PubMed Central – a Vibrant Source for History
A recent blog post from the History of Medicine Division of the National Library of Medicine (NLM) celebrates the wonderful resource in the history of medicine that is PubMed Central. Best known as a source of current, full-text biomedical articles, PubMed Central also includes the contents of medical journals dating back to 1809. NLM notes that there are now over 3.8 million total items available in PubMed Central.
A word cloud created by the National Library of Medicine showing the frequency of medical subject terms used to describe articles in PubMed Central.
The earliest article that mentions Mount Sinai dates to 1871 and the earliest article found that was written by a Mount Sinai physician was “On the Surgical Dissemination of Cancer” by Arpad G. Gerster, then Director of the Department of Surgery. Gerster was the first to suggest that cancer might be spread by surgical procedure.
Read the NLM blog post and then play around in PubMed Central. You are sure to find something of interest there.