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Collections: Medicine in the Americas

About the Collection

Medicine in the Americas is a digital library project that makes freely available original works demonstrating the evolution of American medicine from colonial frontier outposts of the 17th century to research hospitals of the 20th century.

Drawing on the collections of NLM's History of Medicine Division and including works from the United States, Latin America, the Caribbean and Canada, this initial release of Medicine in the Americas encompasses monographs dating from 1610 to 1865. Additional titles, dating up to 1920 and drawing further upon NLM's comprehensive collection of early American printed books and journals, will be available on an ongoing basis in the future.

Medicine in the Americas will be of interest to scholars, educators, writers, students and others who wish to use primary historical materials to help expand knowledge of medical and public health history for the advancement of scholarship across the disciplines and for the education of the general public.

Digital files created for Medicine in the Americas, reside in NLM's Digital Collections, a repository for access to and preservation of digitized biomedical resources. Digital Collections allows rich searching, browsing and retrieval of monographs and films from NLM's History of Medicine Division.

Medicine in the Americas is made possible in part through the participation of the National Library of Medicine in the Medical Heritage Library, a digital curation collaborative supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and administered by the Open Knowledge Commons.


Subject Areas

Materials have been scanned from a broad range of areas, including (but not limited to):

  • Popular & Clinical Works
  • Epidemiology & Public Health
  • Allopathic & Alternative Approaches
  • The Diversity of Specializations
  • Ethnic & Racial Diversity
  • Women’s Health & Women Physicians
  • Milestones in Medical Publishing
  • Allied Healthcare Professions

Search over 32,000 digitized books, manuscripts and maps created in the Americas between 1610 and 1920.


All of the works included in Medicine in the Americas are in the public domain, usually because of their dates, though sometimes because they were published by a government body. Also, the National Library of Medicine does not claim copyright on the electronic files created for Medicine in the Americas, so images and text files created for the project can be published or distributed without seeking permission. We do ask that such materials be labeled, "Courtesy of the National Library of Medicine."

For more information about copyright, please visit:
Historical Collections Copyright Information and
NLM Copyright Information.


Additional Information

For more information about the project, please contact the NLM Support Center.

You can view the original website archived in the NLM Institutional Archives web collection.

Last Reviewed: March 11, 2024