

This digital collection contains 170,000 images, from an Egyptian prescription on papyrus to contemporary micrographs. There are 100,000 images that are freely available to users under Creative Commons licensing.

A collection of AIDS-related materials from UCSF and San Francisco area community organizations.

This collection features approximately 4500 full page plates and other significant illustrations of human anatomy selected from the Jason A. Hannah and Academy of Medicine collections in the history of medicine at the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto.

Digital collections

Research portal with links to a variety of resources, including an extensive list of digital exhibits on the history of medicine and medical humanities.

About 600 advertising items and publications dating from 1850 to 1920, illustrating the rise of consumer culture and the birth of a professionalized advertising industry in the United States.

The Osler Library Prints Collection brings together a rich variety of visual documents related to the history of medicine, spanning several centuries, countries, and artistic media.