The medical archive collections of the John Rylands University Library

The University of Manchester Library has custody of a nationally significant collection of medical archives. These are a rich and varied resource for the history of medicine, but also have potential for wider social, economic, cultural and intellectual histories of the Greater Manchester region. Within the collection are over twenty medical archives, including the private papers of doctors, archives of medical societies, and a large collection of Manchester-related medical documents, known as the Manchester Medical Collection (MMC). These archives contain information on the great majority of medical practitioners, hospitals, medical schools and medical societies active in the Manchester area in the past two hundred years. The collections were not well described and therefore difficult to use. A grant from the Wellcome Trust’s Research Resources in Medical History programme funded the creation of detailed finding aids. These are now available on-line via the UML Special Collections web-site. This paper briefly describes the collections and identifies their research potential for a range of users, including historians of medicine, local historians and genealogists.