LibGuides: NHS: Medical Images

Introduction to medical images

The Internet contains a wealth of scientific and clinical images which can be used for study, teaching and research. Images may be included in electronic journals, individual documents on the web, as part of multimedia tutorials, presentations, lectures and so on.

JISC Digital Media provides advice and guidance for the Higher Education community on image creation, delivery and use and on digitisation projects and much of this is equally applicable to NHS staff. See in particular their review of image search engines

There is plenty of other useful material elsewhere on the site.

Re-using someone else's image?

Always check on the site for information about copyright restrictions. Not all images will be freely available. You may need to seek the publishers' permission before copying any image.

To download an image to your PC, right click on the image and select Save Picture As. To insert into Word or PowerPoint, select Insert, then Picture. Locate the image file on your disc and insert.

Image resources

Here is a selection of other image resources you may find useful.

Images from the History of Medicine (NLM)
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Images from the History of Medicine (IHM) provides access to over 70,000 images in the collections of the History of Medicine Division (HMD) of the U.S National Library of Medicine (NLM).

UK Medical Heritage Library
Free access

The UK Medical Heritage Library brings together books and pamphlets from 10 research libraries in the UK, focused on the 19th and early 20th century history of medicine and related disciplines. This ongoing digitisation project is funded by Jisc and the Wellcome Library. The UK Medical Heritage Library is a sub-set of the Medical Heritage Library (https://archive.org/details/medicalheritagelibrary).
UK Medical Heritage Library.

Public Health Image Library (PHIL)
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Created by a working group at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the PHIL provides a free universal gateway to the CDC's pictures through an organised and searchable database of images related to public health. The content is organised into hierarchical categories of people, places, and science, and is presented as single images, image sets, and multimedia files.
NASA image portal
Access NASA's image and multimedia collections

Example images

DNA double helix illustration

Credit Spooky Pooka, Wellcome Images. DNA double helix illustration. Illustration of the DNA double helix structure first discovered by Watson and Crick in 1953. Digital artwork/Computer graphic 2005. Collection: Wellcome Images

This illustration depicts a dorsal view of the “Common fruit" fly, or “Vinegar” fly, Drosophila melanogaster, a member of the family Drosophilidae. CDC copyright free image from the Public Health Image Library.