Browse Exhibitions

Musical Roots of the Elm City highlights New Haven music and musicians with little or no connection to Yale. It features a selection of items from the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries, including sheet music, programs, advertisements, and pedagogical materials, encompassing classical, military, sacred, jazz, popular, and film music.

Credits
Richard Boursy, curator

The Gilmore Music Library holds many remarkable scores, books, and images of guitar and lute music. Our exhibit, Treasures of Guitar and Lute Music from the Gilmore Music Library, features a display of manuscripts, books, scores, and images, ranging from a lute treatise by Vincenzo Galilei (father of the scientist Galileo Galilei) to a guitar arrangement by Andrés Segovia, the most celebrated classical guitarist of the 20th century.

Credits
Richard Boursy, curator

In our exhibition entitled “They Sang and Took the Sword”--Music of World War I, the Music Library observes the 100th anniversary of the conclusion of World War I, as marked by the signing of the Armistice on November 11, 1918. The exhibition brings together selected materials from the Music Library’s Special Collections and Collection of Historical Sound Recordings pertaining to the war. Several of these feature the work of Yale students, alumni, and faculty.

The Medical Library at Yale, 1701–2001, was on display in the rotunda of the Medical Library from mid-December 2001 through January 2002. It was prepared by Toby Appel, Ph.D, former Historical Librarian, as the last in a series of Yale Tercentennial exhibits. Ned Pocengal prepared the Web adaptation.

Epidemiology and Public Health at Yale: A Yale Tercentennial Exhibit, was on display in the rotunda of the Cushing/Whitney Medical Library from September through November 2001. The exhibit is in three sections, the first on the teaching of public health at Yale in the late 19th century and the creation of the Department of Public Health in 1915, the second on the independent development of the Section of Epidemiology and Preventive Medicine in the Department of Medicine, and the third on the union of these to form Epidemiology and Public Health, a department of the Medical School as well as an accredited school of public health.

The original exhibit was prepared by Toby Appel, former Historical Librarian, with the assistance Matthew Wilcox, EPH Librarian. Toby Appel, Mona Florea, and Gillian Mayman prepared the Web adaptation.

The Historical Library, which houses one of the country’s finest historical medical collections, was part of the original design of the Yale Medical Library (now the Cushing/Whitney Medical Library), built in 1940 and dedicated in 1941. It was the vision of Harvey Cushing, who joined with his two friends and fellow bibliophiles, Arnold C. Klebs and John F. Fulton, in what they called -- with many inventive synonyms -- their “Trinitarian plan,” to donate their superb book collections to Yale if Yale would build a place to house them.

“The enrollment of women in the School of Medicine has ceased to be an experiment.” Written in 1923, seven years after the first woman was accepted into Yale Medical School, this sentence signaled the recognition that women were now a part of the medical community. This exhibition explores the history of women in Yale Medical School - faculty, staff, students, nurses, residents, doctoral students, and researchers - through the 20th and early 21st centuries.

Arnold Carl Klebs was one of the three physician/historians who offered to donate their libraries of rare books to Yale if Yale would build a place to house them. That place was the Yale Medical Library, now the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library. Son of the famous pathologist and bacteriologist Edwin Klebs, Arnold Klebs followed his father from Switzerland to America in 1896, becoming a noted tuberculosis specialist in Chicago. In 1909, having inherited wealth, Klebs returned to Switzerland where he devoted his career to the history of medicine. Harvey Cushing and Klebs met at Johns Hopkins in the first decade of the twentieth century and became lifelong friends. Thirty years later, Cushing suggested to Klebs that he and John F. Fulton join him in pledging their books to become the nucleus of a new medical historical collection at Yale.

This exhibit on Klebs’ life and scholarship, featuring books donated by Klebs and photographs, was on display in the Medical Library Rotunda from February 1, 2008 to March 15, 2008.

The core mission of Yale's School of Nursing is "better health for all people." For a majority of its history, women worked to fulfill this mission at the School of Nursing. As we celebrate the 100-year anniversary of women at the Yale School of Medicine, we also take this opportunity to explore and reflect on another history that is nearly as long: that of women at the Yale School of Nursing. Brilliant, talented women have been essential to the Yale School of Nursing since its founding in 1923 -- as students, as professors, as deans, and as researchers. This exhibition showcases the history of the Yale School of Nursing as well as the legacies of the women who shaped it.

For more on the history of the School of Nursing, read Helen Varney Burst's Yale School of Nursing : celebrating 90 years of excellence ; YSN: a brief history (2013).

By virtue of its ubiquity, we all practice moral judgment at some degree long before developing an aptitude for clinical evaluation. Ideas of how a "good" person should look and act, reside within us and subtly impact the way that we perceive those around us. This practice is so deeply ingrained that it can carry over into the clinic, leading well-meaning practitioners to perceive patients both clinically and morally.

We have organized a collection of prints that encourage the viewer to confront the cultural constructs that underlie moral evaluation. In presenting prints from the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries, we aim to impress upon viewers that the association between health and morality is deeply ingrained within the very fabric of society, and indeed, stretches far beyond the period that our exhibit encompasses. We have prepared a hypothetical patient vignette for each print to further conversation about morality and the practice of clinical medicine. It is our hope that viewers will see the chosen depictions of mental health, illness, and body image not as distant echoes of the past, but rather as preludes to forces that remain substantial in the modern era.