NLM/HMD History Talks by The National Library of Medicine

This lecture was one of several events held in 2019 to celebrate the centennial of Houston Methodist Hospital. Several speakers honored the legacy of Dr. Michael DeBakey, a world-renowned cardiologist who was instrumental in the development of the hospital and its cardiology unit. Speakers include Marc L. Boom, MD, Michael J. Reardon, MD, Craig A. Miller, MD, and William L. Winters Jr., MD. Dr. Miller presented the main portion of the lecture in his talk Through a Distant Lens: Images of the Life of Michael E. DeBakey, MD, followed by a question and answer session.

"Unique Perspectives on Gene Kelly's 1945 Film 'Combat Fatigue Irritability,'" presented to members of the Board of Regents of the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM) and Friends of the NLM.

In this lecture, Dr. Suarez uses developments in a variety of disciplines--art history, museum studies, natural history, and even recent trends in education--to enrich understanding of how digital surrogates can and cannot serve as adequate substitutes for printed books. Recognizing that the digital environment is changing the shape of human inquiry and, hence, the structures of human knowledge, Suarez approaches the world of surrogates both as a bibliographer/book historian and as an editor of digital texts.

During this lecture on "images as cultural history," Dr. Sander Gilman traces the changes in visual representations of persons who are diseased from the eighteenth century through the twentieth century. He focuses on the imagery of psychiatric illness using an array of paintings, lithographs, drawings, and illustrations. Beginning with Hogarth's "The rake's progress" (18th century) and concluding with images representing persons with AIDS, Dr. Gilman provides provocative reasons for using images to study changes in perceptions of health and disease over time.