Find Primary Sources - HPS319H1 - History of Medicine II: 17th-20th century (Fall 2019)

What is a primary source?

Primary sources provide first-hand testimony or direct evidence concerning a topic under investigation. They are created by witnesses or recorders who experienced the events or conditions being documented.

Often these sources are created at the time when the events or conditions are occurring, but primary sources can also include autobiographies, memoirs, and oral histories recorded later.

The medium of the primary source can be anything, including written texts, statistics, objects, buildings, films, paintings, cartoons, etc. What makes the source a primary source is when it was made, not what it is.

Examples of primary sources include, but are not limited to:

Anatomical drawings (ex. Vesalius's Fabric of the Human Body)
Etchings, drawings, or paintings (ex. The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp)
Instruments, tools, artifacts (ex. Bone Forceps from Ancient Greece)
Written works (ex. On the Sacred Disease)
Patient case histories written by doctors (ex. Studies on Hysteria)
Patient narratives of their experiences (ie. diaries, letters, autobiographies, drawings, poems. ex: The Yellow Wallpaper)
Newspaper articles (ex. an article about SARS in the Toronto Star during the 2003 outbreak)
Legal documents (ex. court transcripts of the Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement)
Etc.!

How to Analyze a Primary Source

When you analyze a primary source, you are undertaking the most important job of the historian. There is no better way to understand events in the past than by examining the sources--whether journals, newspaper articles, letters, court case records, novels, artworks, music or autobiographies--that people from that period left behind.

There are TWO major steps to take when examining a source.

Step 1: Ask Questions About the Source (i.e. where was it created; what was the author's occupation; when and how was it created, why might it have been created, etc.?)

Step 2: Find Answers to Your Questions

The best place to find answers to basic questions about your source (the who, what, when, where, how) is in general background sources, like encyclopedias or textbooks. Wikipedia can often be a great place to start, but Wikipedia, like any other encyclopedia is NOT a scholarly source and should not be used a secondary source in your assignment. These are background resources to help find out the basic 'facts' on your source to get you started.

Click HERE for a list of history of science background resources you can try searching for information on your source.

If you have more complex questions about your source that can't be answered in a background resource, you might have a research question on your hands! Time to do some secondary source research.

Databases for Primary Sources - A Selection

Popular Medicine in America, 1800-1900
This unique collection showcases the development of 'popular' medicine in America during the nineteenth century, through an extensive range of material that was aimed at the general public rather than medical professionals. Explore an array of printed sources, including rare books, pamphlets, trade cards, and visually-rich advertising ephemera.
Medical Heritage Library
This is a subset of the Internet Archive of selected historical medical material. The difference between this site and the Internet Archive is that the MHL lets you do full text searching across all the digitised content. This is a good resource for locating historical medical information embedded into more general primary historical works.
Wellcome Library Moving Image and Sound Collection
The Library’s film, video and audio collection is one of the largest of its kind. It covers all aspects of medicine, health and welfare throughout the 20th century and beyond.
19th Century Masterfile
The 19th Century Masterfile is an accumulation of various indexes to printed materials from the nineteenth century. Coverage ranges from about 1774 to 1920, depending on the index selected.
Science in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical
A searchable electronic index to the science content of sixteen nineteenth-century general periodicals.

North American Immigrant Letters, Diaries, and Oral Histories This link opens in a new window
North American Immigrant Letters, Diaries and Oral Histories includes 2,162 authors and approximately 100,000 pages of information, so providing a unique and personal view of what it meant to immigrate to America and Canada between 1800 and 1950.

North American Women's Letters and Diaries
North American Women's Letters and Diaries includes the immediate experiences of 1,325 women and 150,000 pages of diaries and letters. Particular care has been taken to index this material so that it can be searched more thoroughly than ever before. The materials have been carefully chosen using leading bibliographies, supplemented by customer requests and more than 7,000 pages of previously unpublished material. The collection also includes biographies and an extensive annotated bibliography of the sources in the database.
British and Irish Women's Letters and Diaries
This collection includes diaries and letters of nearly 500 women spanning more than 300 years. Each source has been chosen using leading bibliographies. The collection also includes biographies and an extensive annotated bibliography of the sources.

Mass Observation Online This link opens in a new window
Mass Observation Online offers revolutionary access to one of the most important archives for the study of Social History in the modern era.
Black Thought and Culture This link opens in a new window
Black Thought and Culture contains 1,303 sources with 1,210 authors, covering the non-fiction published works of leading African Americans. Where possible the complete published non-fiction works are included, as well as interviews, journal articles, speeches, essays, pamplets, letters and other fugitive material.
LGBT Life with Full Text This link opens in a new window
Formerly known as "GLBT Life". Index to Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender literature, with full text for some important GLBT journals, magazines and regional newspapers. Disciplines covered by GLBT Life include civil liberties, culture, employment, family, history, politics, psychology, religion, sociology and more. This database contains indexing and abstracts for more than 80 GLBT-specific core periodicals.

Electronic enlightenment
An online collection of edited correspondence of the early modern period, linking people across Europe, the Americas and Asia from the early 17th to the mid-19th century. Historical figures discuss everything from religious tolerance to animal rights, vulcanology to classical archeology, economic modelling to celebrity culture.

London Low Life This link opens in a new window
Bringing to life the teeming streets of Victorian London and inviting you to explore the gin palaces, brothels and East End slums of the nineteenth century’s greatest city, London, England. From salacious ‘swell’s guides’ to scandalous broadsides and subversive posters, the material sold and exchanged on London’s bustling thoroughfares offers an unparalleled insight into the dark underworld of the nineteenth century city. Children’s chapbooks, street cries, slang dictionaries and ballads were all part of a vibrant culture of street literature.

Gallica
The vast digital library of the Bibliothèque nationale de France. Provide free access to works by ancient to modern scientists from the Western and Arab worlds, papers of scientific societies and early science dictionaries.

**includes secondary sources as well as primary sources!
The Cushing/Whitney Medical Library's Collection of Prints and Drawings

The Cushing/Whitney Medical Library's Collection of Prints and Drawings shows how artists have portrayed issues and events related to health and medicine over six centuries. The extensive collection of Clements Collard Fry was bequeathed in 1955. To it are added works from the collections of the library's founders Harvey Cushing, John F. Fulton and Arnold C. Klebs and from the collections of Edward Clarke Streeter, Gertrude van Wagenen, and William Helfand. The collection continues to grow through gifts and purchase from endowments.
National Library of Medicine - Online Oral Histories
NLM's online oral histories provide access to a wealth of digitized transcripts, and audio when available. These interviews may be searched below, left, either as a whole or according to the collections into which they are divided.

PubMed This link opens in a new window
PubMed comprises more than 24 million citations for biomedical literature from MEDLINE, life science journals, and online books. Citations may include links to full-text content from PubMed Central and publisher web sites. Search this database to find history of medicine articles published in biomedical journals.

**includes secondary sources as well as primary sources

Databases for Primary Sources - Psychiatry & Psychology

PsycINFO
The major index for scholarly literature in psychology from the 1800’s to the present. PsycInfo includes material of relevance to practitioners, researchers and students working in all areas of psychology, the behavioural sciences, and other related disciplines. Records from 1967 to the present are indexed using the Thesaurus of Psychological Index Terms. PsycInfo is published by the American Psychological Association (APA).

**includes primary sources AND secondary sources. Context matters!
Psychological Experiments Online
Psychological Experiments Online is a multimedia collection that synthesizes the most important psychological experiments of the 20th and 21st centuries, fostering deeper levels of understanding for students and scholars alike. These experiments have far-reaching impacts on fields as diverse as sociology, business, advertising, economics, political science, law, ethics, and the arts.

Counseling and Psychotherapy Transcripts, Client Narratives, and Reference Works This link opens in a new window
Counseling and Psychotherapy Transcripts, Client Narratives, and Reference Works is a searchable collection containing real transcripts of counseling and therapy sessions and first-person narratives illuminating the experience of mental illness and treatment, as well as reference works to contextualize the primary material. The database contains more than 2,000 session transcripts, 44,000 pages of client narratives, and 25,000 pages of secondary reference material.
APA PsycTests This link opens in a new window
This database is published by the American Psychological Association and provides bibliographic, plus full text and multimedia of psychological tests from the early 1900s to the present. Test records include descriptive summaries of the test and its development and administration, mostly drawn from articles in peer-reviewed journals or books, with downloadable tests. 75% of the test records contain the actual test or test items.

Research Guides

HPS319H1 - History of Medicine II: 17th-20th century (Fall 2019)

What is a primary source?

How to Analyze a Primary Source

Databases for Primary Sources - A Selection

Databases for Primary Sources - Psychiatry & Psychology

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