History of the Health Sciences -- Resource Guide: Access to Secondary Sources

This site provides an introduction to resources used in research dealing with the history of medicine and other health sciences.

Access to Secondary Sources

Listed here are sources that index and/or include works written ABOUT a time or event (secondary sources). However, many of the works listed below also index primary sources as well. Similarly, the section on primary sources includes some works that index secondary sources. For complete coverage, both lists should be consulted.

PubMed
PubMed is a service of the National Library of Medicine that includes over 17 million citations from Medline and other life science journals for biomedical articles back to the 1950. PubMed includes coverage of the major history of medicine journals but does NOT cover many other general history journals that include articles on the history of medicine as well. For these articles, general history indexes such as Historical Abstracts and America: History and Life should be consulted.

Bibliography of the History of Medicine
National Library of Medicine.
28 volumes.
Includes some citations from publications not held by the National Library of Medicine and not appearing in PubMed.
Isis, Cumulative Bibliography
1913-1985 with annual cumulations to present.
A comprehensive journal of the history of the sciences, including an annual bibliography that includes hundreds or citations to works on the history of the health sciences. Although this work can be searched online from its beginning, the individual works in the annual bibliography can only be searched from 1989 to the present. For the period, 1913 through 1985 it is best to use the cumulative print version.

America: History and Life
RECOMMEND USING CHROME; Covers the world's scholarly literature in United States and Canadian history. It includes article abstracts from 1700 journals and bibliographic citations of books and dissertations. The coverage is 1954- .
Historical Abstracts
Historical Abstracts offers coverage of world history, from 1450 onward, outside the US and Canada. (The companion index for those countries is America: History and Life). Historical Abstracts provides citations with abstracts to articles in over 1,700 journals, published 1954 to the present. It also contains bibliographic citations to books and dissertations. Limited to 6 simultaneous users.
As of Sep 2023, we've received some reports from users encountering access issues while using Chrome.
Google Scholar
Despite a rather clumsy search interface (there is no controlled vocabulary) and a continually changing database, Google Scholar can sometimes unearth some otherwise inaccessible primary and secondary sources in the history of the health sciences.Be sure to use the link above so that you’ll be alerted to the availability of full-text articles through one of the University of Iowa vendors.
JSTOR (Journal Storage)
Provides image and full-text online access to back issues of selected scholarly journals in history, economics, political science, philosophy, mathematics and other fields of the humanities and social sciences. Consult the online tables of contents for holdings, as coverage varies for each titles. Journals may be searched across multiple titles as well as by the individual titles below
Note that this database comprises mostly back issues: for most titles the JSTOR database does NOT include full text of the most recent 3 to 5 years.
Readers' Guide Retrospective
A comprehensive index to the most popular general-interest periodicals published in the United States. This database is available through WilsonWeb and covers the time period from 1890-1982. (Formerly on WilsonWeb)
Academic Search Elite
This multi-disciplinary database offers full text for nearly 2,000 scholarly journals, including more than 1,500 peer-reviewed titles. Covering virtually every area of academic study, Academic Search Elite offers full text information dating as far back as 1985. This database is updated on a daily basis.
ProQuest Dissertations and Theses Global (PQDT Global)
ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global is the world's most comprehensive collection of dissertations and theses from around the world, spanning from 1743 to the present day and offering full text for graduate works added since 1997, along with selected full text for works written prior to 1997. [Not compatible with Internet Explorer 9]
Each dissertation published since July 1980 includes a 350-word abstract written by the author. Master's theses published since 1988 include 150-word abstracts. The Database offers researchers unlimited access to digital copies from their own institutions as well as affordable copies from others.
Dissertations & Theses @ CIC Institutions
Full text of all CIC dissertations (including University of Iowa, University of Chicago, University of Illinois, Indiana University, University of Michigan, Michigan State University, University of Minnesota, Northwestern University, Ohio State University, Pennsylvania State University, Purdue University, and University of Wisconsin-Madison) from 1997 to the present. Abstracts are available for earlier dissertations.
Index to Early American Periodicals
These two (of three) 'Indexes to Early American Periodicals' cover 1700 - 1799 and 1800 - 1850 and are thought to include all known periodical publications that had their inception and ending during this time period. The actual periodicals are on microfilm in three microfilm collections of the same names (often referred to as APS I and APS II).

Influenza Encyclopedia, The American Influenza Epidemic of 1918-1919
A digital encyclopedia of over 16,000 historical documents and photographs of the 1918-1919 influenza epidemic in which 650,000 Americans lost their lives.
Harnessing the Power of the Criminal Corpse
This open access book is the culmination of many years of research on what happened to the bodies of executed criminals in the past. Focusing on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it looks at the consequences of the 1752 Murder Act. These criminal bodies had a crucial role in the history of medicine, and the history of crime, and great symbolic resonance in literature and popular culture. Starting with a consideration of the criminal corpse in the medieval and early modern periods, chapters go on to review the histories of criminal justice, of medical history and of gibbeting under the Murder Act, and ends with some discussion of the afterlives of the corpse, in literature, folklore and in contemporary medical ethics. Using sophisticated insights from cultural history, archaeology, literature, philosophy and ethics as well as medical and crime history, this book is a uniquely interdisciplinary take on a fascinating historical phenomenon.

WorldCat
A bibliographic database of over 62,000,000 records from over 2,000 libraries around the world.

Access to Secondary Sources - Nursing

CINAHL
CINAHL Plus provides indexing for 3,024 journals from the fields of nursing and allied health, with indexing back to 1937. CINAHL Plus also contains searchable cited references for more than 1,160 journals.
Note: To limit your search to articles dealing with history go to the "publications type" box and select "historical material."

Nursing: a historical bibliography
Bonnie Belough, 1981.
This source contains approximately 5,000 entries of historical interest to the nursing profession. It has 20 chapters on a wide variety of topics including nurses and nursing in literature, religious nursing, and nurses uniforms.
Nursing studies index
Yale School of Nursing, 1963+
Serves a a guide to the analytical, historical, and biographical aspects of the literature from 190--1959. Entries include reports of investigations, reports of demonstrations, biographical articles, conference reports and more. Includes both primary and secondary sources. Entries are annotated.

Damien Ihrig

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Curator, John Martin Rare Book Room

Subjects: Health Sciences, Health Sciences Departments and Programs