Medical History Archives and Databases

  • Academic Medicine – Journal of the Association of American Medical Colleges (Previous Issues): Free access is provided to issues published between 1926 and 2019.
  • American Medical Association Archives (ama.nmtvault.com): “The digital collections provide access to more than 230 titles from the AMA Archives in full text, searchable format. This digital resource offers a comprehensive overview of AMA’s history and activities, and provides a tool to trace past actions, policies, reports, speeches and more.”
  • Center for the History of Medicine at Countway Library (Digital Collections): “The Center for the History of Medicine is one of the world’s leading collections in the history of health care and medicine, attracting researchers from around the world to consult its rare books and journals, archives and manuscripts, photographs and prints, and art and artifact collections.”
  • Contagion – Historical Views of Disease and Epidemics: “Offering valuable insights to students of the history of medicine and to researchers seeking an historical context for current epidemiology, this collection contributes to our understanding of the global, social-history, and public-policy implications of disease. The collection provides general background information on diseases and epidemics worldwide, and is organized around significant “episodes,” topics, and people concerned with contagious disease.
  • Drexel University College of Medicine Legacy Center (Digital Collections): “The Legacy Center is the repository for the records and heritage of Drexel University College of Medicine and its predecessor institutions, including Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania and Hahnemann University.”
  • Medical Heritage Library (medicalheritage.org): “The Medical Heritage Library is an open-access collection of resources in the history of medicine, public health, and the health sciences, including text, audio, and video.”
  • National Library of Medicine Digital Collections (collections.nlm.nih.gov): “Digital Collections is the National Library of Medicine’s free online repository of biomedical resources including books, manuscripts, still images, videos, and maps. The content in Digital Collections is freely available worldwide and, unless otherwise indicated, in the public domain. Digital Collections provides unique access to NLM’s rich historical resources, as well as select modern resources.”
  • National Library of Medicine (History of Medicine Division): “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… spanning ten centuries, encompassing a variety of digital and physical formats, and originating from nearly every part of the globe.”
  • UTMB Moody Medical Library (Blocker History of Medicine Collections): “The Digital Collections provide an exciting opportunity for the discovery of audio and visual resources, which document the record of the University of Texas Medical Branch Galveston in addition to the evidence of developments in anatomy and surgery, anesthesiology, immunology, and psychiatry.”