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The various collections of the History & Special Collections Division support the study of the history of medicine and biology. Collections consist of books, journals, manuscript, prints, portraits, and medical artifacts. For further assistance in locating manuscripts, prints, portraits, or other artifacts, please inquire in the division.

Welcome to the Asclepion, a World Wide Web page devoted to the study of ancient medicine. This page was designed to be an internet source that presents the study of ancient medicine in a manner that is both accessible and useful to the general public and to students in the history of medicine courses at Indiana University Bloomington. Please feel free to browse and send comments or ask questions.

Available here are accounts of the lives and works of seventeenth and eighteenth century mathematicians (and some other scientists), adapted from A Short Account of the History of Mathematics by W. W. Rouse Ball (4th Edition, 1908).

The ordering of the mathematicians and scientists below is approximately chronological. A separate index is provided which lists these people in alphabetical order.

Although the Greeks created rational medicine, their work was not always or even fully scientific in the modern sense of the term. Like other Greek pioneers of science, the doctors were prone to think that much more could be discovered by mere reflection and argument than by practice and experiment. For in their time there was not yet a distinction between philosophy and science, including medicine. Hippocrates was the first to separate medicine from philosophy and disprove the idea that disease was a punishment for sin. Much of the traditional treatment for injuries and ailments practiced by the Greeks stemmed from folk medicine, a characteristic shared by the Greeks with other societies to this day.

"Making the Macintosh" is an online project documenting the history of the Macintosh computer. The Macintosh stands at a cusp in the history of computing and Silicon Valley: it brought together (and sometimes transformed) a number of technical and conceptual threads in computing that developed in the 1960s and 1970s, but it also was responsible for sparking new movements in computing. This project collects and publishes primary material on the Macintosh's development and early reception. It draws on the extensive holdings of the Stanford University Library's Department of Special Collections, the personal papers of engineers and technical writers involved in the Macintosh project, and interviews conducted for the project.

An exhibit of rare scientific works from the Cudahy Collection of Jesuitica.

Tobacco Control Archives' purpose is to collect, preserve, and provide access to papers, unpublished documents, and electronic resources relevant to tobacco control issues.

Much of the intellectual history of psychology as both a scientific and a clinical enterprise has involved the attempt to come to grips with these two problems of mind and body. Through this exhibit and in the discussion to follow, we will trace this history as we identify major contributions to theories of mind, body and their relationship. Starting with Descartes, whose formulation of the problem has in one way or another affected all later views, we will note the way in which 17th and 18th century ideas developed in direct response to the Cartesian challenge, and then relate 19th century mind/brain theorizing to progress in understanding the brain as the "organ of mind" and the mind as a powerful source of physical illness and cure.

With this as background, we will outline the rise of experimental psychology as it occurred at the interface between philosophical analyses of the mind/world relationship and physiological conceptions of the nervous system as a sensory-motor device mediating between the mind and the world. In this regard, we will focus not only on European but on early and often overlooked American contributions. We will conclude with a brief discussion of some of the most important influences on the thought of William James, whose Principles of Psychology (1890) gathered all of these various threads together in what is probably the greatest single work in psychology.

The Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, par une Société de Gens de lettres was published under the direction of Diderot, with 17 volumes of text and 11 volumes of plates between 1751 and 1772. Contributors included the most prominent philosophes: Voltaire, Rousseau, d’Alembert, Marmontel, d’Holbach and Turgot, to name only a few. These great minds (and some lesser ones) collaborated in the goal of assembling and disseminating in clear, accessible prose the fruits of accumulated knowledge and learning. Containing 72,000 articles written by more than 140 contributors, the Encyclopédie was a massive reference work for the arts and sciences, as well as a machine de guerre which served to propagate Enlightened ideas.