The History of Medicine in Western Society

Tips for searching Infohawk for secondary and primary sources. These tips may be useful for searching bibliographic databases, but note that other databases can be organized with different searchable fields.

Start with what you know. On the "basic search" screen of Infohawk, use the drop-down box to search for "subject begining with..." Use a main topic word in the search box. Starting with "surgery", for example, brings up a list of all the subjects indexed for "surgery." Scroll through these to find subsets of subjects under "surgery." There are lots of items, of course, and they are broken down into many categories, such as "Surgery, Aseptic and Antiseptic -- History," and "Surgery -- Case Studies -- Early works to 1800." Clicking on the subject gives you the references to books in the UI collection. Perhaps only one title gets you closer to what really interests you. When you look at that under "display full record" you will see all of the other subjects that a book falls into. Clicking on these subjects will then give you additional titles. Once you find the book in the library, the text itself should contain even more references to other sources.

Using InfoHawk to identify books that are primary sources:

Finding primary sources in the library catalog usually takes a bit of creative and persistant searching. Work on getting a good list of keywords together (see the example below). Pay attention to the notes and bibliographies in secondary sources, as these will give you the names of authors, and sometimes specific titles, to use in your searches. Do ask the reference librarians for help after you have narrowed your topic and have done some searching on your own.

Books that contain personal information by people in the past tend to have attached to them one or another of certain sub-subject headings, such as "diary" or "correspondence" or "autobiography." Get the wording for those into part of a keyword search using the "advanced" search function in the UI Catalog. For example, for primary sources regarding nurses or nursing, you could try:

Keywords =(nurses or nursing) and (autobiography or sources or diaries or personal narratives or correspondence or archives or manuscripts or interviews)

To find primary source books and proceedings that were published on a particular subject, such as surgery, during a particular period, use the InfoHawk "Advanced Search" area and put dates into the "date range" boxes.

Please remember, however, that many sources for medicine in the 19th and 20th centuries may well be in UI collections but not in InfoHawk because they are not separate publications, but are journal articles. To find those you need to go to on-line and printed bibliographies.

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