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Sources on past epidemics

22. April 2020 | HBZ | Keine Kommentare |

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There is an increasing demand on digitized images and documents on the history of medicine.

The Wellcome Library in London holds one of the largest collections on medical history worldwide. A large amount of books, manuscripts, images, historical films and audio files have already been digitized and are available free of charge in the Wellcome Digital Collections.

Contribution on influenza in Riga; local report on the global influenza pandemic of 1889-1895

The Wellcome Image Collection in particular offers historical images in excellent quality, most of which may be reused freely.

“Bring out your dead”. coloured wood engraving of 1665, showing a street in London during the great plague, with a death cart and mourners.

Of course, you can also find numerous digitized documents and images from libraries and digital collections via the Rechercheportal.

Dissertation on the smallpox epidemic in Zurich 1870-1872, digitized by the Bayrische Staatsbibliothek, found via Rechercheportal
German translation of Samuel Auguste Tissot’s description of an epidemic in Lausanne in 1766, digitized by the ZB Zurich for e-rara

The National Library of Medicine (NLM) also offers extensive Digital Collections with a focus on American medical history.

Visual image of a Red Cross nurse, with tipps to prevent influenza, published in 1918 during the Spanish flu pandemic

The NLM has even started to collect websites and social media on the current Coronavirus Covid-19 outbreak for its Global Health Event web archive.

Local news from WJLA television website, recorded on March 30, 2020

Similar archival web content collections are available for the 2104 Ebola outbreak and the 2016 Zika Virus outbreak.

Abgelegt unter: E-Resources⋅ History of Medicine⋅ Main Library - Medicine Careum


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