The Harvard Library writes: Tuesday, April 15 marks the first anniversary of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings, and Boston’s Center for the History of Medicine at the Countway Library, joins the rest of the city in remembering the day by capturing the Boston medical community’s experiences of and responses to the bombing in a digital archive named “Strong Medicine.”
Strong Medicine collects stories, photographs, oral histories, and other media from the Boston medical community that document the experiences of the first responders and medical professionals during the hours, days and weeks following the bombing.
Items collected range from letters of support, like one from a 10-year-old amputee to patients at Brigham and Women’s Hospital who lost limbs, to recorded interviews with medical professionals recounting their memory of hearing about the attack and their professional response. The collection is available online.
The initiative is an effort to create widely accessible research materials for medical education and historical research in a variety of areas. Curators organized collection events at medical institutions, and the archive also allows for self-submisson. Strong Medicine is partnering with Our Marathon at Northeastern University, which is collecting from Greater Boston and beyond.
The Francis A. Countway Library is a partnership between the Boston Medical and Harvard Medical Libraries and is located on the Harvard Longwood campus in Boston. The Countway, of which the Center for the History of Medicine is a department, serves the Harvard Medical School, Harvard School of Public Health, Harvard School of Dental Medicine, and researchers across Harvard, its affiliates, and a global community of scholars.
You can also read more about the collection in the Harvard Gazette.