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Job Opportunity: Curator for the Visual Arts

November 9, 2022 - 10:44am by Melissa Grafe

Join the Historical Library team as our new Curator for the Visual Arts, Medical Library! The Curator for the Visual Arts, Medical Library develops, interprets, and supports a robust collection of prints, posters, drawings, photography, and other visual materials. Primary responsibilities include teaching, collection development and stewardship, and research support. Reporting to the Head of the Medical Historical Library, this position helps lead the exhibition program, which includes several physical spaces and online exhibitions. The curator will also assist in the interpretation of the Cushing Center, home of the Cushing Tumor Registry, a museum space and collection with over 10,000 glass plate negatives and other types of photography. APPLY HERE Essential Duties 1. Support Teaching and Research: The curator will foster the use of the collection by Yale faculty, students, as well as local, national, and international researchers. The curator is expected to forge strong associations with Yale faculty to encourage the use of the collections in Yale-related teaching and research. The curator will also present materials to classes and to other groups who visit the library, collaborate with colleagues to respond to general reference and instruction requests, and participate in the library’s fellowship selection committee. 2. Activate and Interpret the Collections: The curator is responsible for interpreting the holdings of the collection for both the medical community and the broader public. The curator will help lead the Library’s exhibition program; conceive and organize exhibitions; collaborate with faculty, students, and external scholars to organize programming; and write and edit various publications about the collection. The curator may be called upon to issue news releases, grant interviews, conduct tours, and make presentations. 3. Collection Development: Collection development responsibilities encompass active research and selection of materials across a broad range of visual formats, including prints, posters, drawings, photographs, and digital media; dealer and donor relations, including establishing fair price and market value, understanding the total cost of acquisition, drafting deeds of gift and purchase agreements, and keeping abreast of evolving legal and ethical considerations for provenance, international export guidelines, intellectual property rights, privacy, and respectful stewardship of cultural heritage materials. 4. Ongoing Collection Stewardship: The curator collaborates with colleagues in other units of the Library as well as with colleagues Yale’s cultural heritage institutions to ensure that the collections are discoverable, accurately and appropriately described, and well preserved. 5. Collaboration and Collegiality: The curator is expected to function in a collegial fashion as part of a larger team of curators and librarians sustaining a broad program of collection development, scholarly and educational outreach, description, digitization, preservation, and research in the humanities.  6. Service to the Department, University, and Profession: In addition to activities relating directly to Medical Historical Library, the curator participates in library projects, committees, policy decisions and strategic planning and may be assigned special projects relating to the overall needs of the library. The curator is also expected to participate actively in professional associations, foundations, and government agencies as appropriate. Required Education and Experience A masters degree and course of study in history, art history, or equivalent, and a commitment to ongoing intellectual and professional growth beyond the area of initial specialization. At least 2 years of professional experience in a related field, including but not limited to higher education, museums, foundations, or libraries. Required Skills and Abilities: The candidate should possess an understanding of the history of medicine or related fields. Superb analytical, creative, and communication skills in both writing and public speaking. This may be demonstrated through teaching, publications, exhibitions, public programming, or collaborative projects. Demonstrated track record of excellence in teaching. Exceptional classroom demeanor and a commitment to higher education and community outreach, including the ability to engage with diverse audiences (age, gender, nationality, race/ethnicity, profession, sexual orientation, etc.). Reading knowledge of at least one language beyond English. Excellent organizational, interpersonal and team collaboration skills Preferred Education, Experience and Skills: Ph.D. in a related field. Experience with exhibition planning/implementation; donor relations; commercial art trade; awareness of legal/ethical issues surrounding cultural heritage materials. Knowledge of archival theory, practice, technologies, and born digital material. Experience with collections in archives, library, museum, or related. Proficiency using discovery & documentation systems. Physical Requirements Ability to lift materials up to 40 lbs and push heavy book trucks.    

Medical Library Building Closure 11/25/20

November 19, 2020 - 5:27pm by John Gallagher

**UPDATE: The medical library will reopen on January 11, 2021.** In response to public health conditions, Yale Library will close all library buildings and spaces to library users at the end of day Tuesday, November 24. The Medical Library’s 24/7 room will remain open to users authorized to be on the medical campus. We will monitor the public health situation closely. This decision was made to protect the health and safety of students, faculty, and staff and will enable us to reduce our onsite staff substantially, while still providing critical services. Collections Contactless pickup will be moved to outside the medical library entrance. Materials may be returned at any time through the book depository next to the library entrance. Additionally, we will continue to mail books to home addresses. Remote access to our vast electronic resources is available to the Yale and YNHH community regardless of your location. Faculty and students needing access to special collections materials should email historical.library@yale.edu. We will continue to process interlibrary loan and scanning requests for articles and chapters. Submit a request   Support & Resources Please email your librarian for support or to schedule a consultation by phone or Zoom.  For general questions, contact AskYaleMedicalLibrary@yale.edu. Visit this page for information about online classes, tutorials, and research guides.   We are committed to doing everything we can to support you remotely during this challenging time. Please reach out with your questions.  

New Books Added in March

March 17, 2024 - 5:03pm by Kyra Walker

The New Books section consists of items recently added to our collection. Our newly created Graphic Medicine collection features graphic novels about various healthcare subjects. Both collections can be found on the main floor of the library across from the circulation desk. Click the links below to access the full collection and to request items using Quicksearch:  Recently Added Items Graphic Medicine Collection .embed-container { position: relative; padding-bottom: 56.56%; height: 0; overflow: hidden; max-width: 100%; } .embed-container iframe, .embed-container object, .embed-container embed { position: absolute; top: 0; left: 0; width: 100%; height: 100%; }    

"Data as Art" Exhibition: Call for Submissions

March 14, 2024 - 2:18pm by Sofia Matos daSilva Fertuzinhos

Data as Art" Exhibition: Call for Submissions     “Every story is complicated until it finds the right storyteller.” – Anonymous   As we celebrate 10 years of the Bioinformatics Support Hub at the Cushing/Whitney Medical Library, we invite you to share your visual responses to the prompt “Data as Art." Though data representations hold specific scientific meaning, some datasets and data visualizations also possess inherent artistic sensibility on their own. Cultivating an appreciation for data as art can reframe our conception of data as orderly, objective evidence into iterative, multifaceted artifacts produced in the non-linear search for new knowledge. We invite you to submit "data as art" in conversation with this idea. All selected entries will be on display in the rotunda of the Cushing/Whitney Medical Library from late August 2024 to January 2025. Inclusion Criteria:  Quantitative Data Representation. Your work should visually depict quantitative data.  Digital Works. We're seeking digital files   Yale affiliates Exclusion Criteria:  Human Identified Data. Please refrain from using identifiable human data.  Raw Data. Submit a representation of data (visualizations and aggregations of the data), not the raw data (e.g. data files such as .fastq, scripts, etc).  Three-Dimensional Objects. We're focusing on bi-dimensional representations for this call.  Submission Details:   Digital file: .pdf, .jpeg, .tiff  Image resolution: at least 300 DPI  Image size: at least 1 MB, max 1GB  Image description: Include a title and a brief explanation of the data and the methodology used.  Limit 3 submissions per person  Please acknowledge the use of artificial intelligence and what program  Deadline:  Please submit your entry by April 30, 2024 More Information: Data as art refers to representations of data (visualizations and aggregations of the data) with an aesthetic. Any data representation -- as long as it does not contain personally identifying information -- is eligible if the submitter believes the work is artistic or conveys meaning beyond the information encoded in the data itself. Consider submitting a data representation born from a mistake but that led to something aesthetically beautiful.  If you're passionate about merging science and art, this call is for you! Let's transform data into art and showcase the beauty beyond the numbers together.  Questions: Please contact bioinfo.cwml@yale.edu

Medical Photographic History Fellowship Accepting Applications

March 7, 2024 - 3:08pm by Melissa Grafe

The Medical Historical Library in the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library is welcoming applications for a fellowship for the study of medical photographic history. The Stanley B. Burns M.D. Fellowship for the Study of Medical Photographic History supports the study of the history of medical photography at Yale, maximizing the research potential of the Stanley B. Burns, MD, Historic Medical Photography Collection. We welcome applications from all interested researchers, regardless of their institutional association, race, cultural background, ability, sexual orientation, gender, or socioeconomic status. Applications from scholars utilizing traditional methods of archival and bibliographic research are encouraged as are applications from individuals who wish to pursue creative, interdisciplinary, and non-traditional approaches to conducting research using the Stanley B. Burns, MD, Historic Medical Photography Collection and related visual collections at the Medical Historical Library. In any given year the award is up to $2,000 for one week of research. Funds may be used for transportation, housing, food, and photographic reproductions. The award is currently limited to residents of the United States and Canada. A complete fellowship application includes: A research proposal (1,200 words max) that outlines: Significance of the proposed collections research to your larger project Value of your project to your field  Feasibility of completing the scope of research proposed within the fellowship period Please note: If you anticipate consulting other Medical Historical Library materials beyond the Burns collection, please indicate those clearly in your application.  Budget  Curriculum vitae Two letters of recommendation  Please apply through this link. The deadline for applications is midnight, April 28th, 2024.

Research Travel Grant Now Accepting Applications

March 7, 2024 - 2:59pm by Melissa Grafe

The Medical Historical Library of the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library is pleased to announce its fifteenth annual Research Travel award for use of the Historical Library. The deadline is April 28th, 2024. The Ferenc Gyorgyey/Stanley Simbonis YSM’57 Research Travel Grant is available to historians, medical practitioners, and other researchers outside of Yale who wish to use the Historical collections of the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library. In any given year the award is up to $2,000 for one week of research.  Funds may be used for transportation, housing, food, and photographic reproductions. The award is limited to residents of the United States and Canada.  The award honors Ferenc A. Gyorgyey, former Historical Librarian, and Stanley Simbonis, M.D, a 1953 graduate of Yale College and a 1957 graduate of Yale School of Medicine, who graciously gifted an endowed fund in support of the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library. For application requirements and the link to submit application materials, please refer to our fellowship page. View research from past recipients: Michael Ortiz (2023) Tina Wei (2023) Jonathan Jones (2018) Jaipreet Virdi (2018) Thomas Ewing (2017) Erin Travers (2016)

Free Trials - Scopus AI, Neurosurgical Atlas, Sage Business Cases

February 23, 2024 - 1:21pm by Elizabeth Jenkins

The Cushing/Whiney Medical Library and Yale Library have begun a free trials of the following resources. Please let us know what you think of these resources here: Trial Feedback Form. Did you know you can suggest resource trials? Simply fill out this form.  Neurosurgical Atlas Trial through March 23, 2024 Interactive neuroanatomy tools Original illustrations 3D models Case series Grand round lectures Videos of neurosurgical techniques and procedures Scopus AI Trial through March 29, 2024 Scopus AI is a search tool within the Scopus database. Powered by generative AI, this tool allows for natural language searching and quickly synthesizes the abstracts of relevant articles to produce a research summary with references. More information about the Scopus AI can be found here.   Sage Business Cases Trial through March 16, 2024 This resource provides access to 6,150 interdisciplinary cases from 120 countries, on topics related to entrepreneurship, accounting, healthcare management, leadership, and social enterprise.   

Mindscapes: Stories of Mental Health through Yale Collections

February 20, 2024 - 11:03am by Melissa Grafe

On view in the hallway and rotunda from February 19th – August 16th, 2024 Curated by Melissa Grafe, Ph.D. and Laura Phillips, Ph.D. Mindscapes tells a story about mental health—its visibility, classification, and treatment—through the archival and visual art collections of the Medical Historical Library. Instead of a sweeping grand narrative of medical progress, Mindscapes presents a constellation of short stories that illuminate shifting cultural attitudes and scientific approaches to mental health over time. At stake in these stories are challenging, contested topics around mental health that intersect with Yale School of Medicine’s own histories. Two additional cases in the Historical Library, curated by Erin Sommers (History of Science, Medicine and Public Health Major, class of 2025) and Krupa Hegde (History of Science, Medicine and Public Health Major, class of 2025) as part of Marco Ramos’s fall 2023 course, Race and Mental Health in New Haven, discuss the Connecticut Mental Health Center’s connections to community and care. All items on display are from scrapbooks in the newly cataloged Connecticut Mental Health Center records, part of the Manuscripts and Archives Repository.   This exhibition is part of a multi-institutional effort to highlight mental health through collections and communities. It stands in dialogue with the exhibition, Munch and Kirchner: Anxiety and Expression at the Yale University Art Gallery (February 16  –  June 23, 2024), and the Yale School of Medicine (YSM) community art exhibition, Mindful: Exploring Mental Health Through Art (foyer of the Medical Library, February 21st – August 2024), which is sponsored by the YSM Program for Art in Public Spaces. Image: Depression, 1935, lithograph  Blanche Mary Grambs, also “Miller Grambs” (1916–2010), printed by George C. Miller (1894–1965)

Stata MP Now Available

January 16, 2024 - 1:20pm by Dana Haugh

Stata MP is now available for all faculty, staff, and students. Stata is a statistical software package that is widely used across many disciplines for data analysis. To download Stata MP, sign in to the Yale Software Library and select Yale Licensed Software from the top navigation. Next, choose StataCorp. Anyone currently using the SE or BE edition of Stata can upgrade to MP. The campus-wide license also includes other editions, such as SE or BE, but MP is the fastest and can analyze much larger datasets.   Upcoming Stata workshops: First Steps with Stata - January 26, 1:30-3:30 pm Second Steps with Stata – February 2, 1:30 – 3:30 pm For any questions, please direct them to dissc@yale.edu.    

Work in Medicine—as Context, Disease, and Cure

January 5, 2024 - 3:48pm by Melissa Grafe

Written by Jiemin Tina Wei, Ferenc Gyorgyey/Stanley Simbonis YSM’57 Research Travel Grant recipient, 2023-2024 December 29, 2023 What is the relationship between work and medicine? It may seem obvious, especially amidst this year’s wave of unionization of medical residents, that medicine is a form of work. But just as medicine can be work, work can be (and has been, in certain historical moments) medicine. My dissertation and book in progress, “Ameliorating Fatigue at Work: Workplace-Management, Mind-Body Medicine, and Self-Help for Industrial Fatigue in the U.S., 1900-1950,” investigates the history of attempts to ameliorate workplace fatigue in the first half of the twentieth century. It traces how scientists from industrial medicine, occupational health, physiology, ergonomics, industrial psychology, psychiatry, psychoanalysis, and economics struggled to and succeeded in making work and workers into objects of scientific study. For the scientists I study, labor dynamics gave context to their discoveries—providing the backdrop, for instance, to their gendered division of labor, as well as their differential compensation and recognition of work done by women. Focusing on the labor dynamics implicit in the production of science resonates with recent calls by scholars to study “a labor history of science.” A group of historical subjects that I study, clustered around the social networks of physician E.E. Southard, first Director of the Boston Psychopathic Hospital prior to his death in 1920, was interested in this problem in its inverse—looking not at how labor can yield insights into science, but how at how science can yield insights into labor. These psychiatrists and psychiatric social workers collected data and biological material from their mental hospital patients to study the neurological and psychopathic roots of myriad workplace dysfunction, such as refusal to work and tendency to unionize. Oriented, as many of them were, around the eugenics movement, they aimed to socially rehabilitate patients they classified variously as feebleminded, insane, nervous, and psychopathic. Refitting as many individuals as possible to productive work, they sought to resolve the growing social problem of their time, militant labor uprisings. In their medical practice, work was part of disease and cure. Through the generous support of the Ferenc Gyorgyey/Stanley Simbonis YSM’57 Research Travel Grant, my dissertation took me to the Medical Historical Library in the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University. My visit focused on the collections of the esteemed neurosurgeon Harvey Cushing, a namesake of the Library. Cushing and his colleague and assistant, pathologist Louise Eisenhardt, were collaborators of Southard and his colleague and assistant, pathologist M.M. Canavan. Due to limitations of surviving materials about Southard and Canavan, Cushing and Eisenhardt’s repositories provide a crucial point of contrast and help populate modern scholarship with details about the social-professional world of these physicians. The gems of this collection give material reality to this cohort’s medical work. Cushing, a draftsman in addition to a surgeon, littered his Harvard Medical School lecture notebooks with drawings, leaving behind a kind of illustrated textbook of early-twentieth-century medical education. See for instance, his sketches for a lecture on the kidney.­ Left: Harvey Williams Cushing Papers, Histology and Embryology, 1891-92, H.M.S., pp 13a-b. The Robert Bogdan Disability Collection also held striking visual material documenting the life of workers and patients at state mental hospitals and related institutions. Among the collection’s fifteen enormous three-ringed photo albums, Book 6 features postcards and other images from "Institutions: Insane, Feeble minded, Epileptic, Deaf, Blind, ca. 1900-1930." At the State Hospital in Gowanda, N.Y., for instance, postcards show the kitchen, laundry, operating room, superintendent’s residence, staff house, and nurses house.   Above: Assorted photos from State Hospital, Gowanda, N.Y. From the Bogdan Disability Collection, Book 6. Other photos showed “Breaking of Ground for Assembly Building” at the New Jersey State Village for Epileptics at Skillman; Field Day at State Hospital in Willard, NY; and dining rooms in the Massachusetts Hospital in Palmer, MA, and at the State Hospital in North Warren, PA. Above: Assorted photos from the Bogdan Disability Collection, Book 6. Numerous images showed nurses in posed group photos and while recreating, such as at the Asylum in Middletown, NY, and the State Hospital in Gowanda, NY. Above: Front and back of postcard, Middletown, NY, Asylum Above: Assorted photos from the Bogdan Disability Collection, Book 6. The postcards even featured several institutions dedicated to vocational rehabilitation in the U.S. and abroad, such as the State Industrial School for Girls in Mitchellville, IA. These photos, one of which appears to be taken by “Richard the Druggist,” shows these so-called troubled girls gathering outdoors and in their orchestra. In collections such as these, the rich visual and print material at the Medical Historical Library captures the labor required to carry out medical research and care, as well as the correspondence networks of medical professionals using medicine to respond to crises of labor. Left: Jiemin Tina Wei is a PhD candidate in Harvard University’s Department of the History of Science. Her dissertation and book in progress, “Ameliorating Fatigue at Work: Workplace-Management, Mind-Body Medicine, and Self-Help for Industrial Fatigue in the U.S., 1900-1950,” investigates the history of attempts to ameliorate workplace fatigue in the first half of the twentieth century. This research has been generously supported by the Ferenc Gyorgyey/Stanley Simbonis YSM’57 Research Travel Grant, and by the wonderful staff at the Medical Historical Library in the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University, especially Melissa Grafe, Chris Zollo, Kathi Isham, and Christine Bailey.  
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