Friday 9 October 2009

Explore medical history online


The Intute website has reported several new medical online resources this week, including:

The National Library of Medicine has digitised key volumes from medical history, including De Humani Corporis Fabrica by Andreas Vesalius, Micrographia by Robert Hooke and Historiae Animalium by Conrad Gesner. You can listen to audio commentary, pan and zoom and read notes for each title here.

Small and Special provides free access to the results of a project into the early development of The Hospital for Sick Children at Great Ormond Street, in London, which was England's first in-patient hospital for children. The project to analyse the patient registers of the hospital from 1852 to 1914 has been carried out in partnership with Kingston University and funded partly by the Wellcome Trust.

Delta classic public health texts provides free access to full text PDFs of key works in the History of Public Health made possible by Delta Omega - the Honorary Society for graduate studies in Public Health, governed by the National Council. They are generally out of print, or not widely available in libraries. Included from the Nineteenth Century are On the mode of communication of cholera by John Snow, The Contagiousness of Puerperal Fever by Wendell Holmes, Notes on Nursing by Florence Nightingale as well as Reports of the Sanitary Commission in Massachusetts.

(Text: intute.ac.uk, photo credit: National Library of Medicine)

Tuesday 6 October 2009

Take a tip from me

Naively, I used to think that tips - to hairdressers, waiters, etc. - helped top up their meagre wages. In fact, their employers used tips as a kind of subsidy to augment the low wages that workers in these industries received. The Department for Business Innovation & Skills has just published The national minimum wage: a code of best practice on service charges, tips, gratuities and cover charges which makes it clear that this practice cannot legally continue, and everyone must receive the National Minimum Wage.