The National Library of Medicine’s traveling exhibit program highlights important topics in healthcare history and makes them accessible to students and researchers across the country. UVM Libraries was honored to host their exhibit Outside/Inside: Immigration, Migration, and Health Care in the United States at Dana Health Sciences Library this fall. 

Jennifer Snow, interim director of the Dana Health Sciences Library, said “We’re excited to have a great partner in the National Library of Medicine. Outside/Inside is an important exhibit that sheds light on the discrimination and stigmatization that exists in the history of healthcare. As a health sciences library, we aim to be active participants in the conversation of making healthcare equal, accessible, and free of exclusion.” 

UVM staff discuss the exhibit by the panels in Dana
On a recent Friday afternoon, Libraries staff and faculty gathered with UVM and UVMMC community members to celebrate the closing of the exhibit. 

About the exhibit 

Exhibit panels detailed key moments and figures in U.S. immigration and healthcare history such as nurse and reformer Lillian Wald. In 1893, Wald co-founded the Henry Street Visiting Nurse Service in the world’s largest immigrant neighborhood, New York’s Lower East Side. Wald believed that visiting nurses could play a life-changing role in reducing death rates and in helping immigrants adjust to life in the U.S. 

Movements toward inclusive healthcare continued to evolve throughout the 20th century, and the exhibit captured these. In the 1960s and 1970s, the United Farm Workers of America recruited volunteer physicians and nurses to staff health clinics dedicated to immigrants and migrants. In 1985, the Migrant Clinicians Network was founded by nurses and physicians to provide trainings to practitioners working in migrant health facilities around the country. 

“In an era when the value of medical research is being called into question, it is gratifying to host an exhibit that tells the story of medical advances over the years,” said Dean of Libraries Bryn Geffert. “Students and all of us, for that matter, need reminders about what the medical community has achieved and how it achieved it.” 

Dana Health Sciences Library is open to all UVM community members (not just the health sciences majors!), all UVM Medical Center community members and all Vermonters. Another exhibit hosted by Dana focuses on planetary health at UVM and runs through the fall semester.

Learn more about Dana and find their hours.