Did Hamilton Ever Use the Hamilton Rating Scale for Depression? Reflections on the (Re-)Use of Oral Histories and Their Accessibility via the ComBio Website

Saul Benison, a central figure in establishing interview collections in the history of science and medicine, noted already in 1962 that “we often forget that it is not enough to collect documents. They must be used and analysed. Our archives are too dusty and too quiet.”¹ Oral history collections have been expanded or newly created since then, and some of those collections offer at least partial online access. But there are still limitations to their use.² The sheer number of such interviews available online hosted by various institutions, each of them with their own logics for access and metadata, pose serious challenges for accessing them as a corpus—it has been impossible to search across all these collections. We have developed a project and website, called Commoning Biomedicine, hereafter ComBio, that provides a platform to make oral history sources on biomedicine more accessible and searchable.³ The ComBio...