Databases, catalogues, and website indexes

Databases

History of medicine databases are listed below. For a complete listing of article indexes and databases, go to all article indexes & databases.

• Archival Material Held in the Osler Library - A Searchable Database. The Osler Library Archives has over 100 collections of papers by or about doctors, medical students and organisations, including significant collections on Sir William Osler, Wilder Penfield, Maude Abbott and the Canadian Health Libraries Association.
• Global Health Archive. Contains citations of articles, books, reports and conference proceedings on topics such as public health, tropical and communicable diseases, nutrition, helminthology, entomology and mycology in several languages from 1912 to 1983.
  Note: The "Find It at McGill" button occasionally fails to recognize journals that McGill has - always check the catalogue."
• Global Project on the History of Leprosy There are a number of resources on this subject available on this site, such as a database of archival holdings and articles, lists of oral history projects with some excepts, and some scanned photos and maps.
• Google Patent Search This searches the full text of patents issued by the US Patent and Trademark Office from the 1790s to the current day. Records includes the patent description and images.
• History of Science, Technology and Medicine (HSTM). HSTM provides access to journal articles, conference proceedings, books, book reviews, and dissertations in the history of science, technology, and medicine and allied historical fields. NOTE Most of the medical entries date from 1991 to 2004, so to locate earlier works on the history of medicine it is best to consult the Subject Catalogue of the History of Medicine and Related Subjects (Osler Ref folio ZW 1 W447s 1980 - 18 volumes), published by the Wellcome Library, for the period 1900-1978. Material from 1979-1991, and a great deal more, can be found in the The Wellcome Library online catalogue, which contains records for books, journals, reports, pamphlets, theses, patents and images.
• IndexCat (Index-Catalogue of the Library of the Surgeon-General's Office) IndexCat is both a catalogue and an index, containing over 4.5 million records to journal articles, books, pamphlets, reports, dissertations and portraits, making this a great source for locating primary material in medical history. The references are multilingual and cover medicine and allied areas. Coverage is of material from antiquity through 1950.

  Note: for a comparison of coverage between IndexCat and Index Medicus, see the NLM explanatory page.

• MEDLINE. The premier bibliographic index of journal articles covering the fields of medicine, nursing, dentistry, veterinary medicine, and the pre-clinical sciences. One can get references going back to before 1950, with more older references being added frequently, depending on the set one uses (use Change Database). After a search, one can also limit results to the "History of Medicine" subset by clicking on "More Limits".

  The U.S. National Library of Medicine's free article index PubMed contains all the citations in MEDLINE plus other material. See What's the difference between MEDLINE and PubMed for more information.

  The print version of MEDLINE, Index Medicus, was produced from 1879 to 2004, so is useful for locating material published before the electronic databases were created. This is located in Life Sciences Library reference section.

  Note: for a comparison of coverage between IndexCat and Index Medicus, see the NLM explanatory page.

• Osler Library Reprints Collection. This is a collection of over 2,000 articles and book chapters on medical history, personages, institutions and some now historic general medicine. Many of these articles/chapters are also found in books and journals held by the Osler Library but some are not. This material is not listed in the Library Catalogue and can often be hard to locate using other indexes. The Reprints Collection is a particularly good source on McGill and Montreal medicine.
• Recent Dissertations in the Medical Humanities. This is an index to selected recent dissertations in medical history and other aspects of medical humanities, updated monthly by the University of Pittsburgh. Note that the links to the records in ProQuest Digital Dissertations in this database will not get the full text. To get the full text online when available, use McGill's link to ProQuest Dissertations and Theses Full Text.
• Web of Knowledge. Web of Knowledge allows for searching for articles by topic, author, source title, and/or author address, as well as by cited author and/or cited work. Science citations go back to 1900, making this a source for finding historical, primary material.

Library catalogues

McGill library catalogue

• McGill University's Library Catalogue contains information on almost all of the printed holdings of the Osler and other McGill library branches, and McGill's electronic journals and other e-resources. It is the first place to search for information on history of the health sciences resources held in the McGill Library.

Other library catalogues

Though it is often fruitful to search general resources such as the OCLC's union catalogue WorldCat, or the catalogue of the British Library or the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, there are a number of major collections in the history of the health sciences whose catalogues are freely available on the web.

• LocatorPlus The online catalogue of the (US) National Library of Medicine, it contains records of books and some book chapters and articles. The NLM has one of the most important collections of historical material and writings about the history of medicine in the world.
• Catalogue of the Wellcome Library for the History and Understanding of Medicine (U.K.) Among the largest history of health sciences collections in the world, their catalogue contains records for most of their holdings. Until Summer 2004, information about journal articles in the history of medicine was added to the catalogue.
• Académie nationale de Médecine (Paris) La Bibliothèque de l'Académie nationale de Médecine a conservé, dès la création de l'Académie en 1820, les fonds hérités des Compagnies de l'Ancien régime : l'Académie Royale de Chirurgie et la Société Royale de Médecine. Elle possède 400 000 volumes, dont 800 manuscrits et 113 incunables, ainsi que de volumineux fonds d’archives et de manuscrits.

General indexes to history of medicine information on the web

Several comprehensive indexes provide excellent starting points to history of medicine resources available on the Web.

• History of Biomedicine Produced by the Karolinska Institute Library and Information Center, the site provides links to many resources in the history of the health sciences and resources in many countries with useful chronological divisions.
• Library and Archives Canada - Database of Canadian e-resources A directory of Canadian websites on a variety of subjects, including medicine and health.
• MedHist This is part of the WWW Virtual Library for history, and acts as the Virtual Library for the History of Medicine. This site, supported and maintained by the Wellcome Trust, contains links to sites of online journals, biographies, information on medicine in geographic areas and has a powerful search-engine. It is updated regularly and is normally the best place to start a web-search.
• Universite Laval - histoire de la medecine. A listing of various resources, including websites, created by the Laval University library.