The Medical Heritage Library Project
In 2010, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation awarded a grant of 1.5 million dollars to the Open Knowledge Commons as start-up funding for a large-scale effort to digitize and provide free and open access to historical medical literature. Five libraries—the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University, the Cushing/Whitney Medical Library at Yale University, the National Library of Medicine, the New York Public Library, and the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine—were chosen as the initial partners in the project to provide free, high-quality, digital surrogates of printed works selected from their collections—some 30,000 volumes in all, over 8,000 from the Countway alone—as the nucleus for what is now called the Medical Heritage Library. During the course of the first phase of the project, as titles are digitized, they are made available through the Internet Archive.
Additional medical works already available in digital form from the Lamar Soutter Library of the University of Massachusetts Medical School, the Otis Historical Archives of the National Museum of Health and Medicine, and the University of Toronto’s Gerstein Science Information Centre have also been incorporated into the Medical Heritage Library. Nearly 28,000 titles are already available, from classics of medicine dating to the early 16th century to recent student theses, along with annual reports, periodicals and serials, and pamphlets, in hundreds of subject areas relating to medicine, dentistry, and public health.
This copy of the second edition of George Cheyne’s work on disease is a rare and notable survivor of the disastrous Harvard fire of 1762. On the night of January 24th, during a storm of snow and high wind, Harvard Hall, containing the College’s books and scientific apparatus, caught fire. Over 5,000 volumes were destroyed, with only 404 surviving, the books being either on loan or recent donations not yet unpacked. Today, 67 books which survived the fire can be identified, and eight of these are in the collections of the Countway.
The Cheyne volume, along with another fire survivor, A new method of treating consumptions (1727) by Nicholas Robinson, have been recently digitized and are now available through the Medical Heritage Library project.