From postcard to book cover: illustrating connections between medical history and digital humanities

Abstract

This article illustrates the value and impact of collaboration among scholars, archivists, and librarians working across universities and government institutions, and how changes in medium—from a born-physical photograph and printed postcard to a digital reproduction to a simultaneously born-digital and printed book—create new possibilities for scholarly analysis, interpretation, and dissemination, which in turn suggest future directions for research and engagement across fields of inquiry. In doing so, this article argues that history matters by illuminating past networks that, through humanistic inquiry, continue to connect people, ideas, and institutions in the present and into the future.