http://www.intute.ac.uk/medhist/

A great example of the internet's capacity to educate, illuminate and inspire is conveniently found within the UK-based MedHist portal.

With its very wide range of peer-assessed medical historical resources it is sure to appeal to a large number of clinicians.

MedHist is an academic portal administered by the Wellcome Trust Library for the History and Understanding of Medicine. The trust in turn is a charitable organisation founded by Sir Henry Wellcome and, contrary to certain opinion, has never had any direct relationship whatsoever with the pharmaceutical company Burroughs Wellcome (later to become Wellcome).

Established in 1936 and with an endowment of around £11 billion, the trust has in fact become the UK's largest non-governmental source of funds for biomedical research.

This great site offers free and up-to-date access to a searchable catalogue of excellent internet sites and resources covering a very wide range of aspects dealing with the history of medicine.

MedHist is also one of three Wellcome Trust sponsored gateways: the other two being Bioethics Web (resources in biomedical ethics) and pscicom (resources involving public aspects of science and technology).

The Wellcome Gateways in turn are affiliated (with the help of Wellcome) as a part of the BIOME (Internet Resources in the Health and Life Sciences) project maintained through the University of Nottingham.

Unlike a number of similar gateways and resources on the internet where you need to already have a pretty good idea what you want to search for, this site is well set up for genuine browsing.

The topics are divided into Diseases, Education/Research, Electronic Publications, Events, Historical Period, Locality, Medical Specialty and Technique, Miscellany Relating to Medicine, People, Reference and Science/Technology.

Each topic is further indexed into topics within the appropriate field, eg, the Diseases section is itself divided into 36 sections including such items as tuberculosis and plague. The section on the plague is linked to 24 sites which comprehensively cover these enormous "black holes" of global epidemic misery.

The Historical Period section is an excellent start for browsing and includes Ancient, Mediaeval and Modern sections and also a helpful timeline.

A seemingly endless array of remarkable resources are readily available, eg, "Epact: Scientific Instruments of Mediaeval and Renaissance Europe" which contains descriptions and high quality images of a vast array of early medical and surgical instruments and also "Seeing is Believing: 700 Years of Scientific and Medical Illustration".

Some of the other sites (in addition to the ancient and mediaeval sections) which were found especially interesting for browsing included: digitised old and ancient medical texts, medical specialties (eg, surgery, obstetrics), people in medicine, medical teaching, folklore, quackery and witchcraft; and reference archives.

The nature of a portal is it will lead to a variety of sites, some better than others.

While the information and documentation through this amazing portal is remarkable for its broadness of content, the overall quality of most of the audited sites was also excellent.

Many sites include high quality graphical images which could be saved or downloaded and also entire e-books on medicine over the centuries.

MedHist gives us a valuable peek into that huge virtual library that is the internet.