medicine

Exploring the history of Australia’s Royal Flying Doctor Service through Gale Primary Sources

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│By Darren Brain, Gale Marketing Manager, Australia & New Zealand│

On the 15th May 1928, Reverend John Flynn founded the Australian Inland Mission (AIM) – Aerial Medical Service in Cloncurry, Queensland. Initially a one-year experiment with a young Australian airline called Qantas providing air services. This service later evolved nationally into the Australian Aerial Medical Service (AAMS), which was renamed the Flying Doctor Service in 1942, and became the Royal Flying Doctor Service (RFDS) in 1955 after receiving a Royal Charter.  

With Gale’s recent release of Global Development and Humanitarian Aid: The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, 1919-1997, I discovered some interesting documents about the history of RFDS and decided to dig deeper into Gale Primary Sources to learn more about the remarkable story of one of the world’s earliest flying doctors, the fascinating stories of the RFDS, and the growth of the critical service they have been providing against the harsh and unforgiving Australian Outback for nearly a century.

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Spanish Flu in the Time of COVID-19

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│By Eleanor Leese, Acquisitions Editor, Gale Primary Sources│

The first half of the 2020s brought with it political and social upheaval on a scale not seen for generations. Nothing touched the lives of more people than the COVID-19 infections that were reported in the opening days of the decade, and led to the deaths of more than seven million people worldwide. To understand these once-in-a-lifetime events, journalists turned to the most recent example of a global pandemic – still just within living memory: the ‘Spanish Flu’.

With the addition of issues for 2020 to 2024 in The Times Digital Archive, it’s possible to research the development of these two in parallel for the first time.

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How Gale Primary Sources Supports Students Taking Exeter University’s ‘Approaches to Criticism’ Module

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│By Poppy Sargent, Gale Ambassador at the University of Exeter│

The first year ‘Approaches to Criticism’ module taught to English students at the University of Exeter is notoriously one of the hardest compulsory modules, spanning across both first and second term. Throughout this module, you learn to think about yourselves as infinitely complex social and political subjects and how our social and political being shapes reading practices, focusing on systems and subjects in relation to one another.

Leveraging literature from Gale Primary Sources, this blog will highlight how Gale supports this module, sourcing manuscripts and monographs to aid students and lecturers in their work. By focusing on three of (in my opinion) the most interesting and crucial topics of this module, I will show you how Gale’s extensive archives highlight articles covering Marxism, Bodies and Medicine, and Critical Race Studies.

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Uncovering a History of Disabilities: Disabilities in Society, Seventeenth to Twentieth Century

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│By Philip Virta, Senior Acquisitions Editor |

Disability studies is a growing field in academia that examines disability as a social, cultural, and political phenomenon. Seeing how far we have come as a society in terms of equal rights for people with disabilities is heartening, yet how has disability been viewed both historically and contemporarily?

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Peyote Rights, Religious Freedom and Indigenous Persecution in the Women’s Missionary Advocate Papers

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Woman's Missionary Advocate header image

|By Lola Hylander, Gale Ambassador at University College London|

I am a student of the History and Politics of the Americas at University College London, and my dissertation will analyse Employment Division v. Smith (1990),a Supreme Court ruling that overturned almost a century of activism surrounding the Native American Church’s (NAC) right to practice peyotism, a religion based on the ceremonial use of the psychedelic cactus, peyote, in the United States. Religious debates largely define the discourse around peyote use, examining whether or not it should be protected under the First Amendment’s freedom of religion clause. Wanting to further understand the role of religion in the peyote debate, I turned to Gale’s Archives Unbound collection to see what I could find.

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Early Modern Medicine: Women’s Sexual and Reproductive Health

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Obstetrics: midwife assisting in a birth, Original woodcut image from E. Roeslin, Rosengarten, 1513,Wellcome Collection

│By Georgia Winrow, Gale Ambassador at Lancaster University│

Whilst we may think of how diseases such as the bubonic plague, typhoid or tuberculosis were discussed when studying medicine in early modern Europe, we often do not consider how significantly understandings of sexual and reproductive health developed during this period. The specialism of women’s health in particular was firmly established in these years, with the publication of manuals and treaties to direct physicians and midwives in their practice. Indeed, whilst the early modern period saw practitioners drawing upon the work of ancient authorities, it was also a period of innovation, particularly within science and medicine.

Gale’s Sex and Sexuality, Sixteenth to Twentieth Century collection is truly interdisciplinary and includes materials that would support academic fields as varied as Sociology, Law and Theology. For scholars investigating the History of Medicine, the most significant materials within this collection which can be used to explore the emergence of a comprehensive, gendered understanding of early modern medicine are arguably the medical enquiries, manuals and pamphlets.

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Refugee Nurses and the Second World War

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Nursing Times cover images
In this blog post, Dr Jane Brooks discusses the value of the Historic Nursing Journals – one of the collections included in Women’s Studies Archive: Female Forerunners Worldwide. The Historic Nursing Journals collection was sourced from the Royal College of Nursing (UK). Dr Brooks also explains how she is using the fascinating primary sources in this archive in her own research.

|Dr Jane Brooks, Senior Lecturer at the University of Manchester (UK)|

The digitisation of Historic Nursing Journals by Gale has created a dynamic and valuable resource for historians of nursing in the UK and beyond. I have been working in the field of nursing history for over twenty years. In 2010, I began researching nursing in the Second World War. I predominantly work with personal testimony such as oral history, letters and diaries. However, as well as these source materials usually located in public archives, I have used multiple types of entries in nursing journals, most frequently Nursing Times. I live in Yorkshire, the Royal College of Nursing headquarters library is in London and the archives are in Edinburgh, so every time I wanted to conduct any research using Nursing Times I had to travel to review the hard copies. If I needed to check a reference, I again had to make a journey or request one of the very busy archive staff check for me.

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The Potential and Importance of Interdisciplinarity in Academia

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Interdisciplinarity

│By Meg Ison, Gale Ambassador at the University of Portsmouth│

During my undergraduate studies, I read History and French. When I began looking for research funding for a PhD, I realised that so much research in the academy at the moment is interdisciplinary. Indeed, it has become somewhat of a ‘buzzword’. I combined research methods from the Humanities and Social Sciences in my research proposal to win a place with the South Coast Doctoral Training Partnership, funded by the Economic and Social Science Research Council. I completed their MSc in Social Research methods at the University of Southampton, and now I am on the interdisciplinary pathway for my PhD. I did not fully appreciate the potential and importance of interdisciplinarity until I started studying for my PhD with a cross-departmental supervisory team. As a result, I have a strong interest and belief in the power of interdisciplinary study. In this blog post I share some of my insights about this approach to research. 

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Moving from Undergraduate to Postgraduate Study: Using Digital Archives More Proficiently

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From Undergraduate to postgraduate

│By Mo Clarke, Gale Ambassador at the University of Exeter│

Moving from undergraduate to postgraduate study can be challenging. Students are expected to undertake more original research at postgraduate level, contributing to ideas within their field rather than simply explaining them. For history students like myself, engaging with primary sources is particularly important.

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How Gale’s Archives Supported My Thesis on the Politics of Contraception in South Africa, 1970s–80s

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Contraception plus archive article images

│By Nonkoliso Andiswa Tshiki, Gale Ambassador at the University of Johannesburg│

Having to complete my Honours research paper in the era of Covid-19 left myself and many other students feeling stranded so far as to how to obtain valuable and relevant academic resources. Access to digitised resources quickly became vital to one’s success in academia and I am happy that I came across Gale Primary Sources when I did because they contributed greatly to the completion of my thesis. This blog will show how I utilised Gale’s Archives of Sexuality and Gender, and Women’s Studies Archive collections to explore my thesis topic – the Media and Technologies of Contraception in South Africa between the 1970s and 1980s.

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