By Robin Naughton, Ph.D., Head of Digital
State medical journals digitized for the MHL consortium.
The New York Academy of Medicine Library is digitizing state society medical journals as part of a mass digitization project with the Medical Heritage Library (MHL), a digital curation consortium. The Academy Library is one of five collaborators on the project, along with the College of Physicians of Philadelphia; the Countway Library of Medicine at Harvard University; the Health Sciences and Human Services Library, University of Maryland; the Founding Campus; and the University of California at San Francisco.
Together, the MHL team is actively working to digitize 48 state society journals, more than 3,800 volumes that span much of the 20th century. Digitizing the state medical journals will provide open access to quality historical resources in medicine for researchers and the general public, letting them explore connections between medicine and society.
State medical journals digitized for the MHL collective project.
Evenly splitting the volumes among the MHL team makes the process of mass digitization more manageable and very collaborative. The Academy Library has already digitized almost 50% of the state medical journals assigned to it since Fall 2015. The journals are scanned by the Internet Archive (IA) and are publicly available as part of the Library’s and MHL’s collections on the IA site. Our digitized assets are open for anyone to access and use. Thus far, we have digitized journals representing 24 states and almost 238, 000 images.
The volumes are digitized in their entirety, showing the journals’ articles and advertising. For example, in Alaska Medicine (vol. 29, 1987), as you read the article “Alaska State Hepatitis B Program – Past, Present and Future” by Elizabeth A. Tower, you can’t help but notice the advertisement for medical transcription. It is hard to resist the “Hello …. Museum of Primitive Civilizations and Hieroglyphs?”
Scan from Alaska Medicine, vol. 29, 1987.
State medical journals are valuable resources that should lead to many new and novel projects for researchers in the history of medicine. Look for more on the project as it progresses.
Books, Health and History 
The Maryland Medical Journal is in the process of being added, bringing the number to 49. MedChi, The Maryland State Medical Society is digitizing our MMJ volumes from 1876 to 1900 as part of the project.
Are only the 20th-century issues being digitized? Are there plans to scan the earlier ones too at some point?
Hi Bert, yes! It does include scanning of journals in the 19th century as well (ca. 1800 items).
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