Digital Library

The Cushing/Whitney Medical Digital Library is a growing collection of digital resources made available on the Web for scholarship. The Medical Digital Library Committee coordinates the library's digitization activities. Its goals include expanding access to the library's unique collections for scholarly research, and life-cycle management of digital objects. The collections are powered by Greenstone digital library software.

Medical Heritage Library Collection As part of a digitization consortium of some of the top medical libraries worldwide, a large portion of the Medical Historical Library's 19th century collection can be viewed in full-text and downloaded by readers globally.
Medical Instruments and Artifacts The Cushing/Whitney Medical Library possesses a large collection of antique medical instruments and artifacts. Images of these objects are now available for research and further identification.
The Harvey Cushing Photograph Collection The Medical Historical Library holds the largest existing collection of photographs of Harvey Cushing. The images in this digital collection, which represent only part of our holdings, span Cushing's life from his boyhood in Cleveland, Ohio, his college days at Yale, his surgical work at Johns Hopkins under William Halsted, his leadership of a surgical unit in World War I, his success in establishing neurosurgery as a medical specialty at the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital, to his final years at the Yale School of Medicine.
Books By and About Harvey Cushing We have digitized books by and about Harvey Cushing from our collection and have made them available online. These are works for which Yale owns copyright or that are in the public domain.
Harvey Cushing: A Biography, by John F. Fulton John F. Fulton’s biography of his mentor and friend, Harvey Cushing, was the first book-length biography of the great neurosurgeon and teacher and has remained the standard source on his life. When Cushing died in 1939, he left funds in his will for his wife and Fulton, his literary executor, to compile a biography if they “feel that the publication of my biography may be of interest or help to medical students.” Copiously illustrated with photographs and Cushing’s own drawings, Harvey Cushing: A Biography was published for the Historical Library in 1946 and dedicated to Cushing’s wife, Kate Crowell Cushing.
Yale School of Medicine Bicentennial Collection As part of the celebration of the Bicentennial of the Yale School of Medicine in 2010, we digitized photographs of Yale medical classes, deans, departmental chairs and other faculty, departmental photographs, and buildings and other facilities. We hope these images may be incorporated into historical lectures and Yale departmental histories. This collection is a work in progress. More photographs will be added as they become available.
Historical Medical Poster Collection

The Cushing/Whitney Medical Library's newly formed collection of historical medical posters brings together various works included in gifts and bequests of Yale Medical faculty Clements C. Fry, Ira V. Hiscock, George M. Smith; the bequest of medical library founder Arnold C. Klebs; gifts of New York collector and benefactor William H. Helfand; and acquisitions through endowments.

The collection ranges from large size posters meant to be pasted on the sides of buildings and viewed from afar to small glossy placards designed for store windows.

The collection focuses primarily on public health communications, but also has examples of medical product advertising, recruiting, and aid and relief solicitations.

Digitizing and cataloging of the collection will be on-going.
Pathology Teaching Collection The illustrations in the Pathology Teaching Collection span several decades in the early to mid twentieth century, an era before photography became the widespread medium that it is today. Comprised of over 700 hand drawn pen and ink, pencil, gouache, and watercolor images created primarily by Armin B. Hemberger (1896-1974), this collection continues to serve as a valuable teaching resource at Yale. Done with superb detail, the illustrations document various pathologies—some related to WWI and WWII chemical warfare—on both a gross and a microscopic scale.
The Yale Medicine Thesis Digital Library Project Starting with the School of Medicine graduating class of 2002, the Medical Library and Office of Student Research have begun a collaboration to electronically publish the full text of student theses on the Internet as a valuable byproduct of student research efforts and original source material to researchers throughout the world.
Postcard Collection This collection of postcards from the Historical Library features medical institutions in Connecticut: general hospitals, private hospitals, psychiatric hospitals, sanatoria, and the Yale School of Medicine. Most are from the period 1900-1940.
George E. Palade. George E. Palade EM Slide Collection The images in this collection are derived from high resolution scans of glass 3.25 X 4 inch "lantern slides" that were part of a large collection of slides covering his years at the Rockefeller University and Yale University School of Medicine. These selected images were scanned by James D. Jamieson, M.D., Ph.D., a student of Palade.
Peter Parker. Peter Parker Collection One of the gems of the Historical Library is the collection of 83 mid-19th century oil paintings rendered by Western-trained artist Lam Qua of Chinese patients with tumors under the care of Yale-trained medical missionary Peter Parker.
Portrait Engravings Collection In the era before photography, portrait engravings were the only means of distributing images of famous individuals, including noted physicians and scientists. Many of these portraits were engraved from oil paintings, though some were based on sketches from life. Historians have recently begun to examine them for insights into the medical professionís self-image. The Historical Library's engraved portraits number nearly three thousand, and date from the fifteenth to the early-twentieth century.