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Secondary & Reference Sources
Common Search Terms
- Diseases and history
- Diseases -- Influence on history
- History and diseases
- Epidemics + country
- Communicable diseases -- Transmission
- Disease -- History
- Malaria (Ague, Chills and fever, Marsh fever, etc)
- Cholera (Humors, bile, summer complaint)
- Typhoid fever (Abdominal typhus, Enteric fever, Salmonella typhi)
- Smallpox (Variola, small pox, Poxvirus)
- Influenza (Flu, Grippe)
- America: History & Life This link opens in a new window
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(Searches through citations, subject indexing, and abstracts)
Contains information about scholarly articles on the history and culture of the U. S. and Canada. (For World History, use Historical Abstracts) - Historical Abstracts This link opens in a new window
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The primary place to find scholarship on world history. (For U.S. and Canadian History, use America: History and Life). Covers publications from 1955 - present. - ProQuest Public Health Database This link opens in a new window
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(Searches through citations, subject indexing, and some full text)
The ideal starting point for public health information and research. Contains core public health literature including journals, news, trade publications, reports and more. - Web of Science This link opens in a new window
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(Searches through citations, subject indexing, and some full text)
A massive index of literature from the sciences, social sciences, and humanities. Also offers cited reference searching to see who has cited a particular document. 1898 - current.
Note: To do cited reference searching, click on "cited reference search," fill in an author's last name and publication date, figure out which of the resulting list of citations match the work you're looking for, and then "finish search" to see who has cited that work.
The Gale Encyclopedia of Public Health (2nd ed, 2019) by ISBN: 0028666712Publication Date: 2019-09-01Focuses on health crises affecting the public at large, ranging from epidemic and pandemic diseases; chronic conditions such as famine, malnutrition, cancer, and diabetes; social issues, and new substance abuse issues. Entries describe the origin and spread of the issue, public and government reaction and response, and treatments and preventive measures.
Encyclopaedia of the history of science, technology, and medicine in non-western cultures by Call Number: Ref Q124.8 .E53 1997 and Online (2008)ISBN: 0792340663Availability and more information from Catalyst...
Encyclopedia of Plague and Pestilence (3rd ed, 2008) by ISBN: 9781438129235Tracing the history of infectious diseases from the Philistine plague of 11th century BCE to recent SARS and avian flu scares, Encyclopedia of Plague and Pestilence, Third Edition is a comprehensive A-Z reference offering international coverage of this timely and fascinating subject.This updated volume provides concise descriptions of more than 700 epidemics, listed alphabetically by location of the outbreak. Each detailed entry includes when and where a particular epidemic began, how and why it happened, whom it affected, how it spread and ran its course, and its outcome and significance. Black-and-white photographs have been added throughout.
Medical History Sources
- Contagion: Historical Views of Diseases and Epidemics [Harvard University]Historical scholarship about disease and epidemics. Over 500,000 pages of plates, engravings, maps, charts, and broadsides from the 15th - 20th centuries.
- Guide to specialized primary source material about the history of public health (Sam Houston State University)Mostly sources from and about the United States
- Wellcome Collection digital imagesFind thousands of Creative Commons licensed images from historical Wellcome Collection (London) library materials and museum objects to contemporary digital photographs.
- Accessible Archives: Quarantine and Disease Control in AmericaContains first-hand accounts of American infectious diseases: Newspapers (1736-1922), and Books (1823-1928). **Use Browse/Search functions!
- Medical Heritage LibraryA digital curation collaborative among some of the world’s leading medical libraries, promotes free and open access to quality historical resources in medicine.
- Yale Medical Historical Library - Digitized CollectionsIncunabula, Arabic and Persian manuscripts, postcards, posters, photographs, book plates, lantern slides, portraits, surgical instruments, prints and drawings, newsletters and theses, advertising, and more. Dates range from 1300-2000s.
- Medicine and Madison Avenue (Duke Libraries)About 600 advertising items and publications dating from 1850 to 1920, illustrating the rise of consumer culture and the birth of a professionalized advertising industry in the United States.
- The History of Western Medicine in China Resources PortalThis is a wide collection of information -- archive guides, primary sources, digitized materials. Most sources to date focus on the period from the beginning of the nineteenth century to the formation of the People's Republic of China.
- Journal: "Public health reports" (U.S. Marine Hospital Service 1887-2017)The predecessor to the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps & Surgeon General's Public Health Reports, it includes weekly updates from around the country and globe about health issues and disease outbreaks.
- PubMed This link opens in a new window
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(Searches through citations, subject indexing, and abstracts)
The US National Institutes of Health provide this free index of biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books. If full text is not linked to or provided for a particular citation, search our Journals List to see if we have alternate access to the journal publishing that article. - NCCO: Nineteenth Century Collections Online This link opens in a new window
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Drawn from the holdings of the National Library of Medicine the collection includes the content of more than twelve hundred journals. Covers topics such as: the evolution of contagion theory, changing ideas about medical ethics, the growth of medical specialization, and the development of medical societies and medical education. The collection also documents both the rich history of unorthodox medicine and the history of closely related fields, such as dentistry and pharmacy.
- CRL: Public health periodicals (English)Manually browse through digitized historical public health periodicals (journals).
- Contagion: Historical Views of Diseases and Epidemics [Harvard University]Historical scholarship about disease and epidemics. Over 500,000 pages of plates, engravings, maps, charts, and broadsides from the 15th - 20th centuries.
- Biodiversity Heritage LibraryCataloged historical scholarship about natural history and botany.
- JSTOR This link opens in a new window
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(Searches through citations and the full text)
Provides access to more than 12 million journal articles, books, images, and primary sources in 75 disciplines. Most journals are included from their first issue until 5 years ago.
The National Library of Medicine (NLM) has a large and extensive history of medicine collection. As part of the library's mission to provide access and preserve its collection of books, ephemera, pamphlets, posters, etc, the library has created several digitized collections.
- National Library of Medicine (NLM) Digital CollectionsImages, videos, books, manuscripts, declassified government documents about the history of medicine, all public domain. Includes curated exhibits.
- Medicine in the Americas (1610-1920): A Digital Library"Drawing on the collections of NLM's History of Medicine Division and including works from the United States, Latin America, the Caribbean and Canada, this initial release of Medicine in the Americas encompasses monographs dating from 1610 to 1865. Additional titles, dating up to 1920 and drawing further upon NLM's comprehensive collection of early American printed books and journals, will be available on an ongoing basis in the future."
- Images from the History of MedicineContains nearly 70,000 images from the NLM, including portraits, photographs, posters, and graphic art important to the history of medicine from the 15th through the 21st centuries.
- Profiles in ScienceDigital archive of papers from prominent 20th scientists, physicians, and other leaders in medical and scientific fields who have contributed to the development of medical science.
- Turning the PagesFeatures nine works important to our understanding of the history of medicine, including Hanaoka Seishu’s Surgical Casebook, Hieronymus Brunschwig’s Liber de Arte Distilland, and Andreas Vesalius's De Humani Corporis Fabrica (On the Fabric of the Human Body) **Note that this will no longer fully load; only the images will be able to load.
- CDC Publication ArchivesCDC Stacks is a free, digital archive of scientific research and literature produced by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Contains current CDC research and literature, and historical publications, such as the first 30 volumes of the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.
- CDC @ National Archives (Record Group 442)Search within the records of the CDC in the National Archives (RG 442). Index of the collection.
- CDC - LGBT HealthResources and statistics.
- CDC FOIA Reading RoomDeclassified and digitized documents from the CDC.
- CDC @ HathiTrustPublicly available full text publications by and about the CDC.
- CDC PublicationsLinks to collections of current publications put out by the CDC.
- Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [Internet Archive]A collection of public health material, podcasts, and information for children published by the CDC.
- Historical Statistics of the United StatesGathers census statistics that were gathered in the United states from colonial times to the present. Search in Part A - Population > Chapter Ab - Vital Statistics > Table Group Ab912-1137 - Mortality to see how many people died from which diseases.
- International historical statistics Africa, Asia and Oceania 1750-2005CC Ref HA4675 .M552 2007
- WHO: World Health Organization This link opens in a new window
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(Searches through citations and the full text)
Includes reports and statistics about world health.
