Guide for Finding History of Medicine or Older Medical Articles in PubMed

Connect to PubMed

NB: See below for searching 1951-1965

PubMed is a database of international medical literature provided by the National Library of Medicine. It contains all the citations in MEDLINE and more. The generic version of PubMed is free to the public. The Yale version of PubMed, which requires Yale access, has been enhanced by SFX links to full-text for articles that are available at Yale in that form, or to a search in Orbis, the Yale University Library catalog, to determine if Yale holds the journal in print format.

Covering from 1951 to the present, PubMed includes all historical articles indexed for MEDLINE, the database of current medical literature, as well as articles in some historical journals not covered by MEDLINE. It does NOT include books, book chapters in edited volumes, or dissertations. Book chapters, a major source of history of medicine articles, are instead available through the database, History of Science, Technology, and Medicine. PubMed is most useful for locating historical articles and obituaries in medical journals. Recently data for 1951-1965 has been added to PubMed but since the records are dissimilar to later post-1966 records, search stratgey has to be modified (see below).

How to get to PubMed

From the Medical Library Home Page (http://www.med.yale.edu/library/), choose PubMed from the sidebar on the left side of the page.

or

From the Yale University Library homepage ( http://www.library.yale.edu/), choose Databases & Article Searching, and then PubMed.

Or, go directly to http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/ for the generic version.

Limiting Your Search to History of Medicine

Whatever your search, you can limit it to history of medicine articles, by selecting Limits, then the Subsets pulldown menu, and then History of Medicine. Note that this does not work for entries before 1966. See below.

Search by Subject

Enter a term or terms in the box. You need not use "AND". Examples:
bloodletting
cholera india

Limit to History of Medicine and click on GO. This database is extremely well indexed. The search engine will map your terms to indexing terms (MeSH = Medical Subject Headings) and will also search the terms as text words. For example, if you enter mad cow disease, the search engine will map to the scientific name. To see what is actually being searched, especially if you are not getting what you expected, select Details (below and to the right of the search box).

Search by Author

Enter author name in search box in the format of last name followed by initials with no punctuation, for example, musto df, for articles by faculty member, David F. Musto. Authors are entered in this database only in this truncated form.

Search for Articles about a Person

Search as for author but add a space and the delimiter [ps]. For example, for articles about Harvey Cushing, enter cushing h [ps] in the search box.

Search for Titles or Title Words

Click on Limits and open pulldown menu, All Fields. Choose Title.

Limiting Searches

You can limit your search by language and date of publication. Click on Limits and use the pulldown menus. The search remembers your last limits. If you want to remove your previous limits, click on the checkmark in the box next to Limits.

Selecting, Printing, and Downloading

Select items of interest by clicking on the box before each title and then click on Display (below search box). For abstracts, pull down the menu under Summary, choose Abstract, and click on Display again. You can print your list directly by selecting Print under the File menu, or you can simplify the output for printing by clicking on the Send to button below the search box. Text is the default. You can also use the pulldown menu next to Send to to save or e-mail your citations.

Searching 1951-1965 (“Old Medline”)

Items for 1951 to 1965 have recently been added to the PubMed database. These entries were keyed in from print volumes of Index Medicus. There are no MeSH terms (except for 1964 and 1965), hardly any abstracts, and usually only one subject which has not been updated from the original entry in the printed volume. There is no mapping of the terms you enter. Therefore the earlier entries are harder to search.

Use keywords and truncation! Truncation is ? for this database.

Limiting your search to the subset History of Medicine does not work beyond 1964! Instead do a Boolean search with the word “history,” for example, cholera AND history. That will get you most historical articles along with a lot of “noise.” Other historical articles may be indexed under Obituaries or Biographies.

Searching for articles about a person by using [ps] also no longer works. Search for fulton as a Title word to get obituaries of John F. Fulton.

You can still limit by date or language.