The University of Michigan Historical Center for the Health Sciences' primary objective is to foster a broader understanding and deeper appreciation of the pioneering role of the University of Michigan, its alumni, and Michigan as a state in advancing knowledge of disease and promoting human health. The Center serves all of the health sciences and helps each to preserve its heritage and to promote scholarly historical investigation. It seeks to achieve this through four major activities:

• enhancing the usability of existing archival and artifactual resources
• fostering research
• preserving, documenting, and supplementing the University's existing collection of health science artifact
• sponsoring history and policy debates that will bring historians, educators, and policy makers together to promote the exchange of ideas and the utility of history in the development of ethics and policy.

This Guide is a product of the Historical Center for the Health Sciences' SourceLINK Project, initiated in January 1993 with funding from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. SourceLINK has two facets:

1. The Michigan Digital Historical Initiative serves as an information clearinghouse to primary resources in the history of health care and the health sciences as they are associated with Michigan.
   • The objectives of the MDHI are to promote, through the development and dissemination of databases and printed and electronic publications, knowledge of, and intellectual and physical access to, relevant research materials.

   • This component seeks not only to reach more traditional archives users such as historians, but also policy makers, program developers, clinical practitioners, and research scientists.

2. To provide an archival consulting service in the history of health care and the health sciences as they are associated with Michigan.
   • The objectives of the consulting service are to aid historical repositories, clinical institutions, and community-based organizations with an interest or holdings in health care and the health sciences, to identify, preserve, organize, and describe their materials of administrative and/or historical value.

This Guide provides a digital overview of over 1400 primary sources, held by 35 repositories, relating to the history of the health sciences in Michigan and to the influence of Michigan and Michiganians upon the development of the health sciences nationally and internationally. The health sciences in this context have been broadly defined as encompassing medicine, mental health, dentistry, nursing, medical and hospital administration, optometry, opthalmology, pharmacy, chiropractic, and public health programs; as well as associated issues such as legislation, occupational safety and health, health insurance, professional regulation and licensing, and professional education. Materials described include archival records, personal papers, and both original photographic images and photographic representations of health science-related artifacts spanning the last three hundred years of Michigan history. They are rich in documentation of public health activities, pioneering research, and aspects of health care as they impinge upon both professional and domestic life.