History of Global Health

RE:source is a digital publication of the Rockefeller Archive Center (RAC). Drawing on the RAC’s archival collections documenting the history of philanthropy, RE:source is a place where you will find: stories, timelines, and photo essays examining the role that US-based philanthropy has played in shaping the world we live in today; open-source educational materials, featuring primary sources drawn from our archives, for teaching students of all ages, from elementary school to graduate courses; and reports on new research conducted in the RAC’s collections.

The Medical Heritage Library, Inc. is a collaborative digitization and discovery organization committed to providing open access to the history of medicine and health resources.

The Historical Library contains a large and unique collection of rare medical books, medical journals to 1920, pamphlets, prints, and photographs, as well as current works on the history of medicine. The library was founded in 1941 by the donations of the extensive collections of Harvey Cushing, John F. Fulton, and Arnold C. Klebs. Special strengths are the works of Hippocrates, Galen, Vesalius, Boyle, Harvey, and S. Weir Mitchell, and works on anesthesia, and smallpox inoculation and vaccination. The Library owns over 300 medical incunabula.

Wellcome Collection is a free museum and library that aims to challenge how we all think and feel about health. Through exhibitions, collections, live programming, digital, broadcast and publishing, we create opportunities for people to think deeply about the connections between science, medicine, life and art. We are part of Wellcome, which supports science to solve the urgent health challenges facing everyone. Wellcome supports discovery research into life, health and wellbeing, and is taking on three worldwide health challenges: mental health, infectious disease and climate.

The NLM History of Medicine Division (HMD) collects, preserves, makes available, and interprets for diverse audiences one of the world’s richest collections of historical material related to health and disease. Spanning ten centuries, encompassing a variety of digital and physical formats, and originating from nearly every part of the globe, our collections include: Terabytes of born-digital content, including web sites, blogs, and social media; Manuscripts dating from the 11th to the 21st centuries, including the earliest anatomical drawings and the papers of Nobel Prize winning researchers, U.S. Surgeons General, and leaders in the fields of medicine and public health; Over 600,000 printed works, including 580 incunabula (Western books printed before 1501), some 57,000 16th-18th century books, and over 400,000 titles published between 1801 and 1913; Organizational archives from such groups as the Medical Library Association and the American College of Nurse-Midwives; Over 10,000 audiovisuals; and Over 150,000 prints and photographs.

The ACT UP Oral History Project is an archive of 187 interviews with members of ACT UP, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, New York. The project is coordinated by Jim Hubbard and Sarah Schulman, with principal camera work by James Wentzy (and additional camerawork in California by S. Leo Chiang and Tracy Wares and in London by Souleyman Messalti.)

This online collection offers important historical perspectives on the science and public policy of epidemiology today and contributes to the understanding of the global, social–history, and public–policy implications of diseases.

This collection features approximately 4500 full page plates and other significant illustrations of human anatomy selected from the Jason A. Hannah and Academy of Medicine collections in the history of medicine at the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto. Each illustration has been fully indexed using medical subject headings (MeSH), and techniques of illustration, artists, and engravers have been identified whenever possible. There are ninety-five individual titles represented, ranging in date from 1522 to 1867.

The archive for this journal includes:
Am J Public Health: Vols. 61 to 112; 1971 to 2022
Am J Public Health Nations Health: Vols. 18 to 60; 1928 to 1970
Am J Public Health (N Y): Vols. 2 to 17; 1912 to 1927
J Am Public Health Assoc: Vol. 1; 1911
Public Health Pap Rep: Vols. 1 to 33; 1873 to 1907
Am J Public Hygiene: Vols. 15 to 20; 1905 to 1910
J Mass Assoc Boards Health: Vols. 1 to 14; 1891 to 1904
Articles from this journal are generally available in PMC after a 24-month delay (embargo); however, the delay may vary at the discretion of the publisher.

2010 marks the 30th anniversary of the eradication of smallpox. Smallpox was officially declared eradicated in 1980 and is the first disease to have been fought on a global scale. This extraordinary achievement was accomplished through the collaboration of countries around the world. At the end of the 1960s, smallpox was still endemic in Africa and Asia. Vaccination campaigns, surveillance and prevention measures aimed to contain epidemic hotspots and to better inform affected populations. All these strategies were used to combat the disease.
The photographs presented in the galleries illustrate the various activities carried out to eradicate smallpox around the world. They show how the same eradication methods and strategies were repeated in very different countries around the globe.

Institutional Repository for Sharing Information from the World Health Organization.