Digital Scholarship Conversations: Building a Longitudinal, Physician-Level Dataset from the American Medical Directories (1906-1938)

Digital Scholarship Conversations series is a monthly brown bag hosted by Tisch Library. Each conversation will focus on a different topic, helping us share ideas and build community around the intersection of digital technology and our research and teaching.

In this session, Dr. Ben Chrisinger and Dr. Sean Smith will talk about their current project focused on the American Medical Directories (AMDs), periodically published by the American Medical Association from 1906, which present an immense opportunity to illuminate the organizational dynamics of professional medicine in the early 20th century. In addition to physicians’ names and practice locations, these volumes also contain valuable information about individuals’ training histories and medical specializations, demographic characteristics, and membership in state and local societies. Because AMDs were published triennially, they also present an opportunity to link individuals over time, exploring physicians’ movement between regions, as well as how and where training pipelines for the medical workforce developed. No other data source offers such nuanced, individual-level information about the early medical workforce, yet the AMDs remain underexplored archival sources, largely due to the difficulties of extracting large quantities of data from original archival sources. By extracting, formatting, and geolocating data from these sources, this project will put AMD data into the hands of social science researchers, demonstrate its utility by exploring a set of sociological hypotheses, and sustainably archive them for future generations. Additionally, public-facing outputs and activities will bring this project to a broader audience, enabling still further kinds of non-academic inquiries and applications.

Bios:

Ben Chrisinger is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Community Health at Tufts, and PI of the NSF-funded American Medical Directories Project. His research broadly focuses on the relationship between health and place, and uses quantitative and qualitative methodologies. He is on research leave during the 2025-2026 academic year, based out of the Center for Health and Wellbeing at Princeton University.

Sean Smith serves as the Data Services Specialist at Rice University's Fondren Library and is the co-PI of the American Medical Directories Project. He earned a PhD in History after a career in software engineering, and his research examines the role of health in constructing race.