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We are pleased to announce awards for our first Ferenc Gyorgyey/Stanley Simbonis YSM’57 Research Travel Grants since 2019, to two recipients, Michael Ortiz (Harvard University) and Jiemin (Tina) Wei (Harvard University). Ortiz’s proposed project, “American Nature: Life and Political Community in Post-Reconstruction United States, 1877-1927,” shifts the debate on citizenship away from strictly legal and social conceptions, focusing on a new concept of biological citizenship, a consequence of developments in the life sciences, that was operationalized in everyday society. As part of his research at the Medical Historical Library, Ortiz will examine holdings that reflect the cultural life of medical knowledge, such as the Cancer “Cures” Collection and the Medical Trade Card Collection; the Bert Hansen Collection of Medicine and Public Health in Popular Graphic Art; and the William Helfand collection of medical ephemera, as well as archival collections in Sterling Library. Wei’s project,” Ameliorating Fatigue at Work: Workplace-Management, Mind-Body Medicine, and Self-Help for Industrial Fatigue in the U.S., 1910s-1940s” asks not how stress came to be, but how stress-adjacent disorders and the worker came to be subsumed as such under scientific investigation. Wei aims to rethink received notions about the relationship between work, fatigue, and its resolution, particularly focusing on the mediating role played by emergent or evolving scientific subdisciplines at the turn-of-the-century. During her research at the Library, Wei plans to examine the Harvey Cushing papers, Stanley B. Burns, M.D., historic medical photography collection, Pamphlets on public health issued by state government agencies, 1905-1942, and the Spa and Mineral Waters Collection, as well as archival collections in Sterling Library. The Medical Library also awarded its inaugural Stanley B. Burns M.D. Fellowship for the Study of Medical Photographic History to Amadeus Harte (Princeton University). Harte’s project, “How Medical Images Produce Objectivity,” investigates how historical medical images were used to designate objective ideas of "normal" and "pathological" physiology cross-culturally. Please join us in congratulating our newest cohort of fellows at the Medical Historical Library!

Spring 2023 graduates will continue to have access to the Medical Library and to library resources (print and digital) until September 2023. After September, graduates are eligible for tiered borrowing privileges.  Alumni privileges for the Medical Library include: Stacks Pass: Access to the Medical Library facilities and stacks. No borrowing privileges. Free.   Alumni Standard Borrowing: Access to the Medical Library facilities and stacks; borrowing privileges for up to 10 items; loan period is 61 days or when privilege expires (whichever is lesser). Purchased in 3-month increments, $45 per increment or $150/year.   Alumni Premium Borrowing: Access to the Medical Library facilities and stacks; borrowing privileges for up to 50 items; loan period is 61 days or when privilege expires (whichever is lesser). Purchased in 3-month increments, $60 per increment or $200/year.   Remote Access: Alumni can freely use JSTOR collections licensed by Yale.   Additional alumni privileges are available through Sterling Memorial Library (including tiers with interlibrary loan service). For free tools and resources available on the web, visit Alumni Resources for the Health Sciences.   

Yale Library has finalized the APC (article processing charge) discount agreement with Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press. This agreement reduces APC charges from $3,700 to $2,000 per article in the following CSH journals: Genes & Development, Genome Research, RNA, and Learning & Memory. APCs are reduced from $2,250 to $1,215 in Molecular Case Studies. The standard article processing charge, applied to all articles to offset publishing costs, will be waived for open access articles. As a reminder, Yale Library provides support for authors publishing in open access journals through APC waivers and discounts. Visit Open Access Publishing Support for more information. Current APC waivers: Association for Computing Machinery Cambridge University Press Journals Institute of Physics Publishing (IOPP) Journal of Agriculture Food Systems, and Community Development Microbiology Society PLOS Portland Press Current APC discounts: BioMed Central Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press MDPI PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences) Science Advances from the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences (AAAS) Springer Open  

As we launch the Medical Library's exhibition "Killer or Cure? Poison through the Centuries" on March 23rd, we'd like to remind you that while poison has often captured the public imagination through the ages, today it can cause real harm, and even death. Unfortunately, as of 2021, poison is the leading cause of injury death in the United States, and three-quarters of poison deaths are unintentional. Nearly half (41%) of cases occur in children under age 5. Nearly all (93%) poison cases these days occur at home, and most implicated poisons are regular household items – such as common drugs (analgesics and antidepressants), cleaning substances, and cosmetics – that become fatally toxic when not used as intended1. In Connecticut during 2018-2021*, most accidental poisoning deaths occurred due to exposure to drugs**. This data and the figure below are produced from data on underlying causes of death extracted from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) WONDER Database2. This figure on accidental poisoning deaths in Connecticut was created by data librarian for the health sciences, Kaitlin Throgmorton, using Python 3, pandas, matplotlib, seaborn, and Jupyter Notebook – view the code. *CDC Wonder Underlying Cause of Death Files do not include data on infants. These files may not include all data, as data are suppressed when the data meet the criteria for confidentiality constraints. **Drugs combines several categories, including: other and unspecified drugs, medicaments and biological substances; narcotics and psychodysleptics [hallucinogens], not elsewhere classified; antiepileptic, sedative-hypnotic, antiparkinsonism and psychotropic drugs, not elsewhere classified. In addition to the launch of the poison exhibition this week, this week is also National Poison Prevention Week. You can help prevent unintentional poisoning with a few simple tips3: Keep cleaning supplies, medicines, and other household items well out of reach of children. Make sure you know what medicines and supplies you have, and that they're correctly labeled. Call the Poison Help Line at 1-800-222-1222 (or visit www.poisonhelp.org) if you need assistance. References: America’s Poison Centers. National Poison Data System (NPDS) Interactive Dashboard. https://public.tableau.com/app/profile/aapcc/viz/APC_2021-NPDS-Public-Dashboard_PUBLISHED_2023-01-16/AnnualSummary. Accessed at https://poisoncenters.org/national-poison-data-system on Mar 16, 2023. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Health Statistics. National Vital Statistics System, Mortality 2018-2021 on CDC WONDER Online Database, released in 2021. Data are from the Multiple Cause of Death Files, 2018-2021, as compiled from data provided by the 57 vital statistics jurisdictions through the Vital Statistics Cooperative Program. Accessed at http://wonder.cdc.gov/ucd-icd10-expanded.html on Mar 16, 2023. America’s Poison Centers. National Poison Prevention Week 2023. https://poisoncenters.org/nppw-2023. Accessed on Mar 20, 2023.

This past February, the Cushing/Whitney Medical Library, together with the Digital Humanities Lab and other campus partners, celebrated Love Data Week, an international event dedicated to data enthusiasm and education. With more than two hundred attendees across seven events (including many community attendees at the keynote, which was open, virtually, to the public), the week was a resounding success. At Dr. Yanni Alexander Loukissas' keynote, participants heard about the importance of data settings and of grounding data in the real communities they represent. At various training events, participants learned about working with data in Python and R, as well as about the many data management tools available to them at Yale, alongside real-world researcher data management use cases (view a recording of this session). To round out the week, attendees also had the opportunity to attend a documentary film screening on data technology advances and a wellness event focused on managing motivation and increasing mindfulness in data work.   We'd like to extend our gratitude to the following campus partners who presented or assisted with event organization for Love Data Week: Digital Humanities Lab, REDCap @ Yale, Yale Film Archive, Yale School of Medicine Student Mental Health and Wellness Program, Yale ITS Enterprise Storage Team, and Yale Center for Research Computing. We'd also like to thank the following individuals: Sana Ali, Sundari Birdsall, Hannah Clark, Steve DeGroat, Sofia Fertuzinhos, Mary Geda, Dana Haugh, Lisa Ho, Michael Kerbel, Kaylea Nelson, John Onofrey, Vermetha Polite, Kayla Shipp, Sui Tsang, Chris Zollo. Download the Love Data Week 2023 event flyer for more information about the week's activities. And the Love Data Week celebrations aren't quite over! On the afternoon of March 30th, Dr. Lauren Klein will be giving an in-person talk at Yale titled, "The Line Graph and the Slave Ship: Rethinking the Origins of Data Visualization." Register now!