McGoogan News

In honor of the Wigton Heritage Center’s one-year anniversary, UNMC’s McGoogan Health Sciences Library is announcing the center’s new online exhibit portal.

One year ago — June 29, 2021 — the Wigton Heritage Center opened as a welcome center to the UNMC campus. Showcasing the history of UNMC as an institution and the health sciences professions across Nebraska, the Wigton Heritage Center serves as a catalyst for understanding, experiencing and appreciating UNMC’s legacy.

The new digital exploration of the current exhibit allows visitors to discover more stories, images and artifacts from the library’s special collections. These include recent oral histories and newly acquired materials related to the historical figures that are highlighted in the Wigton Heritage Center’s inaugural displays. The online portal features exhibits on display throughout the Wigton Heritage Center’s three levels.

The site provides additional historical context as well. There are full-length biographies of the individuals highlighted in the Wigton Heritage Center, with expanded narratives that had been shortened in the physical displays due to space constraints.

The online experience also highlights connections between exhibits. For example, McGoogan Library’s Special Collections & Archives team discovered stories about the WAY (Drs. Wigton, Aita and Young) Clinic that unites the legacy of the Swift-Wigton family with the history of the Department of Psychiatry and the Nebraska Psychiatric Institute.

The SCA team also explored the connective narrative between early anatomist Edward Holyoke, MD, and his work with prolific medical illustrator Rose Reynolds, whose illustrations were a critical teaching and publication tool of the time.

The portal is open for the community to explore the history of UNMC and health sciences in the state of Nebraska.

The McGoogan Health Sciences Library has a new exhibit on smallpox, “Battling the Speckled Monster: Stories of Slaying Smallpox,” which features three books from the library’s rare book collection and the H. Winnett Orr rare book collection.

The exhibit is located at the entrance of Level 8.

Edward Jenner’s 1798 “An Inquiry into the Causes and Effects of the Variolae Vaccinae” publicized his discovery of the smallpox vaccine derived from cowpox. Jenner’s publication on smallpox was only 70 pages long. The illustrations were printed from copper engravings and hand painted with watercolors. Accurate physical depictions of disease have always been an important component in educating others.

In “The Works of the Right Honourable Lady Mary Wortley Monatgu,” viewers are introduced to one 18th-century woman’s fight to introduce smallpox inoculation to England. This compilation work contains the letters that Lady Montagu wrote home to England while in Turkey. In these letters, she shares her interest in the Turkish practice of smallpox inoculation.

The third book, “A Treatise on the Small-pox and Measles,” is a 19th-century translation of Abu Bakr Muhammad ibn Zakariya Razi, known as Rhazes in the west’s 9th century landmark work distinguishing the difference between smallpox and measles. Originally written in the 10th century, Rhazes’ work eventually was translated into Latin and Greek. The English translation was created by William Alexander Greenhill, an English physician.

To view more of the McGoogan Library and Orr collections, visit Level 5 of Wittson Hall.

Elsevier products (Scopus, Science Direct, etc. ) are back in service.

The interlibrary loan system will be down for scheduled server maintenance on May 19 from 8 a.m. until approximately 10 a.m. During this time, users will be unable to request materials or retrieve PDFs. We do apologize for any inconvenience.

By Teri Hartman

Visual abstracts are summaries in a graphical form that engage your readers by highlighting key findings or arguments of your research article. Visual abstracts make it easy to communicate and amplify your research on journal sites, social media, and DigitalCommons. 

Primers on visual abstracts:  

• Dr. Abbey Fingeret, Associate Professor, UNMC Department of Surgery, Division of Surgical Oncology, has a tutorial in Thrive on creating visual abstracts.  
• Dr. Andrew M. Ibrahim, Chief Medical Officer of HOK and Resident Surgeon at the University of Michigan, has written an open-source primer on creating visual abstracts. 

Examples of published visual abstracts include those in Chest  and Journal of Graduate Medical Education. Journals and publishers offer templates and instruction on creating visual abstracts, such as Medical Education at Wiley 

You can see how other researchers are using Twitter to share their research using visual abstracts. Search for #visualabstract – note that you don’t have to have a Twitter account to see these results. 

Consider creating a visual abstract to attract more attention to your next research article.