As a university student, I will be writing a term paper this semester on the development of hospitals for a class in American Technological Development. I need a fair amount of primary source documents and am a little perplexed how to acquire them.
I can find some literature on the general history of hospitals in America, but I would love to find some reports from early american hospitals themselves.
Is this information available online for the older hospitals? Has anyone had experience with going to the hospitals personally and asking for archival records to learn about the history, even if it is mainly economic information?
Thank you in advance for your advice and suggestions!
The place I have the most luck finding obscure annual reports of all sorts is Hathitrust. If you search for "annual report" hospital you get a lot of promising results. Granted I am not sure how early you are talking about — I have no idea if they have colonial period or thereabouts — but this is where I would start hunting around.
(When I was an undergrad I got great use out of annual reports by California state mental hospitals that were on file in the UC Berkeley library. Many of them are now online now — how much easier that would have been! I ended up writing a thesis on them that many years later I fixed up and published as an article in an edited volume.)
Isn't primary research where you yourself conduct the research into the topic. So questionnaires, surveys etc?