History of Medicine

The Osler Library of the History of Medicine has an excellent guide for researchers. Items with a red shield icon are restricted to McGill users, but most of the links are to free online resources.

Maintained by Jeremy Norman, and based on older print medical bibliographies. Searchable by author, subject or keyword.

NLM maintains an extensive collection of historical materials related to medicine in the U.S. Here you'll find IndexCat (an index to older medical literature than is covered in MEDLINE), a medical image collection, and much more.

The Medical Heritage Library (MHL), a digital curation collaborative among some of the world’s leading medical libraries, 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’s growing collection of digitized medical rare books, pamphlets, journals, and films number in the tens of thousands, with representative works from each of the past six centuries, all of which are available here through the Internet Archive.

The Wellcome Library in the UK is one of the world's major resources for the study of medical history. Search their digital collections and their catalogues and archives here.

AAHM is one of the oldest associations dedicated to promoting the history of medicine. The website includes information on the association and resources on the history of medicine.

The Canadian Society for the History of Medicine/Société Canadienne d'histoire de la médecine promotes the study, research and communication of the history of health and medicine in all of its facets.

The purpose of the Society is to assist and support the historical study of all questions relating to the medical and biomedical sciences and, more generally, to all branches of the healing arts.

Since its inaugural meeting in 1970, the Society for the Social History of Medicine (SSHM) has pioneered inter-disciplinary approaches to the history of health, welfare, medical science and practice.