Review of Brought to Life: Exploring the History of Medicine, Science Museum, London,  www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/broughttolife.aspx.

There is an increasing amount of content relating to the history of medicine appearing online and many of our journals are adding 'media' or 'digital humanities' review sections. Yet, unlike book reviews, it remains unclear how scholars should go about writing a peer-review of a website. This review of Brought to Life: Exploring the History of Medicine makes an attempt to outline the criteria by which websites could be reviewed. Like books, websites should be reviewed based on their content, readability and argument. Yet, unlike books, websites should also be reviewed based on their design and accessibility. To evaluate Brought to Life, this reviewer took into account the purpose, argument, content, sources, usability and navigation of the site in an attempt to satisfy the simultaneous need to assess the accessibility of the content and the merit of the content itself. Brought to Life is a multimedia website that presents images of objects from the medical collection at the Science Museum, London. The purpose of the site is to create a 'valuable resource for teachers and students working on the history of medicine and related subjects' while also 'engaging people of all ages and interests in the history of medicine'. This sense of purpose is shared by many other informational and educational websites and, by translating the wealth of information and objects located at the Science Museum, London into an online space, Brought to Life creates a valuable collection of digital media that has the potential to have a strong impact on a variety of users. An implicit argument of the site is that users can employ objects as a means to teach the history of medicine and trace techniques and treatments over time. The content on the site is divided up into sixteen themes, which emphasise factors influencing change and continuity over time and aim to support students who are studying the 'Medicine Through Time' GCSE History module. The way the themes are delineated is not only for teachers and students of the GCSE History module, but is also meant to engage students in undergraduate courses as well as seasoned scholars. To aid this variety of users, the site has introductions to each theme with key people, objects and places linked out to other pages. Each of the sixteen themes is broken down into five subtopics and each subtopic is associated with objects relating to that topic. For example, a …