Color Our Collections – National Library of Medicine

By Ginny A. Roth

Inspired by the recent adult coloring book trend, the event allows participating institutions to share their collections widely via their websites and social media, inviting the public to download and print their coloring books, which feature images from their archives, museums, libraries, and special collections. You can follow the event on Twitter using the hashtag #ColorOurCollections and participate by commenting, sharing, downloading images, and tweeting your own colored creations. Read tweets from participating institutions and join the conversation.

Last year the National Library of Medicine (NLM) created a coloring book featuring 15 images from our historical collections and including descriptive information about each image. The coloring book also provides links to the original digitized files of each image in the Images from the History of Medicine (IHM) in NLM’s Digital Collections.

You can download NLM’s coloring book from the NLM website or from NYAM’s #ColorOurCollections website. You can also find them on our Pinterest board. Here is a selection of images from the coloring book.

Woodcut of a urine wheel used for diagnosing diseases from Epiphanie Medicorum, by Ulrich Pinder.

Woodcut from Liber Chronicarum, written by physician Hartmann Schedel.

Lithograph of the profile of Franz Joseph Gall, founder of phrenology, showing phrenological sections of the human head.

Woodcut of an owl from Historia Animalium, by physician and naturalist Conrad Gessner.

Illustration of the inside of a Russian ambulance train drawn by George Percy Jacomb-Hood. It appeared on the cover of an August 1904 issue of “The Graphic.”

Ginny A. Roth is the Curator of Prints & Photographs in the History of Medicine Division at the National Library of Medicine.

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