News from the NLM History of Medicine Division
Greetings from the National Library of Medicine History of Medicine Division where we have the following news to share:
* Reminder! Applications to NLM’s Michael E. DeBakey Fellowship in the History of Medicine for 2021 are due September 25, 2020. Learn more.
* NLM Reading Rooms remain closed to the public until further notice in continued accordance with recommendations from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and to promote social distancing. During this period, NLM online resources remain available, including NLM Digital Collections and PubMed Central. NLM continues to provide interlibrary loan (ILL) services from electronically available resources. For the latest NLM ILL service information check here. For the latest NLM Reading Room information check here.
* Washington Post features NLM History Talk by the University of Rochester’s Ted Brown, The World Health Organization’s Alma-Ata Declaration of 1978: What Was It Then, Where Is It Now?>, and spotlight on related WHO images in NLM Digital Collections>.
* “Viral Networks has many useful keys to make sense of data in the history of medicine, thus hopefully enabling further collaborations between medical and digital humanists.” So writes Radu Suciu of the University of Geneva in his review of Viral Networks: Connecting Digital Humanities and Medical History (E. Thomas Ewing and Katherine Randall, eds.), published in the spring 2020 issue of the Bulletin of the History of Medicine. This book is the outcome of Viral Networks: An Advanced Workshop in Digital Humanities and Medical History, January 2018, hosted by NLM/HMD, supported by the Office of Digital Humanities of the National Endowment for the Humanities, and organized by Virginia Tech.
* The remaining four NLM History Talks in the 2020 series have been rescheduled and will take place virtually:
* September 9, 2020 at 2pm ET: Sara Farhan, PhD, 2019 NLM Michael E. DeBakey Fellow in the History of Medicine, and Assistant Professor of History, Department of International Studies, American University of Sharjah, offering the 4th Annual Michael E. DeBakey Lecture in the History of Medicine on DeBakey in Baghdad and Beirut: The Internationalization of Surgical Education, 1945-1970.
* September 24, 2020 at 2pm ET<>: Naa Oyo A. Kwate, PhD, Associate Professor of Africana Studies and Associate Professor of Human Ecology, Rutgers University, and recipient of a 2018 NLM G13 Award for Scholarly Works in Biomedicine and Health for Race and the Transformation of the Food Environment: Fast food, African Americans, and the Color Line, 1955-1995. Dr. Kwate will offer the 11th Annual James H. Cassedy Lecture in the History of Medicine, speaking on “Savages cry easily and are afraid of the dark”: What It Means to Talk about Race and African American Health.
* October 15, 2020 at 2pm ET: Cynthia Connelly, RN, FAAN, Professor of Nursing, Rosemarie B. Greco Endowed Term Chair in Advocacy, and Associate Director, Barbara Bates Center for the Study of the History of Nursing, University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing, speaking on New Drugs, Old Problems: The Sulfonamide Revolution and Children’s Health Care Delivery in the United States, 1933-1949.
* December 3, 2020 at 2pmT<>: Ashley Bowen, PhD, Editor, Perspectives on History, American Historical Association, speaking on Rise, Serve, Lead…and Publish: Including Women Physicians’ Writings in Rise, Serve, Lead: America’s Women Physicians.
All are warmly welcome! Mark your calendars, participate in the Q&As, look for speaker interviews on our popular blog Circulating Now, and watch archived livestreams of previous talks in the NIH Videocast archive of History of Medicine programs, including the research symposium Reporting, Recording, and Remembering the 1918 Influenza Epidemic held in cooperation with Virginia Tech as part of the ongoing NLM/National Endowment for the Humanities partnership to collaborate on research, education and career initiatives.
* The NLM Web Collecting and Archiving Working Group continues to identify and select web and social media content documenting the Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak as part of NLM’s Global Health Events web archive collection. Now including 2,500+ URLs (450+ gigabytes), the collection includes federal, state, and local government COVID-19 pages, websites of disaster relief agencies and NGOs, and content documenting life in quarantine, prevention measures, the experiences of healthcare workers, patients, and more. The group is actively reviewing recommended content for inclusion in the archive (3,800+ URLs to date), scoping and running crawls of content using Archive-It and Conifer (formerly Webrecorder), reviewing archived sites for quality, and adding metadata. The group also continues to engage with other cultural heritage organizations archiving the history of COVID-19, including the groups being convened regularly by the leadership of the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, and by federal agencies who are coordinating their collecting initiatives. Moreover, the group continues to engage with the Society of American Archivist Web Archiving Roundtable, the Archive-It community, and the National Digital Stewardship Alliance. Moreover, and the Documenting the Now project. Nominations for content to include in NLM’s Global Health Events collection remain welcome via nlmwebcollecting@nlm.nih.gov. NLM also continues to participate as an institutional contributor to a broader International Internet Preservation Consortium (IIPC) Novel Coronavirus outbreak web archive collection. IIPC registered their Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) collection in the World Pandemic Research Network, here https://wprn.org/item/444
* Have you completed historical research in NLM’s collections? Would you like to share it freely with a wide audience? We warmly invite you to be a guest author on our blog Circulating Now<>. Featured in the Washington Post, Circulating Now circulates widely, reaching more than 5,500 direct subscribers and 345,000 followers as part of the official NLM social media network. If you would like to write about your research in our collections, please send an email proposing your topic to Beth Mullen, managing editor, at elizabeth.mullen@nih.gov. If you do not already subscribe to Circulating Now, please do-just look for the “Follow us via email” box on the right-side of the homepage.