Looking to find older books and articles that the Health Sciences Library already doesn’t have? Or searching for a book or article we do have but that is located at our offsite shelving facility – but you need to see it immediately? The Medical Heritage Library (MHL) may be the solution.

Founded in 2010 by a consortium of leading U.S. medical libraries to digitize books and journals relating to the history of the health sciences, the MHL currently provides access to almost 300,000 items, including books, journals, manuscripts, movies/videos, and audio files. Beginning in 2015 it has also included works digitized by the UK Medical Heritage Library, a similar consortium in Great Britain. Content in the collection dates from the 11th century to the 21st century, although the bulk of the items are from the period 1750-1920. The materials in the MHL are open to all: you don’t need to be affiliated with an academic institution, nor are there any paywalls.

The MHL has completed two projects that may be of particular interest to CUIMC faculty, students, and staff. The Historical American Medical Journals project digitized over 3,000 volumes (more than 1.7 million pages) from medical journals, most published between 1797 and 1923. These volumes comprise 336 journal titles, of which many are complete or nearly complete runs. 

A similar project is the State Medical Society Journals, which provides digital access to 97 state medical society journals – comprising over 2.7 million pages in over 3,800 volumes. The bulk of these journals date from 1900-2000, although a few titles ho back to as early as the 19th century. These state medical society journals document the transformation of American medicine in the twentieth century at both the local and national level.

Another exciting resource available from the MHL is its Flickr stream, comprising over 3.6 million images extracted from its digitized content; many of these images are in the public domain, so available for unrestricted use and reuse.

The MHL offers a variety of download options for users, including PDF, Kindle, and Torrent. You can search within individual items or search the entire collection using its full-search tool. Try it soon!