Media Review

The Inter-university Library of Health is a French medical library, located in Paris, resulting from the recent merging of two venerable institutions, the Inter-university Library of Medicine and the Inter-university Library of Pharmacy. It harbours a large patrimonial collection, built up over the centuries from 'strata' of acquisitions, legacies from physicians and apothecaries, historical opportunities like the libraries seized from religious congregations andémigrés during the French Revolution, as well as individual librarians' interests and conservation choices. 1 For those who cannot visit the brick-and-mortar Library, the Medic@ website offers online access to documents from its old and rare collections, as well as to electronic resources from other repositories concerned with the history of medicine. Since 2002, the staff of the Library's Department for the History of Medicine has been developing this digital library, which is primarily aimed at scholars working on the history of medicine. Medic@ is a valuable asset to the Library's other documentary services, which include an online databank of images, comprising 80 000 items, a bio-bibliographic database of physicians, and a series of virtual exhibitions. The website's search interfaces and online environment are in French. While this may constitute a real hindrance for non-francophone users, the sober but effective thematic display of the collection on Medic@'s landing page and translations into English of introductions to specific topics and related corpora might facilitate navigation of the website for non-French-speaking users. Medic@ possesses a treasure of 14 000 written documents digitised from the Library's holdings, mostly in French and ancient languages, from the fifteenth century to the early twentieth century. The digital library also has roughly 76 000 notices signalling documents that have been digitised in other repositories. The collection is focused on expressly medical or scientific primary source documents of varied genres, including medical monographs, old pharmacopoeias, medical dictionaries, theses, periodicals, instrument catalogues, and manuscripts. Medic@ has furnished holdings relevant to a vast range of topics in medicine and allied sciences, covering, inter alia, women in medicine, the development of scientific medicine in nineteenth-century France, medical anthropology in the Renaissance and Enlightenment periods, cosmetology and particular diseases. Other riches include a set of Xavier Bichat manuscripts from the Library's holdings, Etienne Jules Marey's complete published work, an important collection of editions of ancient sources from the Renaissance to the nineteenth century, and complete digitised versions of 30 French-speaking medical journals, spanning from their origins to 1940. On Medic@'s …