We enhance exhibitions in the Alabama Museum of the Health Sciences with material images from its own collection as well as the the Reynolds-Finley Historical Library and the UAB Archives. Enjoy these panel series that feature collection items from UAB Historical Collections.

The Birmingham Medical College Collection highlights Birmingham's first medical school, which operated between 1894 and 1915. This school provides an interesting glimpse of early medical education in the South. Items from the UAB Archives include photographs, diplomas, correspondence, and printed material such as programs, invitations, and matriculation cards.

This collection of material was donated to UAB by Dr. William C. Carter, a Distinguished Professor at UAB. Dr. Carter was a member of the faculty in the UAB Foreign Languages and Literatures Department and served as department chair from 1979 until 1990. The Carter Collection is housed in the UAB Archives.

This collection on the American Civil War includes material held by the Mervyn H. Sterne Library, the Reynolds-Finley Historical Library, the Alabama Museum of the Health Sciences, and the UAB Archives. Items found in this collection include surgical instruments and medical equipment, diaries, photographs, correspondence, digitized books, and other original material.

This collection features rare materials from the Reynolds-Finley Historical Library on various contagious diseases throughout history such as plague, smallpox and yellow fever. Especially relevant today, the collection explores topics such as vaccination debates, public health measures to stop the spread of disease, quarantining the infected, and more. The library holds a sizeable collection of materials pertaining to contagious diseases and the digitization of these items will be ongoing.

This exhibit features videos of Dr. Dennis G. Pappas, Sr., narrating stories of major events in the history of otolaryngology and explaining their connection to overall medicine.

COVID-19 has challenged us in many ways. We had to learn new things, change the way we do things, or stop doing familiar things altogether, all while keeping an appropriate distance from each other and taking extreme health precautions. This collection gathers and preserves accounts from the UAB community depicting a wide range of experiences during the Coronavirus Global Pandemic of 2020. Items in the collection include original written accounts, audio-visual recordings, digital photographs, and artwork documenting COVID-19 at UAB. This is an important time in our history, and we wish to document it for posterity. Visit our website to tell your story.

Beginning Fall semester 2006 UAB implemented a policy encouraging students to submit theses and dissertations electronically to the Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETD) repository of the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

UAB Electronic Theses and Dissertations dating from 1970-Present are available online through ProQuest and discoverable through our online library catalog. All theses and dissertations submitted to UAB beginning Spring semester 2007 are electronic. ETDs are published through a joint effort of the Graduate School and the UAB libraries. Please contact the library if you are unable to locate a specific work.

Since 1999, UAB students enrolled in the Ethnographic Filmmaking course have made documentary films about communities and issues in the Birmingham area. Students work collaboratively to research a community or subculture, conduct qualitative interviews of community members, film significant activities and events that reveal the shared culture of the group, and edit their footage to create a documentary account of their community.

This collection celebrates the work and dedication of the supporters of the Historical Collections of UAB Libraries, including the Alabama Museum of the Health Sciences, the Reynolds-Finley Historical Library and the UAB Archives, as well as UAB Libraries as a whole. If you would like to learn more, visit our accompanying exhibit. At present, this exhibit remembers Dr. Arnold G. “Gil” Diethelm (1932-2021), Dr. Charles A. “Scotty” McCallum, Jr. (1925-2021), and Mr. Edward L. Ramsey (1926-2021) for their contributions to the University of Alabama at Birmingham, to UAB Libraries, and to their respective fields.

This collection features the incunabula holdings in the Reynolds-Finley Historical Library. The term incunabulum (singular) or incunabula (plural) translates from Latin as “cradle” and refers to the cradle or infancy of printing. Works printed between the invention of the printing press in approximately 1450 and the end of the 15th century, or 1500, are given this terminology. The library holds 30 incunabula, and the digitization of these items is ongoing.

Dating from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, these catalogs feature a variety of instruments, tools, and supplies that were available to medical practitioners during this time period. Each catalog contains black and white drawings of the equipment being sold, alongside descriptions and prices. Some also contain photos or color drawings, and testimonials or instructions in using the equipment and performing new procedures are sometimes included. The catalogs are housed at the Reynolds-Finley Historical Library, and some of the objects can be found in the Alabama Museum of the Health Sciences.

The Reynolds-Finley Historical Library holds seven medieval and Renaissance manuscripts dating from the mid-14th through the 16th centuries. These works are mostly medical and scientific tracts, including ones by leading thinkers of the period such as Arnold of Villanova, Petrus Peregrinus, and al-Razi (Rhazes). Learn more about these manuscripts.

The Florence Nightingale Collection of the Reynolds-Finley Historical Library includes 58 personal letters by Nightingale, dated 1853 to 1893, covering military and civil hospitals, nursing, sanitary affairs and public health issues in India, and various charitable contributions. The original 50 letters were acquired by Dr. Lawrence Reynolds in February of 1951. In January of 2020, eight additional letters were generously donated to UAB by The Upper Room, a faith-based organization of Nashville, Tennessee, upon the closure of its Christian Art Museum. They are held in the Reynolds-Finley Historical Library on behalf of the UAB School of Nursing. Also, an original photograph of Florence Nightingale was donated by the Nu Chapter of Sigma Theta Tau and the University of Alabama School of Nursing in honor of Dr. Marie O'Koren. For more information on this collection, visit our web exhibit, The Life & Letters of Florence Nightingale.

The University of Alabama at Birmingham Oral History Collection contains interviews on Alabama political and civic leaders, civil rights in Alabama, ethnic history of Alabama, folk history of Alabama, labor history of Alabama, history of Alabama women, historic Alabama communities, Alabama refugee experiences, and history of the University of Alabama at Birmingham. The interviews in this collection were recorded between 1975 and 1984 under the direction of an oral history office in the UAB history department.

This collection features 59 handwritten letters by world-renowned physician, Sir William Osler, to a life-long personal friend, Ned Milburn. These letters range from 1865-1919 and include details of his early and later life. Though the letters covering the early years of his medical career were lost, letters from his later life discuss medical topics such as tuberculosis and the collection reveals details of an important friendship that surely impacted his medical contributions.

In the U.S. the nutritional deficiency disease pellagra became epidemic in the South. It had its beginning and end in Alabama, being first recognized in epidemic proportions by Alabama physician Dr. George H. Searcy in 1906, and ending with Dr. Tom D. Spies' nutritional treatment clinic in Birmingham, which operated from 1937 to 1960. In 1914 Dr. Carl A. Grote, Walker County public health officer, was the first to conduct field work to determine the etiology of the disease in an actual community setting. He conducted this work prior to and independent of Dr. Joseph Goldberger who is righty credited for discovering the nature of pellagra but who at Grote's writing had only studied the disease in controlled environments.

This collection chronicles Alabama's valiant campaign against pellagra. For more information on this topic, visit our web exhibit, Pellagra in Alabama: A Valiant Struggle Against ‘The Red Death.’

In the late 1970s, Professor William Stewart Bell (1921-1980), a Birmingham native and Proust scholar, donated a collection of Marcel Proust books to Sterne Library. Professor Bell was in Paris after World War II and was able to purchase many of these unique volumes. Following a 1988 conference, Marcel Proust at UAB, Sterne Library collected additional works by and about Marcel Proust (1871-1922). The Proust collection at UAB is one of the largest in the US.

In addition to the published works, in 1988 UAB acquired 15 multi-page letters written by Proust to the Duc de Guiche and to the Marquise de Clermont de Tonnerre (after 1910 the Duchesse de Clermont-Tonnerre). Additionally, in 2001 a manuscript collection related to Proust was donated to UAB. The Proust letters and this manuscript collection are both housed in the UAB Archives.

The Reynolds-Finley Historical Library houses a large collection of rare Alabama medical journals. Some of the holdings include the Alabama Insane Hospital Reports, the Transactions of the Medical Association of the State of Alabama, the Alabama Medical and Surgical Age, and others. The Reynolds-Finley Historical Library plans to continue digitizing these journals and adding to this collection. Please continue to check back for additional content.

In 1917 Dr. Lawrence Reynolds (1889-1961), an Alabama native, sailed from New York for France to begin work as a radiologist at an American-supported hospital in Paris. The photographs in this collection document his tenure in the American Military Hospital No. 1, the hospital's staff and patients, and the hospital's annex in the village of Juilly. The images also document the trenches along the front, shell-damaged villages, military officials and soldiers, tourist sites in Paris and the French countryside, and various friends and associates photographed in leisure activities. Upon his discharge in 1919, Dr. Reynolds returned to the U.S. The Reynolds photographs are housed in the UAB Archives.

Mervyn Hayden Sterne (1892-1973), a local businessman and philanthropist, was an early supporter of UAB. On October 23, 1974, the new University College Library at UAB was dedicated in memory of Mervyn Hayden Sterne. The Sterne collection, which contains many of Mr. Sterne's personal items including awards, degrees, letters, and photographs, is housed in the UAB Archives.

StoryCorps is an independent nonprofit whose mission is to provide Americans of all backgrounds and beliefs with the opportunity to record, share, and preserve the stories of our lives. Since 2003, StoryCorps has collected and archived more than 30,000 interviews from more than 60,000 participants. Each conversation is recorded on a free CD to share, and is preserved at the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress.

In January of 2011, members of the StoryCorps staff parked their Airstream mobile recording studio outside of the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute in Birmingham to record the stories of local residents. This is a collection of edited versions of those interviews. To listen to any of the complete interviews, please contact the Mervyn H. Sterne Library, Digital Collections staff at (205) 934-6347. For more information about StoryCorps, please visit their website, www.storycorps.org.

Founded in 1887 in Birmingham, Alabama, the Southern Surgical & Gynecological Association was renamed the Southern Surgical Association (SSA) in 1916. Since the association’s first annual meeting on December 4-6, 1888, the publication of annual transactions has followed. Under the auspices of the Southern Surgical Association, the archival copies of the transactions held in the Reynolds-Finley Historical Library are made available in this digital collection.

UAB Course Videos Collection contains video materials that are available for learning and teaching on campus. The collection includes locally licensed streamed videos, online course lectures from UAB departments, the Reynolds-Finley Historical Lectures, and other general webinars of interest to the campus community.

The UAB Department of English publishes three journals. Birmingham Poetry Review includes original poetry, translations, and reviews. Nelle features innovative literary writing by both emerging and established women writers (cis and transgender). Memorandum is written and designed by students in the Professional Writing Program.

The Electrical and Computer Engineering (E≈CE) collection includes scholarly materials contributed by the ECE department in the form of Technical Reports. These contributions involve faculty, collaborators, and students from diverse fields related to electrical and computer engineering.

Scholarship submitted by UAB Faculty.

This collection contains miscellaneous items from the three components of the Historical Collections area of the UAB Libraries: the Alabama Museum of the Health Sciences, Reynolds-Finley Historical Library, and UAB Archives. Also included are digitized books from the Sterne Library Rare Book Collection.

A project to photograph and document the portraits in UAB buildings.

A collection of publications by and for the UAB community.