Tuesday, May 26, 2009

Bullitt Club Lectures for 2008-9 Available Online

The Bullitt History of Medicine Club has completed its 2008-9 lecture series, and made the audio portion of each presentation available online as MP3s. The Bullitt Club sponsors a collaborative evening lecture series in conjunction with Duke University's Trent History of Medicine Society, with lectures alternating monthly between the two venues. The Bullitt Club also presents noon-time lectures in months when there is no evening lecture at UNC. The lineup for 2009-10 is currently being prepared, with the first lecture in the new academic year planned for September 2009.

Bullitt Club Speakers for 2008-9:

Dr. Sue Estroff, Professor of Social Medicine, UNC School of Medicine
Blemished Bodies and Persons: An Historical Perspective on Stigma
:: April 14, 2009 [75 MB, 1:20:15]

Lisa Wiese, Second-Year Medical Student, UNC School of Medicine
Washington, D.C.: Understanding the Poverty-Health Link from an Historical Lens
:: April 6, 2009 [48 MB, 51:22]

Dr. Todd Savitt, Professor of Medical Humanities, East Carolina University
Entering a "White" Profession: Black Physicians in 19th- and 20th-Century America
:: February 10, 2009 [59 MB, 1:03:22]

Dr. Aldo Rustioni, Professor of Cell and Developmental Biology, UNC School of Medicine
The Neuron Doctrine of 1891 and the 1906 Nobel Award for Physiology or Medicine
:: January 21, 2009 [55 MB, 59:32]

Dr. Vanessa Northrington Gamble, University Professor of Medical Humanities, George Washington University
"Without Health and Long Life All Else Fails": A History of African-American Efforts to Eliminate Racial Disparities in Health and Health Care
:: December 9, 2008 [60 MB, 1:04:24]

Chris Dibble
, MD/PhD Student, UNC School of Medicine
Winner of 2008 McLendon-Thomas Award in the History of Medicine
Edward Livingston Trudeau: The First American Physician-Scientist and the Fight against Tuberculosis
:: November 17, 2008 [49 MB, 52:38]

Dr. Elizabeth Fenn, Associate Professor of History, Duke University
Pox Americana: The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775-82
:: October 21, 2008 [61 MB, 1:05:18]

Wendy Moore, Freelance Journalist and Author (England)
The Knife Man: The Extraordinary Life and Times of John Hunter, Father of Modern Surgery
:: September 23, 2008 [58 MB, 1:02:02]

Ansley Herring Wegner
, Research Historian, North Carolina Office of Archives and History
Phantom Pain: North Carolina's Artificial Limbs Program for Confederate Amputees
:: September 17, 2008 [34 MB, 36:32]

Tuesday, May 12, 2009

SAHMS: Call for Papers on the History of Medicine

The Southern Association for the History of Medicine and Science (SAHMS) has issued a call for paper proposals for its twelfth annual meeting on March 5-6, 2010 in Louisville, KY, co-sponsored by the University of Louisville School of Medicine and the Innominate Society.

SAHMS welcomes papers on the history of medicine and science, broadly construed to encompass historical, literary, anthropological, philosophical and sociological approaches to health care and science including race, disabilities and gender studies. Participants may propose individual papers or panels of several papers on a particular theme. Each presenter is limited to 20 minutes, with additional time for questions and discussion. Complete details for submissions are available on the SAHMS web site. Proposals should be submitted no later than September 30, 2009.

Wednesday, May 6, 2009

BMJ Offers Prize for Use of Its Online Archive

To celebrate online access to all research articles since the first published in October 1840, BMJ, or the British Medical Journal, is offering a 1,000-pound prize to the "most interesting use" of its archive. Entrants to the competition must describe their actual use of the archive in an article that is submitted by the September 30, 2009 deadline. Complete guidelines are available at the BMJ site.

To highlight some of the many influential contributions to medical scholarship and practice that have appeared in its pages over the years, BMJ is also producing a series of videos that describe the work of such people as James Simpson (chloroform), Joseph Lister (antisepsis), Ronald Ross and Patrick Manson (mosquitoes and malaria), Richard Dahl (smoking and cancer), Alice Stewart (x-rays and leukemia), and others. The first video in the series, "The Evidence," is now available online.

BMJ began as the Provincial Medical and Surgical Journal in 1840 and after various name changes became the British Medical Journal in 1857. BMJ was the first general medical journal to participate in PubMed Central, which offered to digitize and provide open access to the journal's back issues. Initial difficulties included assembling a complete run of the journal in all its incarnations as well as overcoming the many technical issues inherent in digitizing historical materials, such as poor paper quality and bleed-through during scanning.

The National Library of Medicine, and later, the Wellcome Trust and the Joint Information Systems Committee, provided financial support for the project, with an estimated expense of $1 per page for the 824,183 total pages of the print journal. At present, BMJ is available both at the BMJ web site and at PubMed Central. Access to article type, however, varies between the two resources. In January 2006, BMJ stopped offering free online access to non-research articles, although research articles are still available from the time of publication at both bmj.com and PubMed Central. Further information on the online archive can be found in a recent BMJ editorial.