From the Newsletter of the Archivist and Librarians in the History of the Health Sciences
Spring, 2002, Volume XXV, Number 2

History of Medicine's Hidden Treasures
By Jonathon Erlen

Doctoral dissertations are the hidden treasures of recent scholarship. Annually over 50,000 dissertations are completed and defended worldwide. A surprising number of these studies examine various aspects of the history of medicine and other areas within the medical humanities. Until now librarians and their patrons had to rely on the ProQuest database that has superceded University Microfilms International as the keeper of this rich treasure trove of ongoing scholarship to locate individual dissertations. This wonderful database is very effective in locating dissertations if the searcher knows either the authors name, the exact title of the dissertation, or the unique identifier number assigned to each dissertation. However, if the searcher lacks all of these three factoids the return rate on searches drops as low as 50%. Thus, many of these dissertations have remained hidden from the searcher's grasp and undiscovered on library and/or departmental shelves. Since the vast majority of these dissertations will never be published as monographs and hardly more than half will be published as one or more journal articles this means that the hard work and new findings of a generation of emerging scholars will be lost.

I realized this terrible problem more than three years ago when I joined the new team working out of the University of Oklahoma whose task was to create the annual ISIS Cumulative Bibliography. My part of this bibliographic project was to select appropriate dissertations for inclusion in what is widely considered the world's leading annual bibliography in the history of science. After examining several years of past volumes of this publication and experimenting with the ProQuest database I realized the above mentioned weaknesses of this database. It became readily apparent that the only way to discover the vast majority of appropriate dissertations in the history of science was to read through the hardbound copies of Dissertation Abstracts. Thus every month I read through between 5,000 and 7,000 dissertation titles and abstracts. What I discovered after doing this fascinating task for a year was very surprising.

I had assumed that most of the history of science dissertations would come from either history of science or history departments. Instead I found that the vast majority of appropriate dissertations came from other academic disciplines. I was amazed at the ever-increasing number of history of medicine dissertations being produced in departments ranging from architecture to women's studies. At this point in my bibliographic work I decided to branch out and offer my findings to other journals and databases whose audiences were mostly non-History of Science Society members and who would benefit from access to this new scholarship in their fields of study.

Currently, I am providing monthly dissertation listings to twenty national/international journals and databases, though not all of these are history of medicine related, such as the American Indian Quarterly, the Journal of Women's History, and the ITER database out of the University of Toronto that hopes to provide access to all materials covering any aspects of European civilization, from 400 A.D. through 1700. Still many of my findings are/will appear in history of medicine related publications, including monthly or annual listings in the Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, Nursing History Review, Pharmacy in History, ASBH Exchange, the International Network for the History of Public Health Newsletter, the Configurations annual bibliography, and the BIUM database that covers ancient history of medicine.

Dissertations for these publications/databases have been found in all three series of Dissertation Abstracts. Series A contains dissertations from the arts and humanities and provides by far the majority of all my findings. Series B provides technical science dissertations (it is surprising how many history of medicine dissertations fall under the categories of nursing, public health, mental health, and psychology). Series C covers non-American universities worldwide, though some of the major English and European universities are covered in Series A and B. It is in Series C that one finds a truly international flavor of history of medicine studies. Unfortunately, Series C dissertations have no electronic counterparts and must be ordered directly from the universities issuing these degrees. This is also true for a very few of the dissertations found in Series A and B, such as those from MIT. However, for the vast majority of dissertations listed in my various bibliographic publications the user whose institution/organization subscribes to the ProQuest database, Digital Dissertations, can follow the instructions to download and then print off the entire dissertation, be it 70 or 700 pages in length, for free. For others they can order these dissertations directly from ProQuest in Ann Arbor, MI.

As a final part of my bibliographic work I am maintaining part of the University of Pittsburgh Health Science Library System's Web page-http/www.hsls.pitt.edu/services/histmed/dissertations.html. The technical aspect of this section of the Web page was created by Phillip Bergen, Information Architecture Librarian for the Health Science Library System. Monthly, I update this section, adding dissertations on medical humanities topics from the most current month's volumes of Dissertation Abstracts. These dissertations are divided into fourteen broad categories, from the socio-historical aspects of AIDS to women's health issues. Virtually all these dissertations are available electronically through ProQuest. Thus the dissertations from Series C are not included in this Web site, along with a few from the other series that do not have an electronic counterpart. The accompanying chart illustrates the current status of this Web page, though its physical appearance will be quite different by later this spring.

I encourage you to share the information about this Web site and the bibliographic resources in the journals mentioned above with your patrons. Hopefully, you and they will find this new access to these formally hidden treasures of medical history/humanities scholarship to be useful.

Jonathon Erlen is Curator of History of Medicine, Health Sciences Library System, University of Pittsburgh