With this rather remarkable collection, the dedicated staff members at Harvard University Library's Open Collections Program have brought together Philadelphia's yellow fever epidemic of 1793, London's Great Plague of 1665, and six other notable epidemics from world history. The collection provides general background information on diseases and epidemics worldwide, and as previously suggested, is...

Michelle Ziegler, the author of Contagions, is a biologist who specializes in biosecurity and public health. On this blog, Ziegler writes about a number of illnesses - including Influenza, Cholera, Malaria, and the Plague - from both a historical and biological perspective. The Plague section is especially extensive, offering detailed examinations of the characteristics of various plague...

The collections at the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale are rather extensive, and they have recently made a selection of their holdings available online for general consideration. This particular website includes three digital collections, including the Peter Parker Collection, a collection of portrait engravings and a biography of Harvey Cushing, a noted doctor and medical...

Originally developed at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland, while organizing a medicine and food virtual exhibition, WUD is "a customised search engine and online curation tool" that allows searching across two major collections of digitized cultural heritage materials: Europeana and the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA). WUD is available both as an app and in a desktop version. WUD is...

The Wellcome Collection, a free museum in London, "explores the connections between medicine, life, and art in the past, present and future." This site brings the curiosities and complexities of the Wellcome to life for web users. Readers may like to begin by selecting the Mindcraft exhibit, where they will explore "a century of madness, murder and mental healing" centered on the influence of...

The National Library of Medicine's History of Medicine site has plumbed the various corners of American medicine for years, and this latest offering takes a look at the history of early American psychiatry through primary documents including photographs, biographies, and other items. The sections offered on the site cover early psychiatric hospitals and asylums, 19th century psychiatrists of note,...

For centuries, artists and physicians have rendered the human body and its anatomy in a myriad of ways, and with the invention of the printing press in the 15th century, the number of anatomical drawings and their like multiplied. Drawing on the collections contained within the National Library of Medicine, this revealing digital exhibit explores some of the ways in which human anatomy has been...

The California Digital Library has been working on bringing a wide array of primary and secondary materials online over the past few years, and this particular digital endeavor is one that will delight both academics and those who are just plain curious about everything from the influence of Elvis Presley on Mexican popular music to the ceremonial costumes of the Pueblo Indians. All told, the...

The relationship between faith and healing has engaged the minds of scholars, artists, and theologians for centuries. One physical manifestation of this area of human inquiry and concern has been the ex-voto, which is a devotional painting that gives thanks to a saint or deity for a miraculous healing or a blessing. This website was designed to accompany an exhibition at the National Library of...

What can we learn from studying DNA and beer? This is just the type of query that inspires the people at the U.S. National Library of Medicine. This online exhibit is meant to accompany a traveling exhibition and is full of information about key technological innovations that have involved the marriage between medical scholars and industrial professionals. Browsing the Learn More area, visitors...