Three Times Around and Still Circulating

Three years ago this week, we launched Circulating Now to explore, share, and celebrate the value of the NLM’s world-renowned historical collections and programs for research, education, enrichment, and learning about the human condition.

By several measures, we’ve achieved our goal. In three years Circulating Now has given voice to over 100 individuals—from guest writers to event speakers to our own talented staff—who have shared their own perspectives and meaningful interactions with our collections and with related programs and resources.

With over 500 posts Circulating Now has offered readers worldwide insights on a wide and wonderful range of subjects in the history of medicine—military history, women’s history, African American history; public health, advocacy, legislation; botany, genetics, biotechnology to name just a few.

Circulating Now has showcased the varied formats of the NLM’s historical collections, enabling readers to experience and learn from our monographs, manuscripts, photographs and prints, films, audio files and born-digital collections. And it has highlighted the range of NLM resources that support historical research and make the collections available—from the NLM’s Digital Collections to the IndexCat™ database of millions of bibliographic citations spanning centuries, from the NLM’s award winning Exhibition Program to historical content in PubMed Central, and from Profiles in Science to Medical Movies on the Web.

Letter to Dr. Rider from Dr. S. Weir Mitchell

Part of the Fogarty collection in the John E. Fogarty Room at the Phillips Memorial Library.

Anti-Tuberculosis. Tunisia, 1952

John E. Fogarty receiving a Boy Scout emblem from a Cub Scout, February 9, 1965 Courtesy of Mary Fogarty McAndrew

Palm tree with unicorn from Hieronymus Bock’s Kreüter Bůch, Strasbourg, 1546

NASA Spacesuit Guidebook

Jie sheng hua ben : nong cun zhu chan yuan can kao cai liao, 1951. National Library of Medicine # 101596172

“An attempt to represent our brain’s setup, shown graphically.” The anatomy of the brain and nervous system is here reconfigured as linked rectilinear offices of functions—and covered over with printed tissue paper. Wunder in Uns, pl. 13

Yvonne Scott dials in to MEDLINE, circa 1970. http://ihm.nlm.nih.gov/luna/servlet/s/974vq2

Geraldine Smith of the National Welfare Rights Organization speaks to a reporter about her appearance before the American Hospital Association, 1970 National Library of Medicine

AOTUS examines the Nirenberg chart.

Frankenstein: Penetrating the Secrets of Nature

Ambassador Verbeke and Professor Wils view NLM’s copy of De Fabrica. Photo by Stephen Greenberg, NLM

Circulating Now has reported on the VIPs who have turned their attention to these important historical collections and on NLM collaborators—institutional and individual—who have worked with us to advance knowledge of the history of medicine and communicate the importance of this knowledge in the 21st century.

So in case you missed them, check out a few of our most viewed posts:

• “Wrapped in flesh”: Views of the body in East Asian Medicine
• On Combat Fatigue Irritability: Kerry Kelly Novick
• Pictures of Nursing: The Zwerdling Postcard Collection

And a few of our staff favorites:

• The Earliest Herbals
• “What a mess! And we are not half through”: Dr. Osler on England’s home front in World War I
• The Medical Civil Rights Movement and Access to Health Care

And tell us about your favorite post on Circulating Now. We’d love to hear from you, and we thank you for following us! If there’s something you’d like to learn more about, or topic you wish we would cover, you can tell us about that, too. If you’re new to Circulating Now, welcome! And whether you’re a first time visitor or one of our growing community of followers, we invite you to stay tuned for more great years to come.