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Feb 10, 2020

Curated by Katherine Isham The Medical Historical Library announces a new exhibition in our reading room: “The Enduring Appeal of ‘The Doctor’” featuring recent gifts from medical historian Bert Hansen, Ph.D. “The Doctor,” painted by Sir Luke Fildes in 1891, has been a popular and influential image in the history of medicine for more than a century. The painting of a Victorian doctor attending a sick child in a poor workman’s cottage held great appeal for the general public, who responded to the sympathetic portrayal. Members of the medical profession embraced the painting as a depiction of... Read More

Jan 17, 2020

The Medical Historical Library announces the availability of Ms Coll 67 The Bert Hansen Collection of Medicine and Public Health in Popular Graphic Art, which includes over 1200 images and items produced between 1850 and 2010 with additional reference materials. The collection is a gift of historian Bert Hansen, Ph.D., whose goal was to document the visual record of medical practice and research and public health in America. Over a period of thirty years, Hansen selected materials produced for the general public (not medical or public health professionals) that use medical imagery as an... Read More

Jan 8, 2020

The Cushing/Whitney Medical Library is pleased to announce that parts of our incunable collection are now available online! The effort to digitize these incunables and make them freely available worldwide was generously funded by the Arcadia Fund. The Medical Historical Library, part of the Cushing/Whitney Medical Library, contains over 300 medical and scientific incunabula, which are books, broadsides, and pamphlets printed before 1501. These incredibly rare incunables represent the earliest history of printing in Europe and the first examples of medical knowledge circulated in printed form... Read More

Dec 11, 2019

By Michelle Peralta, Resident Archivist for Yale Special Collections Yale Class of 1974 Alumna Throughout the 2019-2020 academic year, Yale University is celebrating fifty years of co-education with many events and exhibitions that demonstrate the magnitude of contributions of Yale’s women graduates in all areas of life, including politics, sports, academia, and medicine. Thus, it feels particularly fitting that the latest archival collection available at the Medical Historical Library, Ms Coll 64 The Martha H. Roper Papers, was created by an alumna of one of Yale’s earliest co-education... Read More

Nov 7, 2019

NEW EXHIBITION Plastic Surgery at Yale: Surgical Expertise, Innovation, and History On view in the Cushing Rotunda from October 30th 2019 - February 24th, 2020   Surgical attempts to reconstruct the human body after injury or illness have long been at the forefront of medical innovation. The expansive field of plastic surgery emerged over centuries, now including reconstruction and cosmetics and aesthetic surgery.   In this exhibition, evolving techniques and procedures dating from ancient times through the present day are on display through a sampling of major historical... Read More

Sep 3, 2019

Exhibition curated by Terry Dagradi and Deborah Streahle The Medical Library celebrates the first decade of the Cushing Center with a special exhibition leading up the its anniversary. Throughout his career as a groundbreaking neurosurgeon, Dr. Cushing took detailed notes on what patients told him about their serious, often mysterious ailments. He had patients sit for diagnostic photos and sketches, and he followed up with them for years after treating them. With precision, he removed and preserved their tumors and, after they died, their brains. These materials became the Cushing Brain Tumor... Read More

Aug 30, 2019

The Medical Historical Library is pleased to announce the addition of a new collection to our archives: The Hall-Benedict Drug Company Logbooks and Ledgers (Ms Coll 66), a collection of seventy-five volumes and six boxes, that documents the history of one of the oldest independent drug stores in Connecticut. The collection includes bound prescription logbooks and bound and loose financial ledgers from the Hall-Benedict Drug Company, which was in operation from 1909 to 1998 in the East Rock neighborhood of New Haven, Connecticut. The collection contains an almost continuous record of the... Read More

Aug 19, 2019

Grant Wood’s American Gothic Repurposed and Several Anti-Smoking Acquisitions on view now at the Cushing/Whitney Medical Library. “American Gothic” is one of the best known works by an American artist. Iowa native Grant Wood was inspired by the small town Iowan home in Gothic Revival style and asked his sister and his dentist to pose for the painting as father and daughter residents of the well kept property.   To many viewers of “American Gothic” the scene was, and is, interpreted as a satire on rural life, but Wood avowed that the painting portrayed traditional American values,... Read More