Searching Medical Periodicals with Bookworm
I then restricted the “class” category to “medicine,” which created a more predictable search pattern across scientific literature, trending upwards after Henry Myer’s coinage of the term in the pages of the Lancet on February 13th, 1915. The term reached its zenith in 1919, when continued research on shellshock took place. There was a spike in 1922, around the time of the Report of the War Office Committee, and throughout the years that followed, there were smaller peaks and valleys. There was a notable peak around 1939-1940, around the beginning of the Second World War. This search was restricted to medicine and non-fiction after 1914-1950, which means that monographs are included in this corpus alongside journal articles.
Across these terms, I must note that when searching, Bookworm searches both full-text versions of volumes, alongside volumes which are not accessible to HathTrust researchers for further analysis, While the fiction search returns 166k volumes, while the general periodicals search returns 94k volumes, and the medical nonfiction search returns 31k volumes, these volumes are not necessarily open-text versions which researchers can access, thus the Bookworm search may be less helpful in discovering open-text corpora from the HathiTrust collection, and more helpful in measuring the preponderance of a term across time within the collection.