History of Medicine

With thousands of interesting and intriguing objects you're bound to find something to excite, entertain and educate. Focused on modern history but extends back into late Medieval.

The Cushing/Whitney Medical Digital Library is a growing collection of digitized resources made available on the Web for scholarship. Predominately from the 19th and 20th centuries with an emphasis on the US. Documents include posters, postcards, portraits, and other images and documents. Topics include Advertising, Pathology, the Civil War, Bookplates, Nursing, and more.

The Library's digital collections cover a wide variety of topics, including asylums, food, sex and sexual health, genetics, public health and war.
Published books, pamphlets, archives, posters, photographs, and film and sound recordings are completely free to view.

The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) is an independent global health research center at the University of Washington. The Global Health Data Exchange (GHDx) is a data catalog and is keyword searchable. Provides country profiles. Focus on 2000s with some sets extending back to the 1980s.

Numerous fact sheets on communicable and non-communicable diseases on a world basis. Mapping feature.

US data from the 1970s to the present including information on medicine and health.

HIV data includes a Report on the Global AIDS Epidemic, updates, methodological information, country monitoring systems, resource tracking, and an interactive map features

The 20 statistical tables in this annex provide an overview of key aspects of human development. The first six tables contain the family of composite human development indices and their components estimated by the Human Development Report Office (HDRO). The sixth table is produced in partnership with the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI). Remaining tables present a broader set of indicators related to human development. The five dashboards use colour coding to visualise partial groupings of countries according to performance on each indicator.

Data collected from around the world on multiple topics associated with health. Some data sets reach from 1960 to the present.

Large collection of medical and pharmaceutical journals. Book collection extends into the 19th century.

Read and search the full texts of more than 9,000 of Charles Darwin’s letters, and find information on 6,000 more. Discover complete transcripts of all known letters Darwin wrote and received up to the year 1873. [University of Cambridge]

Selected items featuring the work of Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-1913), British biologist, anthropologist, geographer, environmentalist, and human rights advocate. The man who, independently of Darwin, arrived to the same conclusion on natural selection. In 1858 he corresponded with Darwin about his theory, prompting Darwin to finally publish the famous work, On the Origin of Species, in 1859.

More than 5500 Medical Officer of Health (MOH) reports from the Greater London area. Find out more about the reports: why they were written; what can be found in them; and who was responsible for their creation.

This collection focused on 15 reports about public health in US history from the late 19th through the 20th centuries.

Over 70,000 digitized images of historical significance from the archives of the National Library of Medicine (NLM)

A selection of curated online exhibits on the history of medicine hosted at the University of Virginia. Focus on 19th and 20th century US medicine. Some inclusion of ancient Roman as well as modern British and French voices.

The archive of the Eugenics Society provides a unique perspective on changing social attitudes in Britain towards birth and breeding during the 20th century.