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Celebrate Pride Month!

June 3, 2019 - 2:03pm by Dana Haugh

June is Pride Month and this year marks the 50th anniversary of the uprising at Stonewall in 1969. Additionally, the WorldPride celebration will take place in the United States for the first time in its history. Learn about the history of Pride Month and view LGBTQI+ resources at Yale below: Yale Resources LGBTQI+ Health Research Guide YSM Dean's Advisory Council on LGBTQI+ Issues Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies Yale LGBTQ Center Yale LGBTQ Affinity Group Additional Links  Stonewall Riots (History) 2019 WorldPride NYC Human Rights Campaign: "On the 50th Anniversary of Stonewall, HRC Celebrates Half a Century of Pride" (5/31/19) Library of Congress Collections & Resources

Save the Date: Library Renovation Unveiling & Celebration

May 28, 2019 - 10:24am by Dana Haugh

Please join us for food and drinks on Thursday, June 20th from 3:00 – 5:00 PM to celebrate the unveiling of the Cushing/Whitney Medical Library's newly renovated spaces. Among other uses, these spaces will be the new home for many classes which comprise the first 18 months of the YSM curriculum. Explore the new classrooms, experience the new Information Commons, and discover all the library has to offer!  In the meantime, learn about the space and enjoy some recent behind-the-scenes pictures below! FAQ Who can use the space? Anyone! The library is open to all who visit. If you are coming from outside Yale or YNHH, you can sign in at the front desk in the School of Medicine. For borrowing and access privileges, please visit this page. Can I reserve a classroom? Anyone with a Yale NetID may reserve a classroom. If you are a member of YNHH, please see the circulation or information desk for help reserving a classroom. How do I get there? The Medical Library is located just off the central rotunda in the Yale University School of Medicine Building, 333 Cedar Street, New Haven, CT 06510 (see Google map). For more detailed directions, including where to park, please visit this page. Where are the computers? The library has 24 computer workstations located in the Information Commons (1 floor down from the main level) and 6 bring-your-own-device stations equipped with monitors. Additionally, there are 4 computer workstations located in the library lobby. When is the library open? The library is open 7 days a week. For a full list of library hours, including exceptions, please visit this page. The 24/7 computer & study space is always open and accessible through an after-hours entrance when the library is closed. Why did you renovate this space? There is a national trend of libraries reimagining and repurposing how their space is used. With the shift to electronic publishing, online journals and digital books, libraries no longer need as much shelving stacks for bound journals. This changed landscape facilitated the opportunity to enhance existing library spaces, and created new possibilities for medical education. Placing classroom space within the library will enhance learning opportunities, and connect even more people with the library’s valuable human resources and collections. Moreover, the planned changes provide flexible spaces that can be used for a range of purposes by a variety of users and groups. Progress Pictures  

Long Night Against Procrastination!

April 29, 2019 - 9:52am by Dana Haugh

The Long Night Against Procrastination is for students who want to get serious work done before finals. At this event, the library will provide a distraction-free, quiet environment for you to work... along with regular breaks for snacks!   Where: 3rd Floor Classrooms in Hope Building When: Tuesday, April 30 Time: 7 pm - midnight   ALL phones and personal communication devices (except laptops) will be kept in secure storage during the event.   

Resource Spotlight: Journal Citation Reports

April 16, 2019 - 9:49am by Caitlin Meyer

Welcome to Resource Spotlight! The Cushing/Whitney Medical Library provides access to an incredible array of databases, e-book collections, software and more. In this series of posts, we’ll be showcasing highlights from our collection. Choosing where to publish can be a difficult decision. Who writes in certain journals? Are they being read? Fortunately, Journal Citation Reports can help answer some of these questions. Published by Clarivate, the company that runs Web of Science, Journal Citation Reports (JCR) has information on more than 11,000 journals from around the world. Leveraging the depth of Web of Science’s collection, the JCR tracks which articles, and therefore journals, are being cited in new literature and distills that information into easily digestible Journal Impact Factor metrics.  Each journal in the report has a profile page that outlines its research impact metrics over time, puts the metrics into context within subject categories, and highlights top-performing articles. You can also see the geographic distribution of authors for that journal, as well as a list of organizations that have written the most content.  Since ‘good’ research impact indicators and publishing frequency vary widely by field, the “Browse by Category” function on the homepage can give you insight into what the publishing landscape looks like in a particular discipline. You can see how many journals there are in that field, how often they publish, how many articles come out per year, and the median journal impact.   Journal Citation Reports can be accessed directly or by opening up the Web of Science and selecting JCR at the top.  Feel free to contact the library with any JCR or research impact questions, and keep an eye out for our Research Impact Basics class. 

Celebrate National Public Health Week 2019

March 25, 2019 - 2:35pm by Kate Nyhan

Join Cushing/Whitney Medical Library to celebrate National Public Health Week 2019! We're hosting five hands-on workshops to improve your literature searching skills. Suggest a research question related to the themes by emailing public health librarian kate.nyhan@yale.edu. After any session, you'll be able to use special PubMed features to do fast, more effective literature searches about the topics you care about. Tuesday, April 2, 3:30pm - 4:30 pm: Literature searching for healthy communities and violence prevention: double workshop Wednesday, April 3, 8:15am - 8:45 am: Literature searching for rural health Thursday, April 4, 12:00pm - 12:30 pm: Literature searching for technology and public health Friday, April 5, 9:00am - 9:30 am: Literature searching for climate change Friday, April 5, 12:30pm - 1:00 pm: Literature searching for global health   And if you'd like to arrange a special session for your class, center, department, or student group, get in touch!  

New Resources and Classes for Spring

March 18, 2019 - 2:08pm by Caitlin Meyer

The Cushing/Whitney Medical Library is always working to build better collections and offer new and relevant educational programming. Keep reading to learn more about STAT Plus, MedOne Plastic Surgery, and a bunch of new classes you’ll be seeing on the calendar. New Resources Head to the Databases, Resources & Tools list to see the full range of materials available to you at Yale. Feel free to contact Lindsay Barnett with suggestions for new resources.  STAT Plus STAT Plus is STAT’s premium subscription service, which provides you with access to exclusive, in-depth pharma, biotech, life sciences, and policy coverage, keeping you on top of what's happening - as it happens. This includes news analyses, Capitol Hill intelligence, “cheat sheets” to get up to speed quickly, and interviews with industry leaders. MedOne Plastic Surgery MedOne Plastic Surgery offers a comprehensive portfolio of resources in aesthetic and reconstructive plastic surgery. This includes 150+ books, essential textbooks for residency programs, step-by-step instruction on core surgical techniques, training videos, board exam preparation questions, images, and more. There is also an app.  New Classes Head to the class calendar to see the full roster of available classes and register to attend. You can contact Caitlin Meyer with ideas for new classes. Introduction to Data Visualization in R with ggplot2 by Sawyer Newman This workshop will introduce the R package ggplot2 and briefly compare it to other R graphics packages. The hands-on component, which will take up the majority of the workshop, will involve reading in practice datasets, creating graphs using ggplot2 functions, and refining these visualizations. We will view dataset summaries, boxplots, barplots, histograms, and scatter plots. Introduction to Google Analytics by Dana Haugh This hands-on workshop will demonstrate how you can use Google Analytics to better understand your website users. This workshop is most appropriate for those who have the administrative rights to make backend changes to their website but have little-to-no experience using Google Analytics. This workshop will cover account setup, code snippet installation, Google Analytics Dashboard, acquisitions, behavior, and audience. Design Basics - How to Create Better Visuals by Dana Haugh Do you ever wonder why some posters are more effective than others? Do you want to learn how to create better PowerPoints, flyers, and other graphics? In this hands-on workshop, you will learn tips and tricks for creating effective and engaging graphics. Participants will learn the fundamentals of good design and then apply that knowledge by creating a simple graphic in the free, web-based design tool, Canva. Research Impact Basics by Caitlin Meyer Research impact doesn't have to be confusing! Join us to learn about different measures of research impact, tools available to you at Yale to help track impact information, and more. By the end of this class, you’ll be able to: distinguish between author impact, article impact, and journal impact; identify common metrics used to gauge impact; and use key tools to track, measure, and visualize research impact.

New Renovation Pictures

March 6, 2019 - 2:13pm by Dana Haugh

We are in the final few months of the library's renovation project and the spaces are really starting to take shape. The drywall is almost entirely up and painting is scheduled to begin in the coming weeks. Please note that paint smells may drift into the reading rooms. As always if you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to reach out to us.

Explore Medieval and Renaissance Medical and Scientific Manuscripts

March 1, 2019 - 10:35am by Melissa Grafe

The Cushing/Whitney Medical Library is pleased to announce that our medieval and Renaissance manuscript collection is now online!  The effort to digitize the manuscripts and make them freely available worldwide was generously funded by the Arcadia Fund. The manuscripts contain early medical and scientific knowledge on a variety of topics, including surgery, gynecology, medicine, herbs and remedies, anatomy, healthful living, astronomy, and mathematics.  They are handwritten in Latin, Italian, Greek, German, and English.  Some are illustrated, like MS18, De herbis masculinis et feminis [and other botanical and zoological works, including the Herbarium of Apuleius].  Turning the pages of this manuscripts reveals numerous hand-colored drawings of plants and animals, including the mandrake root. The mandrake root was valued for a variety of medical uses, including as an aid for reproduction. Mandrake root, as depicted in Harry Potter and in legend, would let out an ear piercing, killer scream when uprooted.   Other manuscripts are filled to the very edges of the paper with text, including marginalia and commentary, like MS11, which has 24 different texts including Aristotelian treatises. The earliest work is the Bamberg Surgery, dating from the 12th century and purchased, like most of this collection, by Library founder and famed neurosurgeon Dr. Harvey Cushing.  As medieval medical scholar Monica Green writes, “The Bamberg Surgery doesn’t get a lot of love in histories of surgery, because of its patchwork character. As [George] Corner himself said, “it is a notebook, a partially organized collection of notes, memoranda, prescriptions, and excerpts from other books.”  Please explore these manuscripts on Cushing/Whitney Library site on Internet Archive, as part of the Medical Heritage Library.   You can also find other Arcadia-funded digitized texts, including Yale Medical School theses and early Arabic and Persian books and manuscripts, in this collection.  The Library plans to make the medieval and Renaissance manuscripts available through Findit, Yale University Library’s Digital Collections site.

Finding Drug Information

February 27, 2019 - 1:37pm by Caitlin Meyer

Despite the promise of tools like Quicksearch and the breadth of massive databases like Scopus, certain types of information simply cannot be found in one place. No need to fret, though! We've got you covered. This series of blog posts will serve as a home of recommended resources and searching tips for hard-to-find types of information. Have a suggestion for a subject? Shoot me an email!  Assembled by Alexandria Brackett Drug information -- what does that mean? It's an incredibly broad topic: Some resources cover progress on drug development and industry, some resources offer drug interaction details, some resources identify generic options for trade name drugs. Here you'll find a curated collection across all of these areas and more. Feel free to reach out with any questions! Recommended Resources  ClinicalKey - Drug Monographs  ClinicalKey is an online resource designed to provide answers to clinical questions. ClinicalKey draws from a collection of clinical resources covering most medical and surgical specialty. DailyMed  National Library Medicine (NLM) database that provides trustworthy information about marketed drugs in the United States. Litt’s D.E.R.M. Database  Litt’s Drug Eruption and Reaction (D.E.R.M.) Database allows you to search the profiles of generic and trade name drugs, while also providing references that link directly to PubMed. The Medical Letter  Critical appraisals of new prescription drugs and comparative reviews of drugs for common diseases. Micromedex Healthcare Series  Micromedex provides a wide range of databases tailored to meet the needs of healthcare professionals, including information related to drugs, acute care, toxicology, and patient education. Patient education materials are included in the CareNotes module of Micromedex. Natural Medicines  Combines the Natural Standard and the Natural Medicines Comprehensive Database resources. Drug Industry Information Resources Medscape - News & Perspective Medscape Reference offers medical news, expert interpretations of news, point-of-care information, drug and disease information, and opportunities for CME. Business Source Complete  Offers full-text access to top scholarly business journals, magazines, & trade publications, dating back as far as 1886. Also offers access to industry profiles, company reports & SWOT analyses, market research, & country reports. IBISWorld  Features key statistics, product segmentation, and outlooks/forecasts for over 700 US industries. Also includes Global, UK, & China reports. Thompson ONE Features company financials and filings, earnings estimates, M&A data, analyst reports, company deals, takeover defenses and much more Drug Development Resources ClinicalTrials.gov  NLM database of privately and publicly funded clinical studies conducted around the world. Patient Volume Data  The Patient Volume Databases offer access to nationwide patient samples to track activity in various treatment settings. Statistics available may include discharge rates, demographic information, concomitant diagnoses and/or procedures, and drug information. The databases cover a large number of ICD-9 codes, and are also searchable by keyword. Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials (CENTRAL)  The Cochrane Library is produced by the Cochrane Collection and is a collection of databases designed to provide high-quality, independent evidence to inform healthcare decision making. CENTRAL is a highly concentrated source of reports of randomized and quasi-randomized controlled trials. Innovation & Entrepreneurship Research Guide  This guide features resources made available by the Yale University Library that students can use to learn about industries, research competitors, and understand markets.  

Picturing Disability Technology

February 27, 2019 - 9:47am by Melissa Grafe

Our first 2018-19 Ferenc Gyorgyey fellow, Jaipreet Virdi, Ph.D., shares an aspect of her research on disability technology through photographs and postcards, with little help from Twitter… Picturing Disability Technology Written by Jaipreet Virdi* In a 2014 article, historian Katherine Ott expressed: “Both the artifacts owned and used by people with disabilities and those that are used upon them or that are encountered in life create possibilities, impose limits, assert political and ideological positions, and shape identity.”[1] This statement has guided my research on the material culture of disability and the nature of disability as both an individual experience and a collective one. By examining how disabled people created, modified, and used technologies, tools, and machines as a medium of social interaction, my work aims to conceptualize how such objects shaped the meanings and management of disability – to understand, as Toby Siebers has written, the ways in which objects are “viewed not as potential sources of pain but as marvelous examples of the plasticity of the human form or as devices of empowerment.”[2] My research also examines representations of disability technologies: how did disabled people ascribe meanings and values to their objects? Wheelchairs, canes, walkers, braces, spectacles, hearing aids, prosthetics, and etc., all color various interactions with disability. Since most of these technologies are essential for navigating (sometimes literally) the world, visual representations of disabled people with these technologies provides us with valuable insight for understanding people’s lived experiences of disability. In photographs, for instance, everything from poses, dress, props, and the inclusion of disability technology, are visual evidence of conscious decisions to frame an image of disability. Such images enable us to perceive the kinds of technologies people used, how they adapted them to their bodies, and how they personalized them to reduce the stigma of “otherness”[3] or “freakery.”[4] The Robert Bogdan Disability History Collection at the Medical Historical Library (in the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University) contains over 3,500 photographs and ephemera representing disability. Since the 1980s, Bogdan had collected such representations, ranging from the 1870s-when photographic images became popularized—to the 1970s at the heights of the disability rights movement. Bogdan’s 2012 collaborative book with Martin Elks and James A. Knoll, Picturing Disability: Beggar, Freak, Citizen, and Other Photographic Rhetoric (Syracuse University Press), provides a broader historical context of the collection, including a history of different types of citizen portraits. The carte de visite was the most common photographic format from 1860 to 1885, with each photograph printed from a negative and mounted on a piece of thin cardboard; some people chose to have the photograph on a postcard, so as to send messages to family and friends. Cabinet cards were also popular at the end of the nineteenth century, though they were three times larger than the carte de visite. Citizen portraits were often taken at a local studio, positioning subjects to “echo family visual rhetoric, not disability conventions”—there is no obvious attempt to conceal the disability, for it is part of the family reality as conveyed in the photograph.[5] Other photographs also use props and positioning of people to convey “normal life” within an inconsequential setting to frame an image’s ordinariness, instead of using disability to define the situation.[6] Disability technologies and other visual indicators of disability are prominently present in many of these photographs. As Bogdan points out, “their presence is not so intrusive as to change this picture’s place in the category of atypical family photograph.”[7] In this wedding portrait, for instance, the two women in wheelchairs are part of the wedding party and positioned to provide balance—the same way a photographer will arrange individuals according to height to obtain symmetry in portraits—without drawing much attention to their wheelchairs.   Wedding party with 2 women in wheelchairs, from the Robert Bogdan Disability Collection MS Col 61, Book 1: Wheelchairs.   These photos also do not tend to specifically feature the disability object, rather positioning the people within normal portraiture conventions, whether it is to show romance or familial ties. The use of additional props, moreover, were used to further confine the photographs within portraiture traditions – the disability technology, though consciously included in the photos, are not the subject of the portrait. Rather, it is the people and their relationships with each other. As Bogdan asserts, “Although some of the images were shared, even sent through the mail, they were distributed privately to intimates, family members, and friends. They were not produced for commercial public relations, to solicit money, to sell, or for personal or organizational gain.”[8] Through these images, we can see most assuredly that people with disabilities were “too busy living to be restrained by our post-structuralist worries over the cultural contingencies of what they did or who they were,” as Ott has remarked.[9]   Assorted photographs of women in wheelchairs accompanied by other people, from the Robert Bogdan Disability Collection MS Col 61, Book 1: Wheelchairs. Assorted photographs of women in wheelchairs accompanied by other people, from the Robert Bogdan Disability Collection MS Col 61, Book 1: Wheelchairs.   Assorted photographs of women in wheelchairs accompanied by other people, from the Robert Bogdan Disability Collection MS Col 61, Book 1: Wheelchairs.   One series of photographs piqued my interest: of individuals outdoors in wheelchairs that have chains attached to the wheels. This design feature appears in different styles of wheelchairs, but I have never previously encountered it in my research, either in manuscripts and archives, or in material culture collections. Inspecting the photographs, I took an educated guess: would these be for raising or hoisting the individual from the chair? My guess didn’t seem right to me, so I took my question to twitter.     As historians have discussed, crowdsourcing on social media is useful for harnessing participatory knowledge. It blurs the boundaries between specialist and non-specialist knowledge, offering new insights for working with primary sources. What seemed to me to be a questionable, confusing design feature was quite obvious to others – the wheelchair is a hand-crank, with the chains fixed to move the wheels the same way that a bicycle pedal moves a bicycle. Now, since I don’t own or ride a bicycle, chain gears were not something I was familiar with, but others have shared their knowledge to enable me to paint a better picture of how this design feature was useful for wheelchair users. The exchange on twitter formed a conversation about self-propelled wheelchairs that governed my research through the Bogdan collection and the broader history of the wheelchair. Litters, swings, cradles, carts, carrying-chairs or sedan chairs were used prior to the formation of the wheelchair as we know it, and individual chairs were not mass-produced until the mid-twentieth century to assist the increasing numbers of soldiers surviving from spinal cord injuries. Wheelchairs became associated with disability and thus, users were stigmatized and perceived as unable to contribute to society. These photographs, however, reveal the extent to which disabled people governed their own lives and sought to be self-sufficient, even taking an action pose in their studio portraits to represent their maneuverability. Man in wheelchair formed like a cart, from the Robert Bogdan Disability Collection MS Col 61, Book 1: Wheelchairs.   As Penny Wolfson has shown, users relied on their own craftsmanship or that of others to shape a mobility device for their own needs.[10] Wheelchairs could be made by adding cart wheels on dining or library chairs, by repurposing motorcycle engines, or adding gears for hand-cranked wheelchairs. While most nineteenth-century wheelchairs were manufactured by furniture makers prizing comfort, adaptability, and mobility, some users repurposed from household furniture and included crafted additions for comfort: home-sewn cushions, crocheted blankets or feet mats, and trinkets attached to spokes. These features provide us with clues into the personalized relationship between user and technology, presenting experiences of disability that were not always negative or exclusive. Moreover, photographs of disabled wheelchair users in various settings—in a field, in the streets, on the porch—indicates the challenges of maneuvering within the built environment, especially of navigating on unpaved streets. The wheels, cranks, and other design features that are visible in the photographs additionally reveal variants of disability experience. By the 1970s, wheelchairs became markers of disability as well as symbols of activism, leaving behind intimate traces of their owner(s). And those hand cranks aren’t simply designs of the past; old designs can always be made new again.   *Jaipreet Virdi is a historian of medicine, technology, and disability. She is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the University of Delaware. Her first book, Hearing Happiness: Fakes, Frauds, and Fads in Deafness Cures will be published by The University of Chicago Press. The Ferenc Gyorgyey Research Travel Grant generously supported this research; special thanks to the grant selection committee and to Melissa Grafe. Photograph images from the Robert Bogdan Disability Collection MS Col 61, Book 1: Wheelchairs. You can find Jai on twitter as @jaivirdi.   [1] Katherine Ott, “Disability Things: Material Culture and American Disability History, 1700-2010,” in Susah Burch and Michael Rembis (Eds.), Disability Histories (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2014), 119. [2] Toby Siebers, “Disability in Theory: From Social Constructionism to the New Realism of the Body,” in Lennard Davis (ed), The Disability Studies Reader (New York & London: Routledge, 2006), 177. [3] Catherine Kudlick, “Disability History: Why We Need Another ‘Other,” The American Historical Review 108.3 (June 2003): 768-793. [4] Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997). [5] Robert Bogdan, Martin Elks and James A. Knoll, Picturing Disability: Beggar, Freak, Citizen, and Other Photographic Rhetoric (Syracuse University Press, 2012), 145. [6] Bogdan, Elks, and Knoll, Picturing Disability, 146. [7] Bogdan, Elks, and Knoll, Picturing Disability, 154. [8] Bogdan, Elks, and Knoll, Picturing Disability, 145. [9] Katherine Ott, “The Sum of its Parts: An Introduction to Modern Histories of Prosthetics,” in Katherine Ott, David Serlin, and Stephen Mihm (eds.), Artificial Parts, Practical Lives: Modern Histories of Prosthetics (New York: New York University Press, 2002), 1-42; 3. [10] Penny Lynne Wolfson, “Enwheeled: Two Centuries of Wheelchair Design, from Furniture to Film,” MA Thesis, Cooper-Hewit, National Design Museum, Smithsonian Institution and Parsons the New School for Design (2014).  
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