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UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA CLAUDE MOORE HEALTH SCIENCES LIBRARY OPENS WALTER REED YELLOW FEVER COLLECTION WEB SITE

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, yellow fever was a deadly disease much like AIDS is today. Dr. Walter Reed, an 1869 graduate of the U.Va. School of Medicine, and fellow members of the United States Army Yellow Fever Commission made the discovery that mosquitoes were responsible for the transmission of yellow fever, not direct contact with infected individuals as was commonly believed at the time. For this accomplishment, Reed was awarded a Congressional Gold Medal.

Now more than 5,000 original documents, photographs and artifacts about Reed's work are available to the public at http://yellowfever.lib.virginia.edu thanks to the University of Virginia Claude Moore Health Sciences Library. The two-year project, which was funded in part by a $250,041 grant from the federal Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS), was designed to provide a model for the integration of state-of-the-art information technology and scholarly resources to make unique library resources more widely available.

Working in collaboration with the Electronic Text Center at the U.Va. Library, the Health Sciences Library team, headed by Joan Echtenkamp Klein, digitized and transcribed the Philip S. Hench collection from the Health Sciences library's archive. Dr. Hench, who received the Nobel Prize for his discovery of cortisone, was fascinated by the story of Reed and the Yellow Fever Commission and made it his life's work to collect everything available about this public health story. The extensive archive that Hench compiled was given to the University of Virginia in 1965 after his untimely death.

The New York/New Jersey Chapter of the Medical Library Association recently awarded the new U. Va. web site their highest rating for sites reviewed in their newsletter. The University of Virginia has mounted this magnificent web site about their Yellow Fever Collection, said Patricia E. Gallagher, the reviewer and a medical librarian at the New York Academy of Medicine Library. More than just a list of their own resources, this beautiful web site details as well the people and events that contributed to the discovery of the cause of yellow fever.

April 24, 2002