Blogs

Welcome to Resource Spotlight! The Cushing/Whitney Medical Library provides access to an incredible array of databases, e-book collections, software and more. In this series of posts, we’ll be showcasing highlights from our collection. In this edition of Resource Spotlight, we’ll be looking at the Incidence & Prevalence Database (IPD). Made available by Clarivate Analytics, IPD is a compendium of global epidemiological data from hundreds of sources. The collection of data is intended to provide a comprehensive overview of your research topic - whether that be incidence, prevalence, morbidity, mortality, trends, cost, risk-factors, or disease classifications.  The sources integrated into IPD include government reports, medical journals, market investment reports, medical and scientific associations, national and international healthcare surveys, trade journals, database audits, and industry contacts. The website is updated monthly with new information and government statistics are typically updated annually.  In addition to the data sets procured from sources mentioned above, IPD also features:  Hundreds of “Article Reviews”, where expert analysts condense information into digestible pieces “IPD Summaries”, tables of worldwide and regional incidence and prevalence data  A self-produced “Global Incidence and Prevalence Report with Map” Information on U.S. patient discharges IPD offers some advanced searching functionality that allows users to search by countries or regions, by certain publication criteria (author, title, date), by ICD Code, or by their controlled vocabulary of keywords.  The Incidence & Prevalence Database may be useful to those involved in clinical research, public health, market research, product development, business development, and more.  Start exploring the Incidence & Prevalence Database today! For questions on how to best use IDP, feel free to contact Public Health Librarian Kate Nyhan.

(by Melissa Grafe) Yale University’s Medical Historical Library is pleased to announce the acquisition of an important collection of ephemera, photographs, and rare books related to disability, the Robert Bogdan Disability Collection. Professor Robert Bogdan compiled an archive guided by the ideas of the field of Disability Studies, an approach that focuses on “disability” as a social, cultural, and political phenomenon. Bogdan, an early pioneer in that field, has taught courses related to it since 1971. He started collecting disability ephemera in early 1980s in order to advance his research and writing. As Bogdan began collecting he realized that although there were archives and collections related to specific aspects of disability and particular disability-related organizations, none took a broad Disability Studies approach. The collection is unique in being both broad in scope yet deep in particular areas. For example, there are over four hundred photo postcards of people with a range of disabilities participating in regular life, pictures that might be found in family albums. The people are photographed as family members, friends and loved ones, not as clinical types. There are over one hundred pieces related to begging, ephemera used by people with disabilities to solicit money. There are close to three hundred items related to charities soliciting money for people with disabilities. In addition, there are hundreds items associated with institutions where people with disabilities were confined.  As Bogdan explains, “The collection expands our understanding of the social history of disability as well as contains images that are esthetically challenging and engaging.” There are over 3,500 items in the collection. It covers the period from approximately 1870, when photographic images became widely available, through the 1970s, when the disability rights movement became an important force for social change. Most of the items are contained in 14 large three ring binders organized by topics.  Their format varies but the great majority of the materials are postcards, and most of those are photo postcards. Other photo formats include carte de visite, cabinet cards, as well as other larger photographs. These are complemented by pamphlets and other printed materials.  Please see the preliminary inventory of the collection.  The Medical Historical Library created this finding aid of the collection, which researchers can use to request materials to view in the Library's secure reading room. Bogdan’s work Freak Show is a classic in the field of disability studies, as are a number of his other publications. His most recent book, Picturing Disability, draws on images in the collection. Bogdan has received many honors and awards for his contribution to the field of disability studies.  He is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus in Social Science and Disability Studies at Syracuse University. For questions concerning the collection, please contact Melissa Grafe, Ph.D, John R. Bumstead Librarian for Medical History: melissa.grafe@yale.edu

We’ve offered PubMed and EndNote classes for years, but this year we’re trying something new to make our workshops as efficient and productive as possible! PubMed We realize that our different user groups use the same products in very different ways. Residents and attending physicians may need quick answers to clinical questions whereas students writing their theses may need a more comprehensive search of the literature. We also realize everybody is very busy and 60 minutes are hard to find. To meet these needs, we’ve created two new 30 minute PubMed classes: PubMed for Clinicians and PubMed for Research. Both classes are followed by an optional half-hour hands-on session where attendees can work through their own questions or provided examples.  EndNote Despite offering the same functionality, EndNote looks very different on Apple computers and PCs. To address these discrepancies and make learning basic EndNote tasks easier, we’ve split the introductory class into two: EndNote for Mac and EndNote for PC. Attendees can bring their own computers to become familiar with the interface and create a functioning, organized library by the end of the class. For advanced users, we’ve created a retooled Advanced EndNote class where attendees will fill out a survey prior to the class that lets the instructors cater each session to the needs and questions of the people in the room. No two sessions will be alike!   Check out the class calendar for upcoming workshops.  Are you interested in attending a library workshop and can’t make it to 333 Cedar St.? Let us know, and we can schedule something for your group at your location. 

Check out the newest book in the Humanities in Medicine Collection, Lindsey Fitzharris’s The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister’s Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine. .   Excerpt from the book cover: The gripping story of how Joseph Lister’s antiseptic method changed medicine forever In The Butchering Art, the historian Lindsey Fitzharris reveals the shocking world of nineteenth-century surgery on the eve of profound transformation. She conjures up early operating theaters―no place for the squeamish―and surgeons, working before anesthesia, who were lauded for their speed and brute strength. These medical pioneers knew that the aftermath of surgery was often more dangerous than their patients’ afflictions, and they were baffled by the persistent infections that kept mortality rates stubbornly high. At a time when surgery couldn’t have been more hazardous, an unlikely figure stepped forward: a young, melancholy Quaker surgeon named Joseph Lister, who would solve the deadly riddle and change the course of history. Fitzharris dramatically recounts Lister’s discoveries in gripping detail, culminating in his audacious claim that germs were the source of all infection―and could be countered by antiseptics. Focusing on the tumultuous period from 1850 to 1875, she introduces us to Lister and his contemporaries―some of them brilliant, some outright criminal―and takes us through the grimy medical schools and dreary hospitals where they learned their art, the deadhouses where they studied anatomy, and the graveyards they occasionally ransacked for cadavers. Eerie and illuminating, The Butchering Art celebrates the triumph of a visionary surgeon whose quest to unite science and medicine delivered us into the modern world. Want to know more about this book? Here is the link to the New York Times Book Review by Jennifer Senior: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/29/books/review-butchering-art-joseph-lister-lindsey-fitzharris.html?smid=pl-share   Humanities in Medicine Collection is located across from the Circulation Desk.

You probably know that the Cushing/Whitney Medical Library offers support for bioinformatics projects, but do you know exactly where we fit into the high-throughput omics research data cycle? In this new video produced by CWML staff, you can see a sampling of the tools and services we offer throughout the process. Highlighted resources include: Qlucore Omics Explorer, a tool that facilitates a dynamic analysis of omics data, applicable to various phases of a discovery cycle. Qlucore helps you visualize, QC, apply statistics, and create publication-ready graphics, such as 3D Principal Component Analysis, heat maps, and various 2D plots. Partek Flow software, a program that is used for the analysis of next-generation sequencing data including RNA, small RNA, and DNA sequencing. Partek Flow provides a graphical user interface that allows building your own custom analysis pipelines for alignment, quantification, quality control, statistics, and visualization. Ingenuity Pathway Analysis, a web-based software application for the analysis, integration, and interpretation of the data derived from omics experiments, ranging from microarrays and metabolomics to smaller scale experiments that generate gene and chemical lists. And, finally, MetaCore, a systems biology analysis suite containing information that can be used to perform pathway enrichment, network building, target discovery, and more. For more information on Bioinformatics at Yale, contact Rolando Garcia-Milian.