Search tips

Searches with more than one word will find items with all the words anywhere in the record.
Example: herbal medicine
Cholera France 19th century

To broaden your search, use OR between words.
Example: AIDS OR HIV

To exclude words from your search, use AND NOT between words.
Example: heart AND NOT disease

You can search for words that have the same beginning, eg. midwife, midwives, midwifery, by adding an asterisk * at the end of the stem.
Example: midwi* child* or infant*

You can use a question mark to replace a letter/letters in the middle of a word.
Example: wom?n will search for woman and women

Use near to specify words close to each other, in any order. Use before and after to specify word order, with any number of words in between. To search for the terms “near”, “before” and “after”, enclose them in quotation marks.

To limit your search to specific fields within records, or by language, publication date or location, use an advanced word search.