New Online, Free Access: NLM Digitizes Nearly 200 Unique Early English Books

From the National Library of Medicine:

The National Library of Medicine (NLM) announces the release through its Digital Collections of nearly 200 items uniquely held by the NLM and printed in the English-speaking world between from 1552 to 1800.
NLM’s participation in the English Short Title Catalog (ESTC) helped staff identify the uniqueness of these items. The ESTC is a union catalog managed by the British Library which lists books, pamphlets, and other ephemeral material printed in English-speaking countries from 1473 to 1800, containing over 480,000 items reported by over 2,000 libraries from around the world, including the NLM, British Library, Folger Shakespeare Library, and Library of Congress.
The NLM holds over 9,000 ESTC items, the most for any medical library in the world.
The NLM’s new digital collection of unique English short titles includes:

• The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton, published in London in the year 1660, and one of the first books on the issue of depression
• the anonymously penned, Treasure for Poore Men, a popular manual published in London in 1565 and containing recipes such as “A medicine for the eye if it be hurte with a thorne” and “a migraine in the head”
• reports about various local hospitals and other charitable organizations in Britain during the 18th century, including Guy’s Hospital in London (1734), Lying-In Charity for Delivering Poor Women at their Own Habitations (1772), and the Asylum for Orphan Girls (1786)
• pamphlets advertising patent medicines and popular guides to health and reproduction.

As with all printed material added to NLM’s Digital Collections, these items will be included in the Internet Archive generally, and as part of the Medical Heritage Library, an international collaboration which the NLM has supported since 2010 to provide free access to historical medical literature.
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The University of St. Andrews hosts the Universal Short Title Catalog (USTC), funded by the Andrew J. Mellon Foundation. The USTC is a unique collective database which seeks to include all books published in Europe between the invention of printing and the end of the sixteenth century.

Search the USTC

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