History of Health Sciences: Online Collections

Links to various digitized science, technology, and medicine digital collections.

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 websites, 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
Over 150,000 prints and photographs

Our collections are an incredible resource for all kinds of research, whether you are an artist or writer looking for inspiration, an academic researcher, or just curious about something in our exhibitions.

They contain an array of topics relating to health and the human experience in many forms, from recently published books to historical manuscripts and objects. And we’re still adding to our collections in order to encompass a greater diversity of voices and lived experiences.
Thousands of items from our collections have been digitised, and copies are freely accessible online. Our digital collections cover a wide variety of topics, and are particularly strong in the areas of mental health, sex and sexual health, genetics, public health, and 19th-century books.