Historical Collection

Background

Historical Collection Background Disease classifications and nomenclature documents History of international health organizations documents History of WHO documents League of Nations malaria documents Rare books on plague, smallpox and epidemiology

Scope of the collection

The WHO Historical Collection covers:

• preparatory conferences leading to the foundation of WHO
• official records of the organization
• International Sanitary Conventions (since 1851)
• official records, reports, statistics and journals published by the Office International d'Hygiène Publique (OIHP), the Health Organization of the League of Nations, the UNRRA (and more)

The Rare Book Collection consists largely of documentation acquired by the OIHP on epidemics included in the International Sanitary Conventions such as: plague, cholera and yellow fever. Materials covering smallpox, malaria and other diseases prevalent at the beginning of this century, are also included. Our oldest book on plague dates from 1507 while our oldest treatise on epidemiology was published in 1518.

The WHO Library has collected all of the international classifications and nomenclatures of diseases, particularly the Bertillon Classification and its various revisions.

Lastly, the Historical Collection is notable for its collections of monographs on public health and medicine from all over the world. The collection is particularly strong in the areas of tropical medicine and diseases, infectious diseases such as tuberculosis and the history of public health systems in various countries. All languages are included whether they are printed in Roman or Cyrillic alphabet, Chinese characters or other.

Search the collection

A hypertext link has been set up from the cataloguing record to the full text, where available. You may also access some of the documents that are available in electronic format, by clicking the hypertext link of any of the documents in PDF format from the following list. To view the lists of available PDF files, select a topic at the top-right of this screen.

The bibliographic records of the Historical Collection monographs are available in WHOLIS (the WHO library database). To access these records click on the link above and enter a subject and restrict your search to location HIST-COLL in the search options. An online tutorial for guidance in using WHOLIS is available.

Related Links

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