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A village with palm trees printed in ink on the cloth cover of a book.

Elementary Hygiene for the Tropics, 1902

June 2, 2022 Circulating Now

By Elizabeth Fee ~ Originally published in Hidden Treasure: The National Library of Medicine, 2011. This sometimes charming, sometimes dreadful little book offers a series

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Artwork showing physicians and medical students washing their hands before examining obstetric patients.

How to Wash Your Hands, Historically

April 7, 2020 Circulating Now

By Sarah Eilers ~ A simple act of personal hygiene that practically every human carries out daily is key to preventing the spread of viral

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Born #OTD in 1818, Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis was a Hungarian physician and scientist widely regarded as the “savior of mothers” for his discovery of handwashing as crucial in preventing maternal mortality. In 1850, Semmelweis showed that puerperal fever—also known as childbed fever—was caused by an infection, which could be prevented by disinfecting the hands of the obstetricians and midwives with a chlorine solution before they examined mothers in labor. Today, hand hygiene is recognized as a key practice for health care workers to diminish the spread of infections.

Don't put down that #ComicBook! You may learn something!

In addition to being used to create book pages, #parchment is also an option for covering books. Today on #NationalParchmentDay we're sharing a small manuscript from the mid-#16thCentury. It has a limp parchment cover that has shrunk to the point it no longer fully covers the text block - a common phenomenon for this material, which is very sensitive to the many environmental changes that would happen over the course of centuries.

Today we are celebrating the birthday of Helen Keller (born #OTD in 1880). She lost both her hearing and sight after a bought of illness as a young child and went on to become a disability rights advocate. Among her many achievements was her work on behalf of returning veterans during and after the Second World War. This photograph of Helen Keller at the bedside of a wounded veteran was taken during her visit to the patients of Brooke General Hospital in 1944 and was featured in an article in the hospital's magazine, the Brooke Bluebonnet Broadcast. To the patients and staff she said, "The fighting men have splendid morale...it is hard to define--makes me feel the spirit that is mightier than all wars--a spirit that will at last recreate the world."

Barcodes are wonderful! They are immensely useful for keeping track of collection items in our libraries. Unfortunately, they're also sometimes placed in inconvenient places such as on these reports from the 1880s. In addition to being on the envelope the items are housed in, which is totally cool, both barcodes and call number labels were placed directly on the brittle paper at some point in the past. This isn't best for document preservation for multiple reasons, including that the barcodes are much stiffer and thicker than the surrounding paper. We removed them in the conservation lab so that the historic paper will be safer long term.

This image, produced for the NLM's "AIDS, Posters, and Stories of Public Health: A People's History of a Pandemic" exhibition, was recently featured in the piece by @pozmagazine entitled "Viewing the History of AIDS through Posters." Visit https://loom.ly/R1fL-Bs to follow the conversation between three curators on their recent exhibitions which "emphasize the pivotal role played by HIV and AIDS posters since the virus emerged in the early ’80s." (🔗 link also in bio).

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