Home | Library Services & Information | Staff Directory | Toby Anita Appel

Toby Anita Appel, Ph.D., M.L.S.

Liaison to:

  • History of Medicine

Other Programs:

  • Program in Humanities in Medicine

  • Yale Medical Alumni Office

Personal Librarian for students in:

  • History of Medicine


Contact me at:

As your Librarian, Toby can:

  • Serve as your single point of contact to all things library
  • Tailor an instruction session for you or your class
  • Receive your suggestions for new purchases – books, journals, dissertations, DVDs, and electronic resources
  • Help you search for information in any of the Medical Library’s many databases
  • Send you the ‘Medical Library News’ each month – highlighting new resources and information about the library’s programs to keep you up-to-date.

About your librarian

I am a historian of science and medicine as well as a librarian and have been head of the Historical Library at Cushing/Whitney Medical library since 1994.  We purchase new (circulating) and rare books and prints in the history of medicine, offer reference services including teaching classes on resources, catalog rare books and manuscripts, do exhibits, create electronic exhibits, enter images from our collection into the Digital Library, make selected materials (e.g. articles from 19th century journals) available through Document Delivery.  We also have an active preservation program.

For more information on the Historical Library, see
http://www.med/yale/edu/library/historical/

Contact me for assistance in:

  • Using the Historical Library’s collections.
  • Locating primary and secondary sources for your historical research.
  • Obtaining copies of images in the collection.
  • Setting up a class in the Library using our resources.
  • Finding materials related to the history of Yale medicine including information on past graduates and faculty of Yale School of Medicine.
  • Finding information on past physicians, especially those who practiced in Connecticut.
  • Using databases for finding materials in the history of medicine including PubMed, History of Science, Technology, and Medicine, Index Catalog of the Surgeon General’s Library, various history and general databases, etc. 

Education:

  • PhD, Princeton University (History of Science)
  • M.L.S. University of Maryland

Primary position:

John R. Bumstead Librarian for Medical History.

Affiliate appointments: 

Research Associate of the Section of History of medicine and an associated faculty member of the Program in History of Science and Medicine (HSTM).

Society Memberships

  • Archivists and Librarians in the History of the Health Sciences.
  • American Association for the History of  Medicine.
  • History of Science Society.
  • Association for the Study of Connecticut History.

Library Committees

  • YUL Manuscript Cataloging Subcommittee
  • YUL EAD Finding Aids Committee
  • YUL Special Collections Committee
  • Medical Library Digital Library
  • Information Desk.

Recent Presentations

“Kate Hurd-Mead: Doctor in Connecticut, Medical Woman of the World,” The Kate Hurd-Mead Lecture of Drexel University School of Medicine, presented at the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, March 15, 2007.  Earlier version presented to the Frederic L. Holmes Workshop, Section of the History of Medicine, Yale University, February 12, 2007.

“Early Women MDs in Connecticut, 1865-1920, Especially Kate Campbell Hurd Mead, Feminist Physician and Historian of Medicine,” Beaumont Medical Club, Yale University, October 20, 2006.

“Our Digital Library, especially the Portrait Engravings Collection,” Archivists and Librarians in the History of the Health Sciences annual meeting, Halifax,  N.S., May 4, 2006.

“Medical Societies, Alternative Physicians, and the State in Antebellum Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island,” New England Historical Society, Rutland, Vermont, October 16, 2004.

“Orthodox and Botanic Healers in Antebellum Connecticut: A Case Study of the Repeal of State Medical Licensing Laws,” Frederic L. Holmes Workshop, Section of the History of Medicine, Yale University, February 10, 2004.

“Medical Sects, Societies, and the State in Antebellum Connecticut: The Thomsonian Herbal Physicians and the Medical Licensing Law,” Robert U. Massey History of Medicine Society, University of Connecticut Health Center Library, October 8, 2003.

 

Recent Publications

Review of Christopher Hoolihan, An Annotated Catalogue of the Edward C. Atwater Collection of American Popular Medicine and Health Reform.  2 vols. Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2001-2004, in Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 61 (2006): 243-244..

Review of Hervé Le Guyader, Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, 1772-1844: A Visionary Naturalist, translated by Marjorie Grene. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. in Isis 96 (2005): 445-446.

“Disease and Medicine in Connecticut around 1800,” in Voices of the New Republic: Connecticut Towns, 1800-1832, 2 vols. (New Haven: Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2003), II: 95-104.     

“A “Trinitarian Plan”: The Historical Library, Cushing/Whitney Medical Library, Yale University,” The Watermark: Newsletter of the Archivists and Librarians in the History of the Health Sciences, 25 (2002): 65-69.

Review of John S. Haller, The People’s Doctors: Samuel Thomson and the American Botanical Movement, 1790-1860. Carbondale, IL: University of Southern Illinois Press, 2000, in Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 57 (2002): 359-360.