![Photograph of Tilli Tansey, Lesley Rees, Howard Morris, and John Hughes at the Witness Seminar “Endogenous Opiates” held by the History of Twentieth Century Medicine Group](/sites/default/files/styles/feature_story_medium/public/2023-11/1_Endogenous%20Opiates%201995.png?itok=uNPN_oVg)
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As of 2023 there are roughly 4,000 English-language oral history interviews with biomedical scientists, doctors, nurses, patients, and hospital administrators available online. More or less the same number are only available offline, either because they contain sensitive material or simply haven’t been digitized yet. These interviews are hosted by some of the wealthiest institutions for biomedical research in the world, as well as by lesser-known medical schools, public libraries, and centers for the history of biomedicine across the US and the UK. This already substantial corpus continues to grow steadily as new collections are recorded and existing collections are digitized, providing unique insights into the history of medicine in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Oral histories such as these offer detailed personal accounts of the development of medical research and treatment, references to events, sources, and literature unavailable elsewhere, and perspectives of those who too often are left out of the history of medicine. These resources have the potential to shape how future historians of medicine understand the recent past.
Alfred Freeborn
Michael Winter
Pascal Belouin
Kim Pham
Elizabeth Hughes
Hanna Lucia Worliczek
Steffen Hennicke
Lara Keuck