History Research Guide

Key printed primary and secondary sources for the history of Britain and Ireland, with a primary focus on the period between 1300 and 1800.

Books and pamphlets from 10 research libraries in the UK, focused on the 19th and 20th century history of medicine and related disciplines.

These digital collections cover a wide variety of topics, including asylums, food, sex and sexual health, genetics, public health and war.

The Smithsonian Institution began to collect objects related to health and medicine in 1881. It first obtained examples of patent medicines in 1930, acquiring packages of Haarlem Oil (or Dutch Drops), Dr. John Hooper’s Female Pills, and Roche’s Herbal Embrocation. Since then the Smithsonian’s collection of patent medicines has expanded to over 4,000 products, dating from the 19th century to the present day.

These materials include digitized copies of books, serials, pamphlets, incunabula, and manuscripts—a total of more than 500,000 pages—many of which contain visual materials, such as plates, engravings, maps, charts, broadsides, and other illustrations. The collection also includes two unique sets of visual materials from the Center for the History of Medicine at Harvard’s Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine.

Digital project designed to give Internet users access to high quality images from important anatomical atlases in the National Library of Medicine's collection. The project offers selected images from NLM's atlas collection, not the entire books, with an emphasis on images and not texts. Atlases and images are selected primarily for their historical and artistic significance, with priority placed upon the earliest and/or the best edition of a work in NLM's possession

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.

NLM-sponsored links to libraries with significant history of medicine collections, and other historical resources

The Consortium now indexes over 3,600 finding aids from 35 institutions

Original works demonstrating the evolution of American medicine from colonial frontier outposts of the 17th century to research hospitals of the 20th century. 1610-1920.

Over 2,500 visual documents related to the history of medicine that spans several centuries, countries, and artistic media.