Wellcome Film added to the Medical Heritage Library

A collaboration among some of the world’s leading medical libraries, the Medical Heritage Library (MHL) promotes free and open access to quality historical resources in medicine. Our goal is to provide the means by which readers and scholars across a multitude of disciplines can examine the interrelated nature of medicine and society, both to inform contemporary medicine and strengthen understanding of the world in which we live.

The MHL is therefore delighted to announce the Wellcome Library as a new content contributor, with the news that Wellcome Film has been added to the MHL’s online content.

An online digital collection of moving images from the collections of the Wellcome Library, Wellcome Film chronicles the history of medicine over the last hundred years and has been freely available in Internet Archive since 2010. The content of Wellcome Film includes rare footage of Sir Henry Wellcome (1853-1936) filmed at the archaeological digs he funded in the Sudan in 1910s, alongside films exploring the development of medicine in the twentieth century, including specific surgical techniques and drug treatments.

As a content provider, the Wellcome Library becomes the latest historical institution to make its collections available through the MHL. The MHL was established in 2010, with funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation via the Open Knowledge Commons, to digitize 30,000 rare medical books. Now, over two years later, nearly 40,000 books, videos, and audio recordings are freely available online, with content provided from many of the leading history of medicine libraries (a full list of our content providers is available on our website).

Author: Michael North, Head of Rare Books & Manuscripts, National Library of Medicine