Medical Heritage Library

» see medicalheritage.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

i have been pulling scanned books off the internet archive for most of twenty years and i have never once checked who paid for the scanner. Nobody does. A scanned page arrives looking like it has always been there, as though somebody's shelf simply became a URL through natural processes. Behind a great many of the medical ones was this organization, which existed for fourteen years and then closed without most of its readers finding out it had ever been open.

It began in 2010 out of the Open Knowledge Commons, with about 1.5 million dollars of startup money from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to put scanning equipment into partner libraries. The founding members ran from Harvard's Countway Library of Medicine through to the National Library of Medicine, with Yale, Columbia, the New York Public Library and the College of Physicians of Philadelphia along the way. London's Wellcome Library joined the effort from the british side.

The arrangement was simple enough that it is easy to underrate. Each library digitized its own holdings, the files went to the Internet Archive under open licenses, and there was no subscription and no institutional login anywhere in the chain. It incorporated properly as a nonprofit in 2018. A UK Medical Heritage Library ran alongside it from 2014 with nine british digitization partners.

By the end the collection held 355,872 items, mostly books and journals with some audio and video mixed in, covering everything the history of medicine touches from surgery to public health.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what it built ~

The valuable part was the unglamorous part. Anybody will digitize a famous anatomical atlas, because it photographs well and a foundation will fund it. Almost nobody will digitize fifty state medical society journals, thousands of pages of county meeting minutes and obituaries of doctors nobody remembers, which is exactly where the actual social history of american medicine sits.

That material had one copy in one building, findable by people who could get to the building. Turning it into a public file changed who was allowed to be a historian of medicine. If you are outside a wealthy library's subscription list, which is most of the world including where i am sitting, an open scan is not a convenience. It is the difference between the work being possible and not.

~ the next chapter ~

The closure announcement came in march 2024 and the organization dissolved on 30 june 2024, fourteen years after the work started, with no drama and no crisis attached to it. Consortiums run on grant cycles and staff time from institutions that have their own budgets to defend, and eventually one of those runs out.

What makes this a strange grave is that almost nothing was lost. The 355,872 scans stay on the Internet Archive, the conference recordings stay on YouTube, and the organization's own records and website went to the Center for the History of Medicine at Countway, which archived them. Most things on this site died and took their contents with them. This one spent fourteen years moving its contents somewhere that would outlive it, then stopped, having already done the only thing it was for.

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