Yale University Library Research Guides: History of Reproductive Health: Primary Sources beyond Yale

Free, big databases for downloadable primary sources

Turn to these free online primary sources:
Medical Heritage Library
A consortium of medical libraries, including Yale, have put parts of their collections available online. Over 300,000 freely downloadable primary source books, many from 1780-1923. On the Medical Heritage Library website, you can find access to American and State medical society journals.

National Library of Medicine (NLM) Historical Collections
Great primary history of medicine material, including digitized books, images, archives, and moving images (aka movies). Freely available movies include the 1952 film All My Babies: A Midwife's Story and the 1966 Maternity care: labor and delivery.

Internet Archive
Home to a huge variety of resources, including Moving Pictures, for free use. Not limited to history of medicine, but lots of possible primary sources here on childbirth in America. Make sure, if you pick a source from here, that it's uploaded by a library or other institution! Film possibilities include the 1970 Not Me Alone: Preparation for Childbirth, which includes Lamaze, or a 1930s film showing a Caesarian section, Childbirth with Caesarian Operation (Filmed in a Hospital).

Hathi Trust
A huge online repository of freely downloadable books and journals, from a collaboration of libraries including Yale. Not limited to history of medicine, but lots of possible primary sources here on childbirth in America.

Digital Public Library of America
This site pulls in sources and archives (like letters and diaries) from many libraries, museums, and other institutions, as well as big databases like Hathi Trust and Internet Archive.

Topical primary source sites

This is a selected list of sites related to topics involving the history of reproductive health. This is by no means everything!

Birthing Reproductive Justice: 150 Years of Images and Ideas
This exhibit provides a visual narrative of the emergence and antecedents of reproductive justice. Given that women's lives have never been reducible to one dimension of their reproductive health, this exhibit traces a longer history of reproductive justice, illustrating many experiences, debates, and policies related to pregnancy, birth, contraception, and raising children. Birthing Reproductive Justice also explores the question of who has produced and controlled knowledge about women's reproductive health and decisions.
Venereal Disease Visual History Archive
The Venereal Disease Visual History Archive is a project to present and make available visual culture materials related to syphilis and gonorrhea from the first half of the twentieth century that are currently scattered among different digital and traditional archives. The primary focus is on sources related to the popular campaign to “stamp out” venereal disease in the 1930s and 1940s.
Image Archive on the American Eugenics Movement
An older site from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, one of the major centers of American eugenics, this collection includes primary sources including letters, photographs, publications, and more.
The Margaret Sanger Papers Project
Margaret Sanger's work as a visiting nurse focused her interest in sex education and women's health. In 1912 she began writing a column on sex education for the New York Call entitled "What Every Girl Should Know." This experience led to her first battle with censors, who suppressed her column on venereal disease, deeming it obscene. Increasingly, it was the issue of family limitation that attracted Sanger's attention as she worked in New York's Lower East Side with poor women suffering the pain of frequent childbirth, miscarriage and abortion. Influenced by the ideas of anarchist Emma Goldman, Sanger began to argue for the need for family limitation as a tool by which working-class women would liberate themselves from the economic burden of unwanted pregnancy.
Our Bodies, Ourselves
In 1970, a group of women in the Boston area self-published “Women and Their Bodies,” a 193-page booklet that dared to address sexuality and reproductive health, including abortion. They distributed it for 75 cents. A year later, they changed the title to “Our Bodies, Ourselves” — and changed the women’s health movement around the world. The U.S. book was updated in print through 2011 and online until 2018, while global adaptions are still in development today.
Embryo Project Encyclopedia
Within the Encyclopedia, you can find hundreds of descriptive articles about reproductive medicine, developmental biology, and embryology. You can also find thousands of objects such as photographs, microscope slides, and videos. Next, you can find dozens of items such as animations, graphics, and timelines that help users visualize topics. Finally, with EP Essays, users can find longer articles that help them interpret and apply the history of reproductive medicine, developmental biology, and embryology.
The Fetus In Utero From Mystery to Social Media
This exhibition takes an historical approach to this question by exploring the complex evolution of the fetal image in Western Christian culture. We show that before images of the fetus in utero entered the digital age, they have been deployed in three distinctive ways over the past 500 years. First, during the Renaissance, the fetus in utero transformed from an object of divine mystery to one of “rational” inquiry at the hands of male anatomists. Second, from 1700–1965, images of the fetus in uterus underwent a process of medicalization through the male medical gaze. Third, from 1965–present, the fetus in utero has been curated as a public image by a variety of individuals and movements steeped in social and political contexts.

Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library

History of Reproductive Health: Primary Sources beyond Yale

Free, big databases for downloadable primary sources

Topical primary source sites