History of Medicine Collections: Digital Collections and Online Resources

This collection explores the complex relationships between modern medicine and modern advertising. Most images come from the "Competitive Advertisements Collection" (Pre-1955 files) within the J. Walter Thompson Company Archives.

Exhibit highlighting anatomical flap books from the History of Medicine Collections at Duke

Duke's Medical Center Library & Archives hosts Historical Images in Medicine. This digitized collection encompass over 3,000 photographs, illustrations, engravings, and bookplates from Duke's History of Medicine Collections.

The College of Physicians of Philadelphia Digital Library is a searchable image database and exhibition platform dedicated to celebrating and communicating the history of medicine

The Medical Heritage Library (MHL), a digital curation collaborative among some of the world’s leading medical libraries, promotes free and open access to quality historical resources in medicine.

Digital Collections provides access to the National Library of Medicine's distinctive digital content in the areas of biomedicine, health care and the history of medicine.

A selective collection of over 200 websites archived by the National Library of Medicine beginning in 2014 related to global health events, including the 2014 and 2016 Ebola outbreaks, Zika virus disease in 2015-2016, and the Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak.

Images from the History of Medicine (IHM) in NLM Digital Collections provides online access to images from the historical collections of the U.S. National Library of Medicine. IHM includes image files of a wide variety of visual media including fine art, photographs, engravings, and posters that illustrate the social and historical aspects of medicine dating from the 15th to 21st century.

This collection brings together a rich variety of visual documents related to the history of medicine, spanning several centuries, countries, and artistic media. Ranging from the seventeenth to the twentieth century, the collection consists predominantly of prints, though it also includes some photographs, drawings, posters, and cartoons.

Beginning with the difficult to find and unique items held only at UNC's HSL, these digitized collections have grown to include a variety of North Carolina resources, both historical and cutting edge, as well as related global digital resources in the health sciences.

Digital collections cover a wide variety of topics, and are particularly strong in the areas of mental health, sex and sexual health, genetics, public health, and 19th-century books.