[Quality criteria for scientific collections within medical associations: the collections of the German Urological Association fullfill high requirements]. / Qualitätskriterien für Sammlungen medizinischer wissenschaftlicher Fachgesellschaften : Die Sammlungen der DGU erfüllen ihre Anforderungen.

Quality criteria are necessary for the evaluation and rating of scientific collections of medical associations and are necessary for their development in order to argue within the scientific community or with other relevant actors.

Humphry Davy and the Royal Institution of Great Britain.

The abortive attempts of Sir Humphry Davy to introduce modest reforms at the Royal Society of London during his Presidency (1820-27) contrast with his (largely unstudied) earlier experience of administration at the Royal Institution of Great Britain (RI). Davy's attempts to combat the systemic weaknesses in governance and funding, and his role in effecting changes at the RI, in association with a core group of reformers, merit consideration. This paper analyses important aspects of the early management and social structure of the RI and examines the inner workings of the institution. It shows how and why the Library, its most valuable financial asset, and its celebrated Laboratory, developed along distinctive lines, each with its own support structures and intra-institutional interests. While acknowledging the roles traditionally ascribed to Count Rumford and Sir Joseph Banks, the paper highlights the contributions of other early patrons such as Thomas Bernard, son of a colonial governor of Massachusetts, and Earl Spencer, a leading European bibliophile and RI President from 1813 to 1825. The promotion of a Bill in Parliament in 1810, designed to transform the RI from a proprietary body politic into a corporation of members, and the subsequent framing of the bye-laws, provided opportunities to establish a more democratic structure of elected committees for the conduct of science.

The great contribution: Index Medicus, Index-Catalogue, and IndexCat.

OBJECTIVE: The systematic indexing of medical literature by the Library of the Surgeon-General's Office (now the National Library of Medicine) has been called "America's greatest contribution to medical knowledge." In the 1870s, the library launched two indexes: the Index Medicus and the Index-Catalogue of the Library of the Surgeon-General's Office. Index Medicus is better remembered today as the forerunner of MEDLINE, but Index Medicus began as the junior partner of what the library saw as its major publication, the Index-Catalogue. However, the Index-Catalogue had been largely overlooked by many medical librarians until 2004, when the National Library of Medicine released IndexCat, the online version of Index-Catalogue. Access to this huge amount of material raised new questions: What was the coverage of the Index-Catalogue? How did it compare and overlap with the Index Medicus? METHOD: Over 1,000 randomly generated Index Medicus citations were cross-referenced in IndexCat. RESULTS: Inclusion, form, content, authority control, and subject headings were evaluated, revealing that the relationship between the two publications was neither simple nor static through time. In addition, the authors found interesting anomalies that shed light on how medical literature was selected and indexed in "America's greatest contribution to medical knowledge."

[The art cabinet and its current significance. Museum establishment of natural history in early modern times]. / Die Kunstkammer und ihre Aktualität. Museale Inszenierungen von Naturgeschichte in der Frühen Neuzeit.

For some time a hightened interest in so-called "curiosity cabinets" of the 16th to 18th century has surfaced in the historical sciences as well as in exhibitions with popular appeal, the arts and literature. Johann Laurentius Bausch was among those who assembled such a collection of natural history objects and artefacts. His curiosity cabinet was closely connected to his far more famous library and in his last will Bausch attempted to safeguard the coherence of the two. Against this background the article accentuates some of the aspects of his work from a perspective of a history of collections. One focus will thereby be on the practice of collecting as seemingly contradictory, being characterised on the one hand by the preservation of ancient knowledge as well as by scientific research based on specific objects. Another focus will be on curiosity cabinets as important platforms of exchange and means of social advancement. For the Academia Naturae Curiosorum exhibition objects and their publication were an important device of achieving recognition and protection from the Emperor's Court.

A história e o acervo das obras raras da Biblioteca de Manguinhos / The history of Biblioteca de Manguinhos and its rare collections

Descreve a formaçäo do acervo de obras raras da Biblioteca de Manguinhos, da Fundaçäo Oswaldo Cruz. Säo obras que se estendem dos séculos XVII ao XX, distribuídas entre livros, coleçöes de periódicos, folhetos, teses, que contemplam valiosos trabalhos na área da história das ciências biológicas e da saúde. Descreve também a riqueza ornamental e decorativa do ambiente e do mobiliário preservados da biblioteca. Resgata a trajetória de 100 anos da Biblioteca de Manguinhos, intimamente associada à história da Fundaçäo Oswaldo Cruz.

Financing North American medical libraries in the nineteenth century.

Culture not only justifies the existence of libraries but also determines the level of funding libraries receive for development. Cultural appreciation of the importance of libraries encourages their funding; lack of such appreciation discourages it. Medical library development is driven by culture in general and the culture of physicians in particular. Nineteenth-century North American medical library funding reflected the impact of physician culture in three phases: (1) Before the dawn of anesthesia (1840s) and antisepsis (1860s), when the wisdom of elders contained in books was venerated, libraries were well supported. (2) In the last third of the nineteenth century, as modern medicine grew and as physicians emphasized the practical and the present, rather than books, support for medical libraries declined. (3) By the 1890s, this attitude had changed because physicians had come to realize that, without both old and new medical literature readily available, they could not keep up with rapidly changing current clinical practice or research. Thus, "The Medical Library Movement" heralded the turn of the century.

[From Problemata Aristotelis to the handbooks of Döderlein. The old book collection of the Rikshospitalet, a center of knowledge and a research tool]. / Fra Problemata Aristotelis til Döderleins håndbøker. Rikshospitalets gamle boksamling, et kunnskaps- og forskningsverktøy.

The collection of old medical and scientific books from the National Hospital in Oslo is a valuable library for education and research. Most of the books are from the collections of the obstetric, paediatric and dermatological departments. The oldest date from the mid-sixteenth century, but the collection also reflects systematic purchases of medical literature after 1800. This library offers an exceptional opportunity in Norway for studying the development of medical knowledge and practice over two centuries.

The legacy of New Jersey physician book collectors.

For 70 years New Jersey physicians generously gave books from their personal libraries to create a medical library in the state. Today, the old and rare medical books they collected are available to new generations of physicians and scholars in the history of medicine collection at UMDNJ Smith Library.

Chasing the ambulance. The emerging crisis in the preservation of modern health records.

In this brief essay we argue that the best efforts of archivists, scholars, and practitioners within the National Health Service have not prevented the wholesale destruction of the bulk of patient records created during the twentieth century. This is a matter of vital concern not merely for historians of modern medicine. Important clinical work has frequently been undertaken on materials which have survived, usually by chance or by the foresight of physicians, matrons, and administrators. Even the significant fragments of historical documents which remain in the hands of the health authorities have been threatened by the continuing drive to reduce storage and maintenance costs within hospitals. Archivists and academics have struggled to address the problems of sampling, storage, and access which the enormous bulk of modern records present. In this essay we suggest that the first step must be to raise awareness amongst professionals and the public of the extent to which any future history of the medical services and of patient care will depend on a reasonable rate of survival of these records. The second step must be to confront the problem of resources and the inevitable task of selection which must form the foundations of any long-term policy of preservation. An initial survey of archival materials in Devon indicates that the records of community health care form a substantial and potentially invaluable research source for future historians, though their relevance has rarely been recognized within the academic community.