Most people know PubMed Central (PMC) for its free, full-text archive of recent biomedical journals. If you love medical history, you’ll also find that PMC contains a gold mine of historical journal articles dating back to 1809.
Among the many fascinating items in the collection are:
- An article by Florence Nightingale on nursing reform (British Medical Journal, 1892).
- An appeal for justice by Arthur Conan Doyle, related to the infamous case of the Parsi English solicitor George Edalji, which reflected contemporary racial prejudice (British Medical Journal, 1907).
- An article by Walter Reed, on the transmission of yellow fever by mosquitoes (Journal of Hygiene [London] 1902).
This valuable digital collection is the outcome of the Medical Journal Backfiles Digitization Project (2004-2010), a partnership between the Wellcome Trust, the Joint Information Systems Committee, NLM, and a number of medical journal publishers.
~Jill Foust
*Parts of this article were reprinted from Circulating Now: From the Collections of the World’s Largest Biomedical Library blog, PubMed Central: Visualizing a Historical Treasure Trove.