This archive of documents covers one of the most vibrant and creative periods in scientific research and discovery, the long nineteenth century. The modern researcher can exploit the more than 3.5 million pages of journals, books, reports, and personal documents to explore the rapid acceleration of scientific, technical, and medical knowledge, tracing the changes from the Newtonian world to that of Einstein, from the horse to the automobile, from medical treatments based on humors and bloodletting to antiseptics and epidemiology. This archive covers every aspect of nineteenth-century science: electricity and electromagnetism, mathematics and engineering, astronomy and astrophysics, color theory and the theory of natural selection, geology and mineralogy, chemistry and medicine. This period was also considered the last great age of discovery, as explorers charted the interiors of the Americas, Asia, Africa, Australia, and the Arctic and Antarctic regions. The documents collected represent the most theoretical pursuits as well as practical applications and popular science.

In 1833 William Whewell, president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, whose members were then generally known as “natural philosophers,” first advocated use of the term “scientist.” Over the course of the century, the work of an increasingly diverse and dynamic scientific community led to fundamentally new understandings of the world and to technological innovations that transformed modern society. This work includes Charles Darwin's writings on evolution as well as Gregor Mendel's studies in genetics; Louis Pasteur's research in vaccination and Dmitri Mendeleev's creation of the periodic table; the many electrical wonders uncovered by Thomas Alva Edison and Nikola Tesla as well as the many lesser-known inventors responsible for improvements in the steam and internal combustion engines; the explosive inventiveness of Samuel Colt and Alfred Nobel and the more benign contributions of the naturalists Alexander von Humboldt and John James Audubon; the alteration in the way humanity viewed the night sky as a result of the discoveries of Caroline Herschel and William Huggins and the discoveries at the chemical element level of Marie Curie and William Ramsay; John Snow's development of epidemiology and Joseph Lister's promotion of the antiseptic method; the brilliant mathematical work of Carl Friedrich Gauss and Karl Weierstrass and the ideas of Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell that laid the groundwork for modern physics.

The range of materials available in this archive is well indicated by a quick glance at just one part of the whole, such as the 1.2 million pages in the American Medical Periodicals section. The chronological reach of these journals is evident in the holdings of the Medical Repository, founded in 1797, or the long-lived American Journal of Insanity, published by the Utica (N.Y.) State Hospital and then the American Medico-Psychological Association from 1844 to 1921. There are regional journals addressing the broad expanse of medicine, such as the Ohio Medical and Surgical Journal (1848–1878), and periodicals devoted to the specific fields of gynecology, homeopathy, dermatology, otology, psychology, nutrition, phrenology, neurology, hygiene, pharmacology, bacteria, surgery, syphilography, dentistry, medical education, and the business of medicine. Nearly every aspect of nineteenth-century medical practice, professional and popular, is covered in this archive.

The archive is based in large part on the holdings of the internationally renowned research institution the Huntington Library, in San Marino, California. Already in possession of a premier assortment of material on the history of science, the Huntington Library recently acquired the Burndy Library. With more than 47,000 volumes, the Burndy Library enhances the Huntington's holdings to create one of the world's great repositories on the history of science and technology. Additional materials originate from the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., and the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University in Philadelphia. Taken together, these rare books, journals, and documents constitute an invaluable window into the nature of scientific knowledge in the nineteenth century and are now readily available to scholars everywhere in this user-friendly searchable database.