Great News!

As of this writing, Maryland is one of only three states which doesn’t have its medical journals digitized. But that’s all about to change! We are taking part, with the UM School of Medicine’s Health Sciences and Human Services Library, in a project to digitize our Maryland Medical Journal volumes from 1900 to 1960. We stop at 1960 due to some copyright and royalty issues.

The name of our publication seems to wander back and forth between the Bulletin, the Maryland Medical Journal and the Journal. Separately, there’s a publication called “Transactions” which is the proceedings of the spring and fall House of Delegates meetings, as well as various academic articles.

The great news is that we’ve received a donation in support of the archives which we will be using to digitize the pre-1900 Maryland Medical Journal volumes!

In February, I visited Archives.org, which is located at the National Agricultural Library in Beltsville, Maryland. I had spoken to them on the advice of the HSHS Library, and found that’s where they’re digitizing the rest of the Journals. They digitized one volume for me as a test, and it was PERFECT! You can look at it here. You can go through it page by page, or search for a specific term or person. It is going to be a massive aid to those doing medical research in the late 19th century and to those searching for their ancestors.

Once the pre-1900 Journals are digitized, they will be uploaded to Archives.org and attributed to MedChi. We can add a page on our website with links to the Journals.

While I love searching for things in our archives, much of the time, I get vague requests, such as “I think it’s sometime in 1945” only to find that it was really an article in 1959. Or the request to find our which medical school Grandpa attended, only to notify the caller that there were about a dozen medical schools in Baltimore in 1900.

I will make a (huge) announcement when everything’s finally on-line!