History matters...through partnerships that advance research, education, and public service

In the summer of 2015, as part of a seminar made possible through a grant to Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech) from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), a dozen primary and secondary teachers from across the United States gathered at the National Library of Medicine (NLM) in Bethesda, Maryland. Joining them and offering a presentation about the significance of the history of Spanish influenza in recent scientific research was the distinguished epidemiologist Jeffery Taubenberger of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), National Institutes of Health (NIH), whose research has transformed modern scientific understanding of influenza. Complementing Taubenberger’s presentation, NLM historians and librarians guided the group in studying firsthand a variety of rare and unique primary sources from the library’s historical collections—medical publications, newspapers, original documents, and ephemera—all dating from the 1918 influenza pandemic, and many of which, due to their physical condition could not yet be digitized and made available remotely in electronic form.