On Facet Tags, the Revised Subject Tree, and More

July 9, 2026

An overview for scholars and researchers familiar with the History of Medicine bibliographic corpus.

The Garrison-Morton-Norman site has been rebuilt as a modern browse-and-search frontend over the same bibliographic database scholars have relied on for years. The entries, subject headings, and citation data are preserved. What has changed is how the collection is organized for discovery—and several features that make geographic and biographical context easier to explore.

The corpus holds roughly 16,000 bibliographic entries, indexed through tens of thousands of subject assignments across a taxonomy of ~1,700 subject headings. Many entries carry multiple subjects. That granularity is a strength for precision indexing, but a single subject tree is a difficult front door to a collection this size: you often need to know where in the hierarchy to start before you can find anything.

Medical libraries have long addressed this differently. Rather than asking researchers to descend a monolithic tree, they offer faceted browse: a small set of orthogonal categories—era, geography, specialty, document type, and so on—from which to combine filters to narrow a large catalog. The National Library of Medicine’s MeSH (Medical Subject Headings) is the familiar example; PubMed and many special-collections catalogs use similar multi-axis systems.

You may be more used to the word tags than facets. They work together on this site:

A tag is a clickable label that narrows the corpus—Medieval, United States, Surgery, Biography, and so on.
A facet is a dimension or grouping of related tags: a domain such as era, geography, specialty, or reference. Each facet collects tags that answer the same kind of question.

The browser has eight facets; each holds many tags. You select at most one tag per facet, then combine choices across facets. That is different from a single flat tag list, but the pills you click are tags organized into these structured groupings.

The Facet browser is MeSH-inspired: eight facet groups and their tags follow MeSH’s conceptual structure (historical periods, geographic categories, clinical specialties, institutions, reference genres, and related domains), and several tags carry MeSH tree references for scholars who think in those terms. The vocabulary is adapted to Garrison-Morton’s subject headings, which predate the facet tags.

Your Feedback on Facets Matters

Not every subject maps cleanly to a combination of tags—and that is intentional. Perfect one-to-one coverage would trade too many subjects for too many facets and tags.

Facets are meant for broad, combinatorial browsing. For a very fine-grained subject heading, search the corpus instead (or use the subject browser , or the legacy-subject lookup on the facet browser) rather than expecting a dedicated facet tag.

The opposite problem matters too: if the facet set is too sparse, filters return overly broad result sets, and smaller subjects can disappear inside large tags.

We are looking for places where the Facet browser has a noticeable gap relative to the Subject browser—especially medium or large subjects that are hard to reach with facets, and smaller subjects that get lost under a broader tag. If you find either, please let us know.

Using Facets & Tags

The eight facet groups are:

Group	Examples of tags
Historical Eras	Ancient, Medieval, Early Modern, Modern, Traditional & Indigenous
Geography	United States, Europe & UK, Asia & Pacific, Travel & Voyages, etc.
Specialties & Disease	Surgery, Public Health, Neurology & Psychiatry, Plagues & Epidemics, etc.
Drugs & Technology	Pharmacology, Diagnostics & Imaging, Instruments & Devices
Institutions & Culture	Hospitals, Ethics & Law, Arts & Humanities
Reference & Scholarly Works	Biography, Bibliography, Encyclopedias, Periodicals
Natural & Physical Sciences	Chemistry, Genetics, Zoology, Natural History
Social & Historical Studies	Women & Gender, Race & Colonial Medicine, Historiography

Within each group you select one tag at a time. Tags from different groups combine with AND logic—for example, Medieval + Islamic/Arab medicine + Surgery returns entries indexed under subjects that fall into all three categories. Tag counts update as you filter, so you can see which combinations actually exist in the corpus before committing to them. Results can be viewed as table, cards, or map.

This is intended to supplement the subject tree as the main discovery path for scholars who do not already know the hierarchy. The subject browser remains available, but facets are the recommended starting point for exploratory research across the full corpus.

Garrison-Morton subject lookup

Because many researchers know the site through its longstanding subject headings, the facet page includes a “Find legacy subject…” search. Type a familiar subject name and the system shows its place in the canonical subject tree and which facet tag(s) it maps to. You can jump directly to the equivalent facet filter set, or open the subject in the traditional subject browser. We did not discard the editorial subject vocabulary; we layered a more navigable browse interface on top of it.

Facet tags also appear on individual entry pages, so you can pivot from a record you already know into a broader filtered set.

Subject hierarchy: reorganized, not reduced

We also revised the subject hierarchy used in the sidebar subject browser. This was probably the most consequential information-architecture change in the rebuild.

The numbers

On the legacy site, the canonical subject table had 285 root-level headings—nearly 300 distinctive top-level categories, many in the ALL CAPS style of the original taxonomy (SURGERY, PHARMACOLOGY, WOMEN in Medicine, VOYAGES & Travels by Physicians, etc). Faithful as that structure is to decades of editorial practice, it is overwhelming as an entry point: the first screen of navigation is itself a specialist’s almanac.

The revised browse tree reduces the visible root to twelve broad meta-categories:

History & Social Studies of Medicine
Reference & Bibliography
Clinical Specialties & Practice
Biological & Natural Sciences
Basic & Physical Sciences
Culture, Arts & Humanities
Regional, Ethnic & Travel Medicine
Health Systems, Policy & Public Health
Alternative, Folk & Fringe Medicine
Technology, Computing & Engineering
Allied Disciplines & Miscellaneous
Other Subjects

Under those folders, the familiar granular headings reappear. No leaf subject with entries was deleted. The canonical subject records—and the entries attached to them—are unchanged. What changed is the navigation tree: a separate browse structure that re-parents root headings under broader folders, while preserving deeper ancestral relationships from the original taxonomy.

Revised / Classic toggle

Scholars who prefer the prior top-level organization can switch back without leaving the new site. On the Subjects browse page, a Revised / Classic toggle in the sidebar lets you choose:

Revised (default) — the twelve meta-category folders described above.
Classic — the original canonical tree, with ~285 flat top-level headings and the familiar nested structure beneath them.

Your choice is remembered in the browser and (reflected in the URL, e.g.?tree=classic). Entry results are the same either way; only the navigation hierarchy changes. This toggle is meant to ease the transition for longtime users while keeping Revised as the default for newcomers. It does not yet reproduce every legacy affordance (A–Z letter jumps within the sidebar, or “See” / “See also” redirects for empty headings)—those may follow in a later release.

Work still in progress

Reparenting rules, facet-to-subject mappings, edge cases in the ALL CAPS legacy headings, and coverage for uncommon subjects are all still being refined. If a subject lands in a folder that feels wrong, or fails to map to a facet tag, that is useful feedback.

Scholars who want the prior site exactly as it was—including its older interface—can still visit the legacy installation at historyofmedicine.com during the beta testing period.

Publication and annotation maps

Entry browse now supports a map view that distinguishes two geographic questions the bibliography often raises:

Publication places — where a work was published or printed.
Places mentioned in annotations — locations discussed in the bibliographic note, which may differ from the imprint.

Both can be explored from subject, facet, author, place, year, and entry-number browse routes.

Author portraits

Thousands of author images have been imported from public-domain sources and appear throughout the site—in author browse, entry records, and search results—where a portrait is available. License and source attribution are shown where required.

A note on vocabulary

When we describe the facet system as MeSH-inspired, we mean aligned with MeSH’s conceptual structure and tree references where helpful—not a National Library of Medicine import. Facets are the eight browse dimensions; tags are the selectable values within each. Entries remain indexed by the Garrison-Morton subject headings scholars have cited for years. Facets and the revised subject tree are browse layers, not a re-cataloging of the corpus.

We welcome your feedback

This rebuild touches the core way researchers enter a large, idiosyncratic taxonomy. Corrections and suggestions are especially welcome on subject placement, facet mapping, and the Revised vs. Classic hierarchy. Please use the site contact page or reach out through your usual IIHM channels.