Using and Accessing Primary Sources

What can evidence from the past tell us about health, medicine, and society today? Historical examples like the 1918-19 influenza pandemic have come back into the limelight as a way to help us understand the present. Understanding the historical and social context of health sciences can inform and enrich your scholarship and clinical practice.

This interactive session will introduce you to historical sources in archives, show you how to find them, and offer tips on how to incorporate these primary historical sources into your research.

General tips: For topics that are new to you, start with a broad overview from reliable secondary sources. Note questions that the sources raise, and note important names (people, places, institutions) and keywords that could be useful in searching. From there, dig deeper by looking for primary sources.

See below for selected examples from the history of vaccines and of mental health care.

An example of sources from a recent blog post, Connecting OHSU Library Resources with “Care and Custody: Past Responses to Mental Health”

Key names and events (U.S.)

• Dorothea Dix: Teacher and advocate who agitated for the creation of asylums to keep people with mental illness out of poor farms, prisons and jails.
• Elizabeth Packard: Campaigned against involuntary confinement in the nineteenth century, pointing out how unequally such laws could be applied.
• Photograph of President John F. Kennedy signing the Community Mental Health Act in 1963: In addition to closing inpatient institutions, advocates and policymakers in the 1950s–1970s proposed robust networks of community behavioral health centers and resources, so that people could access necessary services while remaining in the community.

Digital primary sources (U.S.)

• Dorothea Dix, Memorial to the Legislature of Massachusetts. Boston: Printed by Munroe & Francis, 1843. U.S. National Library of Medicine.
• Elizabeth Packard, Modern Persecution: Insane Asylums Unveiled and Married Woman’s Liabilities Volume I and Volume II. Internet Archive courtesy of the Cushing-Whitney Medical Library.
• “Deinstitutionalization and Community Support: A Report,” July 28, 1975. [MS C 493, Bertram Brown Papers 1884-1988, Series 5] Modern Manuscripts Collection, History of Medicine Division, U.S. National Library of Medicine.

Digital secondary sources (OHSU and Oregon)

• Oregon State Hospital Museum of Mental Health
• Oregon Encyclopedia entries:
  • James C. Hawthorne (1819-1881) by Tim Askin
  • Morningside Hospital by Aurora Siegler
  • Whitecloud Center by Morgen Young

Digital primary sources (OHSU and Oregon)

• Series of reports from the Oregon State Insane Asylum
  Offer a window into the social construction of mental illness as it has changed over time; the “forms of disease” identified for the 384 patients admitted during a two-year period included “idiocy,” “imbecility,” “acute/general melancholia,” and “epileptic insanity” (epilepsy was considered a “neurotic” disorder related to insanity in this era).
• State Psychiatric Service for Rural Courts
  In the 1941 document, a University of Oregon Medical School professor addresses judges with an aim of explaining the benefits of clinical treatment, rather than confinement, for “juvenile offenders.”
• “Release date: A Relational Perspective on Transition from Prison,” by Ariana Cooley and Samantha Ross
  To connect the past to the present, you may want to expand beyond HC&A in Digital Collections. The contemporary clinical issues described in this report are easier to put into context with an understanding from the historical evidence.