Download 100,000+ Images From The History of Medicine, All Free Courtesy of The Wellcome Library

The Well­come Library, in Lon­don, spe­cial­izes in the his­to­ry of med­i­cine. While the insti­tu­tion has long offered a good dig­i­tal col­lec­tion for brows­ing, the library announced yes­ter­day that they are mak­ing more than 100,000 his­tor­i­cal images free to down­load under a Cre­ative Com­mons CC-BY license. (Users can dis­trib­ute, edit, or remix at will; the license even allows for com­mer­cial use, with attri­bu­tion.)

The Wellcome’s hold­ings rep­re­sent the institution’s long-term inter­est in col­lect­ing art relat­ed to med­i­cine, the body, pub­lic health, and med­ical sci­ence. The drop-down menu labeled “Tech­nique” in the stan­dard search box returns a stag­ger­ing array of types of visu­al cul­ture, from aquatint to carv­ing to fres­co to X‑ray. The library reports that the ear­li­est image avail­able is from 400 AD: a frag­ment of papyrus from an illus­trat­ed herbal man­u­script, fea­tur­ing a fad­ed col­or draw­ing of a plant.

Some images in the col­lec­tion are, per­haps unsur­pris­ing­ly, squirm-induc­ing (an 1851 Japan­ese wood­cut show­ing an ampu­ta­tion of the low­er leg; a Dutch etch­ing depict­ing a 17^th-c mas­tec­to­my; a Ger­man illus­tra­tion show­ing 17th-cen­tu­ry monks per­form­ing eye surgery). But there is plen­ty of beau­ty here, as well. I loved an a 19^th-c wood­cut of a sumo match, and a Tibetan illus­trat­ed man­u­script used in the pro­duc­tion of med­i­cines.

im****@*********ac.uk http://wellcomeimages.org Illus­tra­tions of Tibetan mate­ria med­ica, plant and ani­mal, used in the pro­duc­tion of med­i­cine. Title: ‘A Selec­tion of Sub­stances used for the Pro­duc­tion of Med­i­cine based on the Teach­ing of the four (med­ical) Tantras’ This anony­mous man­u­script is writ­ten in the ‘Trung­pa’ (‘khrungs dpe) genre of Tibetan med­ical lit­er­a­ture. Enti­tled, ‘Sman bla’i dgongs rgyan rgud bzhi’i nang gi ‘khrungs dpe re zhig’, it deals with var­i­ous mate­r­i­al med­ica, plant and ani­mal, used in the pro­duc­tion of med­i­cine. The book com­pris­es unbound sheets of thick (per­haps Russ­ian?) paper held togeth­er by two boards and wrapped in a piece of cloth. The med­ical illus­tra­tions are fin­ished in colour. The man­u­script is very rare and obvi­ous­ly very expen­sive. Its own­er made a sig­nif­i­cant effort to obtain illus­tra­tions for every med­i­cine men­tioned, includ­ing plants, stones and ani­mals. There are sev­er­al sug­ges­tions about the ori­gin of the man­u­script. It might well be a copy from Sangye Gyat­so’s ‘tankas’, pos­si­bly writ­ten by a painter or doc­tor who trav­elled from Mon­go­lia to Lhasa. It could have been tran­scribed in Tibet and sub­se­quent­ly sold to Mon­go­lia. There is a sim­i­lar­i­ty between the images of mate­r­i­al med­ica in this man­u­script and those found in the 19th cen­tu­ry Tibetan xylo­graphs of med­ical works, like the ‘Mdzes mtshar mig rgyan’, which cir­cu­lat­ed in the ter­ri­to­ry of Mon­go­lia in the nine­teenth cen­tu­ry. 18th cen­tu­ry Sman bla’i dgongs rgyan rgud bzhi’i nang gi ‘khrungs dpe re zhig ‘A Selec­tion of Sub­stances used for the Pro­duc­tion of Med­i­cine based on the Teach­ing of the four (med­ical) Tantras Pub­lished: — Copy­right­ed work avail­able under Cre­ative Com­mons Attri­bu­tion only licence CC BY 4.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/” />

Browsers inter­est­ed in dip­ping a toe into the stream of images may try out the gal­leries list­ed on the Images home­page. The “Olympic Sports” gallery offers an 1829 engrav­ing of the famous con­joined twins Chang and Eng hold­ing bad­minton rack­ets, and an 1870 illus­tra­tion of rec­om­mend­ed ring exer­cis­es for lady gym­nasts. The “Witch­craft” col­lec­tion (under the “Favourites” tab) con­tains many illus­tra­tions from his­tor­i­cal books cov­er­ing witch­craft in Europe and the Amer­i­can colonies, along with a more sur­pris­ing 19^th-cen­tu­ry Malayan black-mag­ic charm.

Rights-man­aged images are marked as such in the thumb­nail results that appear after a search. Although the archive requires you to enter a CAPTCHA to access the free images, you can select sev­er­al thumb­nails on the search-results page in order to bulk-down­load files for many images at the same time. The sam­ple files I request­ed arrived on my desk­top at 300 dpi.

The image above is an illus­tra­tion of a mechan­i­cal hand from 1564.

h/t @kirstinbutler

Rebec­ca Onion is a writer and aca­d­e­m­ic liv­ing in Philadel­phia. She runs Slate.com’s his­to­ry blog, The Vault. Fol­low her on Twit­ter: @rebeccaonion. 

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The British Library Puts 1,000,000 Images into the Pub­lic Domain, Mak­ing Them Free to Reuse & Remix

The Get­ty Puts 4600 Art Images Into the Pub­lic Domain (and There’s More to Come)

The Nation­al Gallery Makes 25,000 Images of Art­work Freely Avail­able Online