Blogs

2016-2017 Gyorgyey Fellows

The Medical Historical Library, Cushing/Whitney Medical Library, is pleased to announce the following recipients of the Ferenc Gyorgyey Research Travel Award for 2016-2017:

Whitney Wood, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Department of History, Classics and Archaeology, Birbeck, University of London

A New Way to Birth? Herbert Thoms and the International Natural Childbirth Movement

Whitney Wood’s research explores the natural childbirth movement in Canada. As part of this research, Wood will be examining the Herbert Thoms papers (http://hdl.handle.net/10079/fa/mssa.ru.0656), as Thoms was an international leader in the movement and produced quite a bit of material on the topic of natural childbirth. Whitney Wood is planning to come to the Medical Historical Library in Spring 2017.

Erin Travers, Doctoral Candidate, History of Art and Architecture, University of California, Santa Barbara

Boundaries of the Body: The Art of the Anatomy in the Seventeenth-Century Netherlands

Erin Travers will be examining Dutch anatomies, particularly Jacob van der Gracht’s drawing book, Anatomie der wtterlicke deelen van het menschelick lichaem. These anatomies form the basis of her dissertation. She will at the Medical Historical Library July 18th-23rd, 2016.

Many thanks to the selection committee: John Warner and John Gallagher.

"Harvey Cushing and John Fulton: Two Founders Bonded By Science, Medicine, And Books": Full video of June 3 event now online

On June 3, 2016 the Cushing/Whitney Medical Library hosted a talk titled "Harvey Cushing and John Fulton: Two Founders Bonded By Science, Medicine, And Books." The focus of this event was a conversation between Drs. Dennis D. Spencer and Gordon M. Shepherd, moderated by Cynthia Tsay, YSM ’18. The panel spoke about the personal and professional relationship of these men, and touched upon the founding of the Yale Medical Library and how they worked together to make it a reality. You can now view the full video of the event online.

At the post-lecture reception, we also took a few photos of attendees with Harvey Cushing himself:

Dr. Cushing's great-grandson, Harvey Cushing

Dr. Frank Lobo and Sharon McManus

Dr. Dennis Spencer and Harvey Cushing

Library Curator of Prints and Drawings Susan Wheeler

L to R: John Gallagher, Cushing's great-great-grandson Kevin Cushing, Dr. Gordon Shepherd, Cushing's granddaughter Kate Whitney, Dr. Dennis Spencer, Cynthia Tsay

Spotlight on Humanities in Medicine Collection

Spotlight on the Humanities in Medicine Collection

Check out the newest book in the Humanities in Medicine Collection, The Gene: An Intimate History.

Excerpt from the book cover The Gene: An Intimate History Siddhartha Mukherjee Pulitzer Prize-Winning Author of The Emperor of All Maladies :

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning, bestselling author of The Emperor of All Maladies—a magnificent history of the gene and a response to the defining question of the future: What becomes of being human when we learn to “read” and “write” our own genetic information?

Siddhartha Mukherjee has a written a biography of the gene as deft, brilliant, and illuminating as his extraordinarily successful biography of cancer. Weaving science, social history, and personal narrative to tell us the story of one of the most important conceptual breakthroughs of modern times, Mukherjee animates the quest to understand human heredity and its surprising influence on our lives, personalities, identities, fates, and choices.

Throughout the narrative, the story of Mukherjee’s own family—with its tragic and bewildering history of mental illness—cuts like a bright, red line, reminding us of the many questions that hang over our ability to translate the science of genetics from the laboratory to the real world. In superb prose and with an instinct for the dramatic scene, he describes the centuries of research and experimentation—from Aristotle and Pythagoras to Mendel and Darwin, from Boveri and Morgan to Crick, Watson and Franklin, all the way through the revolutionary twenty-first century innovators who mapped the human genome.

As The New Yorker said of The Emperor of All Maladies, “It’s hard to think of many books for a general audience that have rendered any area of modern science and technology with such intelligence, accessibility, and compassion…An extraordinary achievement.” Riveting, revelatory, and magisterial history of a scientific idea coming to life, and an essential preparation for the moral complexity introduced by our ability to create or “write” the human genome, The Gene is a must-read for everyone concerned about the definition and future of humanity. This is the most crucial science of our time, intimately explained by a master.

Want to know more about this book? Here is the link to the New York Times Book Review by James Gleick: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/15/books/review/the-gene-by-siddhartha-mukherjee.html?_r=0

Humanities in Medicine Collection is located across from the Circulation Desk.

SCOPA Lunch & Learn, June 8 at 1pm

(by Katie Hart)

Librarians attending the Medical Library Association Annual meeting in May. Left to right: Andy Hickner, Denise Hersey, Nathan Rupp, Holly Grossetta Nardini, Rolando Garcia Milian, Mark Gentry.

You’re invited to a SCOPA sponsored Lunch & Learn at the Cushing/Whitney Medical Library on June 8^th at 1pm. Join us to hear recent presentations given at the Medical Library Association annual conference. Please feel free to bring a lunch or perhaps make a stop at the famous medical school carts. The four presentations we will be reprising for you are:

Design, Implementation, and Evaluation of a Medical Library Program to Support Biomedical Research in the 'Omics Era – Rolando Garcia-Milian (presenting), Janis Glover, and John Gallagher.

This presentation discusses the strategies used to design and implement our end-user bioinformatics support program. It also provides results on training, resources, tools, and services available to Yale biomedical researchers. Access the report here: https://works.bepress.com/rolando_garciamilian/12/ and our resources here: http://guides.library.yale.edu/c.php?g=295798&p=1972432

Putting the Pieces Together: Finding a Point-of-Care Solution for an Academic Medical Center – Denise Hersey (presenting), Mark Gentry, Janene Batten, Nathan Rupp, and Holly Grossetta Nardini.

The Cushing/Whitney Medical Library assembled a task force composed of librarians, physicians, nurses, and hospital IT staff to compare and evaluate DynaMed Plus and UpToDate – two resources used at the beside to provide clinical care – and then recommend which product best meets the needs of our associated hospitals, informing the subscription renewal process for 2016-2017.

The Yale Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) Analyzer: A New Tool for Search Refinement – Holly Grossetta Nardini and Lei Wang.

The presentation describes our MeSH analysis methodology, a technique that helps craft more comprehensive searches, and the use of a new tool that saves time by doing this analysis automatically. The Yale MeSH Analyzer helps refine searches, particularly those where indexing is challenging, by creating a quick, scannable grid of MeSH terms for easy review.

Using Omeka for Online Exhibits – Andy Hickner (presenting), Melissa Grafe, Kerri Sancomb, and Francesca Livermore (5 minute lightning talk).

Omeka is a web publishing platform for online exhibitions. Andy will describe how Yale University Libraries conducted a pilot of Omeka for the Libraries’ online exhibition needs and share lessons from our experience.

See you there!

Future Medical Librarians at STEM Career Fair

by Kate Nyhan

Librarian Kate Nyhan discusses a career in health sciences librarianship with four high school students. These future medical librarians are students at Wilbur Cross High School in New Haven attending a career fair to learn about STEM careers. Research and education librarian Holly Grossetta Nardini, reference librarian Melissa Funaro, and public health librarian Kate Nyhan (pictured) talked with students from New Haven's public schools about what medical librarians do, how informationists fit into the health care team, and how these young people can prepare for STEM careers like ours.

We were impressed with the confident kids at this STEM career fair. Many of them already have career goals, and lots of them discussed quite sophisticated strategies for seeking and evaluating information online. A good number of these students have visited the Cushing Center and learned about the history of science and medicine there.

The best part of this career fair was interactive: live searches in PubMed on health care topics relevant to these students. Speaking of which -- are you the track coach whose runners found an article suggesting that a short warm-up is as effective as a long one? I promise we talked to these young athletes about the importance of searching comprehensively. If they cherry-picked this evidence to get out of doing the long warm-up, remind them that evidence-based medicine is based on a thorough literature review!

Many thanks to Many Mentors, the Yale League of Black Scientists, and Wilbur Cross High School. We were glad to be part of the STEM career fair team, and we look forward to next year. And in the long term, we hope we can look forward to welcoming some of these talented students to the always rewarding profession of medical librarianship!

Cushing/Whitney Medical Library welcomes our new director, John Gallagher

The Cushing/Whitney Medical Library is delighted to announce the appointment of our new director, John Gallagher.

John joined the staff of the Yale Library in 1999 as a library services assistant in the Library Shelving Facility. He moved to the Medical Library in 2000 where he took the position of evening & weekend circulation supervisor, and was quickly promoted to the head of the circulation department. After completion of his Masters of Library Science in 2004, John was promoted again to the head of Access and Delivery Services. He was instrumental in pioneering and establishing the Scan on Demand service at the Cushing/Whitney Medical Library, which evolved into the Scan and Deliver service for the wider Yale Library system. He served as the library liaison to the Department of Orthopedics and Rehabilitation and co-chaired the library’s joint Department Committee for Best Practices, a university-wide initiative to foster and promote better management/labor relations and collaboration through interest-based problem solving. During this time, John also chaired a management/labor Access Services Assessment Task Force that reduced check-in errors at all libraries.

As deputy director for Public Services and later associate director, John oversaw the completion of a number of major medical library renovations, including a complete renovation of the Medical Historical Library’s rare book stacks and staff areas, the construction of a Secure Reading Room, and the construction of the Cushing Center.

In 2012, John was selected to participate in the National Library of Medicine/Association of Academic Health Sciences Libraries’ Leadership Fellowship Program. John's participation in this prestigious and highly competitive program gives testimony to the quality of his leadership abilities.

Susan Gibbons, University Librarian and Deputy Provost for Libraries & Scholarly Communication commented, "John’s appointment is fantastic. Not only do we add a talented colleague to the library’s senior leadership team, but John’s career demonstrates the opportunities for career advancement at Yale University Library."

Even with all his responsibilities, John has an open door policy and welcomes staff to share their thoughts, ideas and feelings with him. John is a mentor, teacher, friend and leader. We welcome John as our new director!

Library profiled in spring 2016 issue of Nota Bene

The spring 2016 issue of Nota Bene: News from the Yale Library is now available online. This issue has a particular focus on the work of the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library as it marks its 75th anniversary this year. In addition to telling the story of the Medical Library, the issue profiles some of the current projects, resources, collections, and exhibits that are making an impact at Yale and in the medical community worldwide.

Library will return to its regular hours starting May 20

The Library will return to its regular hours starting May 20. This means we will close at midnight Sunday through Thursday, so plan accordingly! Remember, our 24/7 Computer & Study Space is always open, and accessible through an after-hours entrance when the library is closed.

2016 Class Gift: The anatomy donor tree

(Guest post by the YSM, YSN, and PA Classes of 2016)

If you've visited the library recently, this unusual sculpture may have caught your eye as you entered. The 2016 Class Gift is a collective effort between the Yale School of Medicine, School of Nursing, and Physician Associate Program. The gift is a tree sculpture made from molds of the limbs of first-year students in the 3 programs, and serves as a reminder of the collaborative process between the bodies of students and donors in the anatomy course. We invite everyone to write notes thanking the donors or describing what the service, donations, or anatomy course meant to them on ribbons and to pin them on the tree.

Day of Data 2016 Spring Discussion Series: Outcome Defined Organization of Patient Profiles

The Day of Data 2016 Spring Discussion Series will feature Dr. Alexander Cloninger. Dr. Cloninger has active applied collaborations with medical researchers at the Center for Outcomes Research and Evaluation at Yale and the National Institutes of Health. His current research deals with defining and analyzing patient similarity for the purposes of clustering and outcome prediction.

Thursday, May 5, 2016
1:30 – 3:00 pm
Sterling Memorial Library Lecture Hall

Alex Cloninger is a Gibbs Assistant Professor in the Applied Mathematics Program at Yale, where he as been since 2014. He completed his Ph.D. at University of Maryland as a member of the Norbert Wiener Center for Harmonic Analysis, and his undergrad at Washington University in St. Louis. His research interests lie in the areas of machine learning and diffusion geometry, ranging from theory to implementation and data processing, with a focus on developing novel algorithms to work with medical data.

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