Digital Collections of British Primary Sources - Science, Health, and Medicine:

• Royal College of Nursing Digital Archive, on the history of nursing (including military nursing) in Britain and the empire, https://rcn.access.preservica.com/

  • See especially their Family History page additional resources on how to research individual nurses, https://www.rcn.org.uk/library/archives/Family-history

  • And the digitized Nursing Record / British Nursing Journal at this link, https://rcnarchive.rcn.org.uk/

• Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, one of the oldest scientific journals in Britain https://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/serial?id=philtransactions

  • You can also access the Royal Society’s The Journals Archive which contains full colour digital scans of original printed journals published by the Royal Society between 1665 and 1886.

• 19th century entomology texts, via Digital Bodleian, https://digital.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/collections/entomologists-useful-compendium/

• Key works of geological literature, 1600-1900, via Digital Bodleian https://digital.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/collections/geological-literature/

• London Medical Officer of Health reports, 1848-1972. These were statistical reports on births, death, and disease, but also include some anecdotal info. Via Wellcome Library https://wellcomelibrary.org/moh/

• Alan Turing Digital Archive, incl. personal documents, letters, manuscripts etc https://turingarchive.kings.cam.ac.uk/

• Walgreens Boots Alliance Archive. Digital documents, photos, advertisements, product info, etc related to Boots, which is Britain’s biggest pharmacy chain http://archives.walgreensbootsalliance.com/default.aspx

• UCL Modern Genetics Collection of digitized documents, including the papers of Francis Galton, JBS Haldane, Lionel Sharples Penrose, Alfred Darbishire, and C.A.B. Smith https://www.ucl.ac.uk/library/digital-collections/collections/genetics

• Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons Glasgow digitized archives, dating from 1602 https://heritage.rcpsg.ac.uk/collections/show/6

• Milner Library has access to the historic runs of the British Medical Journal, https://www.jstor.org/journal/britmedj

• The Gwillim Project, digitized letters, sketchbooks, and other primary sources of sisters Elizabeth Gwillim and Mary Symonds, who travelled to Madras, India in the early 19th century. These sources are useful both for social history and the history of science, natural history, botany, etc https://thegwillimproject.com/