Library/Archive

Upon his death, Sir Henry Wellcome provided for The Wellcome Trust to maintain support for research in the history of medicine. Information here is largely related to the Wellcome Trust's mission of providing funding for scholarship, and publishing treatises on the history of medicine. The site also includes extensive information on the Trust's library holdings including an on-line catalogue. Useful introductory information about a number of topics within the history of medicine, can be found in dozens of digitized versions of exhibits with a particular emphasis on British and British colonial medicine.

This site is devoted to the life and times of Dr. John Snow (1813-1858), an important figure in the history of public health, epidemiology and anesthesiology. In addition to biographical material about Snow's life and education, the site provides information about medical advances that resulted from Snow's work such as the scientific understanding of cholera. The site provides, for example, full text articles written by Snow including "On the Mode of Communication of Cholera" (1855) and "On Continuous Molecular Changes" (1853). Notably, the site also provides information about the cultural context in which Snow lived, and in particular about the medical history of mid-nineteenth century London. Scholars looking for both introductory and in-depth information about mid-nineteenth century medicine and the development of the nexus between science and medicine will find this a useful site.

This website includes some pages of potential interest to educators and researchers. A collection of syllabi for classes held at the Institute are available, as are links to the Bulletin of the History of Medicine, which can be accessed online, and the archives of Johns Hopkins Hospital, the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, the Johns Hopkins University School of Nursing, and the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health.

The History & Special Collections division of UCLA's Louise M. Darling Biomedical Library uses this site to distribute information about library projects, collections, and resources. The site offers several online exhibits on topics including medicinal spices, bloodletting, Charles Darwin, and others. The Library houses many special collections, and the contents of these are described in some detail, but they are not searchable. The site also provides links to other online resources such as the National Library of Medicine and the Surgeon-General's Office's online catalogs.

The one-page site acts as a resource of links related to civil war medicine. There is no text or unique information provided by this site, but the page can act as a good hub for exploring other Civil War sites. Some of the links access primary source information that can be rare and interesting.

The United States National Library of Medicine is located in Bethesda at the headquarters of the National Institutes of Health. This site lists about 20 exhibits, past and present, that have been displayed at the library and/or have online components. Many of these exhibits are outstanding, providing both scholars in the history of medicine and the general public interested in medical history with an array of images and texts relating to topics such as the study of stress, medieval Islamic medical books, and Frankenstein. The site also has links to other sites on the history of medicine at the NIH, and a list of public (offline) seminars in the history of medicine.

This excellent, comprehensive site examines the life and work of Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), as well as Renaissance science. The site has scores of images from Galileo's notebooks and pictures of his scientific instruments, and there are long notes about important related scientists such as Copernicus and Kepler, with illustrations of their theories. In addition to the scientific materials, there are short essays introducing members of Galileo's family, his patrons, associated institutions and universities, as well as more general historical context (e.g., the Inquisition). Bibliographies accompany the essays, and often a photograph or two of portraits, illustrations or manuscript pages. A portrait gallery contains about 30 other images of the key figures discussed on the site. An extensive timeline of Galileo's life, a searchable database of information on him and his world, an excellent glossary, and three maps of Europe, Italy and Florence round out the site.

This is an in-depth site with excerpts and full text works in the history of chemistry, including works by Francis Bacon, Niels Bohr, Robert Boyle, John Dalton, Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit, Michael Faraday, Antoine Lavoisier, Dmitrii Mendeleev, Louis Pasteur, Joseph Priestley, and Ernest Rutherford among many others. Also included are links to brief biographies of many key chemists. The site has a search engine, it also allows for easy navigation alphabetically or by subject matter within chemistry (i.e. biochemistry). The site also includes a glossary of chemical terms, a calendar of important events in the history of chemistry and links to related pages.

This is the home page for Oxford University's Museum of the History of Science. An overview provides a sense of the museum's collection, and a paragraph describes its history (and the history of the building it is housed in) since 1683. There are seven excellent online exhibits with numerous graphics and photographs, including pieces on the history of photography, mathematics and astronomy. All are composed for a lay audience. For researchers, a remarkable searchable database of over 13,000 objects allows visitors to find and view artifacts in the museum's collection. These objects span the entire history of science and technology, and many of them are extremely rare. Another section of the site features some of the best portraits, instruments and illustrations in the archive.