Many historians of med will be thinking about projects that your students can do in the coming year without the usual access to archives. In order to perhaps create a space for thinking about the potential for research in the coming months, I though I'd share a few ideas here.

1) The Wellcome Trust has digitalised numerous items in collections on their website. I have included a link to their digital collections below. Check out their website, as there are enough potentially projects there to keep a class of 30 students busy https://wellcomelibrary.org/collections/digital-collections/

2) I think their MoH Reports 1848-1972 are great and I could imagine placing a dozen students on a region and examining a variety of issues in a single neighbourhood, like vaccination, inf disease outbreaks, food safety, overcrowding, sanitation, etc. https://wellcomelibrary.org/moh/ 

3) Many other local archives have begun to digitalise their MoH reports as a result, so check local collections for progress in this area. That said, Wellcome has scanned many reports for cities outside London, including Glasgow, Liverpool, Leeds and Cardiff, for example

4) I have long encouraged my stdts, who often come from medical backgrounds to explore specialties they are interested in or key texts which came out in multiple editions. These may already be scanned in the Wellcome collection or might be bought for next to nothing online.

Students could look at how editions of important medical texts evolved through various eds, including Osler, Gray's Anatomy or Dr Spock's Baby and Child Care. PS. Did you know that Gray's Anatomy contained a section on the sense organs? That alone would make a good project.

5) ECCO is a great resource for histns of the 18C. Texts on nerves, digestion, hosps, foundlings, mat med, etc would make for great projects, esp if combined with new themes or approaches in the history of medicine, including the senses or emotions. https://www.gale.com/intl/primary-sources/eighteenth-century-collections-online

6) Many students can access digital newspaper collections, either through geneology websites, or university libraries. These are a mine of information and could support projects on the history of accidents for example, because they report most common accidents.

This includes drownings, falls, drugs and alcohol deaths, suicide, accidents involving animals or motor vehicles. Local disasters are also covered in considerable detail and these narratives could be analysed in various ways.

7) Advertisments of 'Quack' medicines in newspapers would also be a great project. Students could look at one regional newspaper and cover either one continuous period or blocks of 2-5 years periods listing change in the types of medicines advertised.

Students might catagorise ads as cure-alls, those for digestion, teeth, cosmetics, etc and chart changes in their prevelance, where they were sold, the language used, who endorsed them, cost, packaging, patents, etc.

8) I know many of you might be tired of epidemics already, but imagine using local newspapers to chart past epidemics, especially under-researched ones. Or use the AIDS posters in the Wellcome Collection online. Youtube also has many interesting PH videos.

I had a student research polio in Birmingham UK in the 1950s, and there were many interesting stories overlooked is past national studies, like local resistance to vaccines, turning points in an outbreak, often the result of a prominent local death. How about 1957 flu?

9) Many archives are currently digitalising records, like Staffordshire Records Office. They have a useful wordpress page and would probably respond well to requests to collaborate if you have good ideas for them. …https://staffordshireasylumrecords.wordpress.com/ 

10) Children's hospital records including Great Ormond Street were digitalised a few years ago and the case notes would support several interesting projects. The secondary literature on GOSH is also robust enough to support research on the hospital. http://hharp.org/ 

11) The NLM in US has online collns, incl personal papers, student notes and recipe books. Each would make a good project. These kinds of collections are more common that you think, so visit institutional websites and you may be surprised by what you find. https://www.nlm.nih.gov/hmd/collections/archives.html?fbclid=IwAR2lw4iYRPgWapXDVldnkz8l3a3KKT3b7aLPS7cR3xdP63s3y3zgr0xwTWg

12) Then there's the Lancet and BMJ. Their contents have been digitalised and would support great projects on medical policy, foreign travel, specialisation, professionalisation, medical education, even first aid competitions held between mining communities.

The Provincial Medical and Surgical Journal (precursor to BMJ) contains many reports on dispensaries, which are overlooked institutions. You name it, you can probably find it in old journals. Let your students loose on them and they may dream up projects you never could.

This is just a dozen resources/projects that I can think of at the moment, but there are many more. Please feel free to list more in the comments below, or tell us what your students are doing during this time when access to archives is not as easy as in the past.