Historical medical films to be made freely available on the web

Over 400 historical medical films are to be digitised and made freely available online for the first time, via a new collaboration between the Wellcome Library and JISC Collections. The material consists of over 100 hours of moving image content from the Wellcome Library's unique and historically significant collection of film.

Featuring in the archive are films exploring global health issues and how they have been tackled, including: footage on malaria (a 1946 film shows huts in Kenya being sprayed with DDT to check an epidemic); films that illustrate advances in public health care (looking in particular at immunization, and the introduction of free-to-all health services): some of the medical greats of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (such as Ivan Pavlov's famous research first describing the phenomenon now known as 'classical conditioning' in his experiments with dogs).

All items are to be digitised over the next two years and made freely available via the Wellcome Library's website and JISC's Film & Sound Online service. It's anticipated that films will start to become available online from Autumn 2008.