NetNotes: Medical History on the Internet

How will the Internet interact, positively or negatively, with historical scholarship? As before, we intend in these pages to publish reports on works in progress that seem likely to stretch the boundaries of what is possible, through the use of the Internet and electronic publishing, for emerging forms of inquiry in the history of medicine. One exceedingly promising example is The Living City, a website described in the accompanying article. Not only do Amy Fairchild and David Rosner provide more evidence of the multimedia functionality of this new means of distribution—the World Wide Web—by enhancing traditional textual and statistical data, they also introduce us to the promising technology of geographic information systems, or “GIS.” GIS is likely, in the years just ahead, to bring history and geography together in new configurations. And this is likely to occur both at the level of broad temporal and spatial sweeps and also, as we see here with New York City, at the “micro” level of life and death, neighborhood by neighborhood.