Medical Historical Library

The Medical Historical Library of the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University is pleased to announce its sixteenth annual Research Travel award for use of the Historical Library.

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 Medical Historical Library holds one of the country’s largest collections of rare medical books, journals, prints, photographs, and pamphlets. It was founded in 1941 by the donations of the extensive collections of Harvey Cushing, John F. Fulton, and Arnold C. Klebs. Special strengths are the works of Hippocrates, Galen, Vesalius, Boyle, Harvey, Culpeper, Haller, Priestley, and S. Weir Mitchell, and works on anatomy, anesthesia, and smallpox inoculation and vaccination. The Library owns over fifty medieval and renaissance manuscripts, Arabic and Persian manuscripts, and over 300 medical incunabula.  The notable Clements C. Fry Collection of Prints and Drawings has over 2,500 fine prints, drawings, and posters from the 15th century to the present on medical subjects, and the collection has expanded to approximately 10,000 items.  Themes include social justice, war, drug use, reproductive rights, HIV/AIDS, activism, and more.  Although the Historical Library does not house the official archives of the Medical School, it does own a number of manuscript and archival collections, most notably the Peter Parker Collection, parts of the papers of Harvey Cushing, and the John Fulton diaries and notebooks. The Library also owns The Stanley B. Burns M.D. Historic Medical Photography Collection; an extensive Smoking and tobacco advertising collection; the Robert Bogdan collection of disability photographs and postcards; medical imagery from popular publications donated by Bert Hansen; and smaller collections of patent medicine ephemera from noted collector William Helfand.

The award honors Ferenc A. Gyorgyey, former Historical Librarian. Ferenc A. Gyorgyey was born in Hungary and immigrated to the United States at the time of the Hungarian Revolution.  He received his library degree at Southern Connecticut State University in 1961 and a master’s degree in history from Yale in 1967.  In 1962 he was hired by Madeline Stanton (then Librarian of the Yale Medical Historical Collections) as a cataloger for the Historical Library, and was named Historical Librarian when Miss Stanton retired in 1968.  Known for his graciousness, devotion to patrons, a thorough knowledge of the collection, and a remarkable sense of humor, he held this position for 26 years until his retirement in 1994. Ferenc Gyorgyey passed away in 2014.

The award also honors 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. Simbonis enjoyed a long medical career as a laboratory pathologist at Columbia Medical Center, and finally Chair of Pathology at St. Joseph Hospital in Patterson, New Jersey. He believed that the library was “the heart and soul of the university” and that the medical library specifically was a major reason for his own academic success here at Yale. Simbonis died in 2018.

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 collections in the Yale Library system, please indicate those clearly in your application.
• Budget, including proposed times for research trip
• Curriculum vitae
• Two letters of recommendation 

Deadline: April 27th, 2025 at midnight

The application cycle opens on February 12th, 2025. Please submit your proposals through THIS LINK. If you have any questions, please email historical.library@yale.edu. Grant receipients will be notified by end of May.

Past Recipients

2024
– Hannah Darvin: “Sentimentalizing Medicine: Luke Fildes’s The Doctor (1891) and the Idealized Image of the Physician-Patient Relationship”

2023
– Michael Ortiz: “American Nature: Life and Political Community in Post-Reconstruction United States, 1877-1927”
– Jiemin (Tina) Wei: “Ameliorating Fatigue at Work: Workplace-Management, Mind-Body Medicine, and Self-Help for Industrial Fatigue in the U.S., 1910s-1940s”

2019
– Christopher Babits: “To Cure a Sinful Nation: Conversion Therapy in the United States”

2018
– Jonathan Jones: “A Mind Prostrate”: Physicians, Opiates, and Insanity in the Civil War’s Aftermath
– Jaipreet Virdi: “The Science of Hearing Conservation: Norton Canfield and the Formation of Audiology in Postwar America”

2017
– Thomas Ewing: “The Grip[pe], and the Nerve Exhaustion that Followed It”: Research on the History of Tuberculosis and Influenza in Yale Medical Historical Collections

2016
– Whitney Wood:”A New Way to Birth?  Herbert Thoms and the International Natural Childbirth Movement”
– Erin Travers: “Boundaries of the Body: The Art of the Anatomy in the Seventeenth-Century Netherlands”

2015
– Rebecca Brannon: “Did the Founding Fathers Live Too Long?”

2014
– Lianne Habinek: “Such Wondrous Science: Early Modern Literature and the Birth of Neuroscience”

2013
– Emily Hagens: “Italian Laywomen’s Medical Practice: Knowledge Transfer in Sixteenth-Century Venice”
– Yonina Murciano-Goroff: “Harvey Cushing and Surgical Isolationism in Cancer Care”

2012
– Elizabeth Kelly Gray: “The Private Century: Drug Addiction in America to 1880”
– Adam Rathge: “The Origins of Marijuana Prohibition in the United States, 1870-1937”

2011
– R. Allen Shotwell: “The Practices and Techniques of Dissection in the Renaissance”
– Courtney Pendleton: “Harvey Cushing’s Early Neurological Experience: Innovations and Influence on Contemporary Practice”

2010
– Kelly Bezio: “National Immunities and Transatlantic Contagions”

2009
– Delia Gavrus: “Men of Strong Opinions’: Identity, Self-Representation, and the Construction of Neurosurgery, 1919-1920”

2008
– Karin Ekholm: “Generation and Its Problems: Harvey, Highmore and their Contemporaries”