Yale University Medical Historical Library Travel Grant

Based at Yale University, the Medical Historical Library holds one of the country’s largest collections of rare medical books, journals, prints, photographs, and pamphlets.

Travel Grant

The Ferenc Gyorgyey/Stanley Simbonis YSM’57 Research Travel Grant is available to historians, medical practitioners, and other researchers outside of Yale who wish to use the Historical collections of the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library. In any given year the award is up to $2,000 for one week of research. Funds may be used for transportation, housing, food, and photographic reproductions. The award is limited to residents of the United States and Canada.

Collection

Special strengths are the works of Hippocrates, Galen, Vesalius, Boyle, Harvey, Culpeper, Haller, Priestley, and S. Weir Mitchell, and works on anatomy, anesthesia, and smallpox inoculation and vaccination. The Library owns over fifty medieval and renaissance manuscripts, Arabic and Persian manuscripts, and over 300 medical incunabula. The notable Clements C. Fry Collection of Prints and Drawings has over 2,500 fine prints, drawings, and posters from the 15th century to the present on medical subjects, and the collection has expanded to approximately 10,000 items. Themes include social justice, war, drug use, reproductive rights, HIV/AIDS, activism, and more. Although the Historical Library does not house the official archives of the Medical School, it does own a number of manuscript and archival collections, most notably the Peter Parker Collection, parts of the papers of Harvey Cushing, and the John Fulton diaries and notebooks. The Library also owns The Stanley B. Burns M.D. Historic Medical Photography Collection; an extensive Smoking and tobacco advertising collection; the Robert Bogdan collection of disability photographs and postcards; medical imagery from popular publications donated by Bert Hansen; and smaller collections of patent medicine ephemera from noted collector William Helfand.