Cushing/Whitney Medical Library Digital Collections

The Cushing/Whitney Medical Digital Library is a growing collection of digitized resources made available on the Web for scholarship. The Medical Digital Library Committee coordinates the library's digitization activities. Its goals include expanding access to the library's unique collections for scholarly research, and life-cycle management of digital objects. The collections are powered by Greenstone digital library software. There are currently twenty collections in the Digital Library, including photographic collections such as the Yale School of Medicine collection, Nursing collection, photographs of Medical Historical Library founder and neurosurgeon Harvey Cushing, soldiers wounded in the Civil War, and photographs of hysteria and insanity from the Iconographie Photographique de la Salpêtrière.  Other digitized collections include parts of the Medical Historical Library's poster, print, and portrait collections, bookplates, tobacco advertising, and postcards. The Lam Qua paintings collections consists of 83 mid-nineteenth century oil paintings in the Historical Library rendered by Western-trained artist Lam Qua of Chinese patients with tumors under the care of Yale-trained medical missionary, Peter Parker. Parker's papers have also been digitized and made available online.  The George E. Palade Electron Microscope (EM) Slide Collection consists of 31 scans from lantern slides of some of the earliest electron micrographs taken by George Palade, winner of the Nobel Prize in 1974 (shared with Albert Claude and Christian DeDuve), and his collaborators both at the Rockefeller University (1945-1973) and at Yale (1973-1990).