A curated portal featuring films from our historical audiovisuals collection, accompanied by scholarly essays.
The historical collections of the National Library of Medicine (NLM) support research accross a wide variety of topics. Explore scholarship by NLM staff, historians, curators, volunteers, students, and NLM staff in the resources below.
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Medicine on Screen
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Circulating Now
Blog posts exploring historical research, rare materials, and collections activities.
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Profiles in Science
Exploring the stories of scientific discovery through biographies and digitized archives.
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In His Own Words: Martin Cummings and the NLM
Martin Marc Cummings (1920–2011), medical educator, physician, scientific administrator, and medical library director, made significant contributions to medical informatics and librarianship. Read More
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FDA Notices of Judgment database
The FDA Notices of Judgment Collection is a digital archive of the published notices judgment for products seized under authority of the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act.
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Physicians' Lives in the Shenandoah Valley: Henkel Family Letters, 1786–1907
The Henkel Family Correspondence collection consists of 828 letters and is largely the product of Caspar C. Henkel’s life. This digital edition is divided into 3 blog posts for ease of navigation and contextual narrative.
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Profiles in Science
This site celebrates twentieth-century leaders in biomedical research and public health. It makes the archival collections of prominent scientists, physicians, and others who have advanced the scientific enterprise available to the public through modern digital technology.
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Medicine On Screen: Films and Essays from NLM
A curated portal to the National Library of Medicine's historical audiovisual collections. This site showcases unique, rare, and important medical films enriched with contextual information, scholarly essays, and related resources.
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The Public Health Film Goes to War
A curated collection of eighteen rare and wonderful World War II-era health films.
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Pictures of Nursing
The postcard is a fleeting and widespread art form influenced by popular ideas about social and cultural life in addition to fashions in visual style. Nurses and nursing have been the frequent subjects of postcards...
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Family Planning
As one of the most populous countries in the world, China saw the need to have a strong family planning policy. The country launched 3 family planning campaigns.
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Consumptive Disease
Tuberculosis was one of the major epidemic diseases in 20th-century China, along with smallpox, malaria, cholera, schistosomiasis, and other epidemics. Organized efforts to fight the disease began in 1933.
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Health For The People
In the 20th century, under both Nationalist and Communist governments, China supported public health measures as a way to strengthen the country.
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Chinese Anti-Malaria Posters
Malaria was historically a major threat to the health of the Chinese people. In 1950, over 30 million Chinese people suffered from malaria.
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Chinese Public Health Posters
The National Library of Medicine has recently acquired a large collection of Chinese Public Health materials, about seven thousand items produced from early 20th century to the year of SARS.
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Visual Culture and Public Health Posters
Posters flourished as an art form in Europe and the United States in the late-nineteenth century as advances in printing technologies allowed for mass circulation. In the 1860s, French artists ushered in a new age for the illustrated poster.
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Historical Anatomies on the Web
Historical Anatomies on the Web is a digital project designed to give Internet users access to high quality images from important anatomical atlases in the Library’s collection.
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Islamic Medical Manuscripts
Here you can learn about Islamic medicine and science during the Middle Ages and the important role it played in the history of Europe.
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Classics of Traditional Chinese Medicine
The National Library of Medicine (NLM) holds approximately 2,000 volumes of Chinese medical classics. Here we display a few of the earliest and most interesting texts from the NLM collection.
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