ResearchBuzz

The Harvard University Library Open Collections Program launched “Contagion: Historical Views of Diseases and Epidemics” at the end of February. It’s available at http://ocp.hul.harvard.edu/contagion/ . This collection contains more than 500,000 pages of digitized books, serials, manuscripts, etc and was designed to offer historical perspectives on epidemiology.

There are a few different ways to review the collection. A timeline covers 1494–1948, and starts with “Syphilis, 1494–1923” and ends with the founding of the World Health Organization in 1948. Some of the entries on the timeline are just data points and facts (”Morton presents the first detailed clinical description of malaria and its treatment with cinchona.”) while the red-bold-italicized entries are links to data pages.

The data page for “The Yellow Fever Epidemic in Philadelphia, 1793”, for example, starts over with an overview of the disease and the way it impacted Philadelphia in 1793, with notable figures in the fight against the epidemic. After the overview there’s a pointer to Web pages (or in this case, Web page) and then a list of publications. At the end there are references for the page as a whole, but let’s get back to the publications.

The publications are fascinating in that they’re contemporary, written within ten years of the epidemic. “A Short Account of the Malignant Fever, Lately Prevalent in Philadelphia…” was written in 1794; ” Observations Upon the Origin of the Malignant Bilious, or Yellow Fever in Philadelphia, and Upon the Means of Preventing It: Addressed to the Citizens of Philadelphia” was written in 1799. Click on the title of a publication and you’ll be able to page through the publications, viewing their pages as either text or images. In this case I think I like the images better; I took a look at a text page and it was still doing the f-for-s thing, so I was reading things like this: “They are firft afted upon, by the heat of the fun…” I can handle this better when it’s the original image.

Epidemics and diseases certainly do not make for light reading, but from a historical perspective this is an amazing exhibit.

I harp constantly on the importance of vocabulary in search, so I’m not going to get into it right now. But vocabulary is one of the reasons I get so interested in those “top searches” lists. They tell what kind of words people are using and sometimes bring to my attention terms and concepts I hadn’t heard of.

I was very interested to read about SearchMedica’s ‘Clinical Search Terms’ reports. this quarterly report will show the list of top searches used at SearchMedica.com, ostensibly by medical professionals. (As using the search engine seems to require no registration, I’m not sure how the users are being identified as medical professionals.)

Top searches include breast cancer and lung cancer, which surprised me because those searches are essentially layman’s vocabulary. Then I saw vertebroplasty metastases and aphthous ulcers. Alrighty then.

SearchMedica.com divides its search into three tabs — general, psychiatry, and oncology/hematology. You can get the press release, with the announcement of the top searches in the preliminary Clinical Search Terms report, here.

London’s Great Ormond Street children’s hospital has launched a Web site containing more than 50 years’ worth of patient records. The new site covers over 84,000 child patients who were treated between 1852 and 1914. You can search it at http://www.smallandspecial.org/ .

From the front page you can search by first name, surname, and approximate year of birth. (There is a far more extensive search available at http://www.smallandspecial.org/search but you’ll have to register to use it.) I did a search for Dickens and got 18 results, including Dickenson as well as Dickens.

The results are in a table that shows date of admission, sex, name, diseases, and registration district. There are no hyperlinks on the table but you can choose a name and click on it for more details. Additional information includes admitting doctor, ward, and length of stay. If you register on the site (registration is free) you’ll get even more information including case notes, residence of the patient, and outcome of the disease. (Not all data is available for all records.)

This is a very interesting set of data for historical or genealogical research. Definitely worth a look!