Images from the History of Medicine (IHM), the National Library of Medicine's database of almost 60,000 historical images, documents social and historical aspects of medicine from the Middle Ages to the present. Pictures in the database come from the Library's collection of caricatures, photographs, fine prints, ephemera and portraits and from illustrations drawn from books and journals held by NLM. IHM covers a large range of medically related topics past and present, from medieval astrology to nineteenth century slum conditions, from the international fight against drug abuse to AIDS. The strength of the collection lies in the earlier periods, although it does contain twentieth century images, most dating from before World War II. IHM generally is not a source of modern clinical images.
Other collections of images include
Profiles in Science, digitized archival collections of leaders in biomedical research and public health; and
Historical Anatomies on the Web, which provides access to digitized images from important anatomical atlases in the Library's collection.
