John R. Bumstead Librarian for Medical History & Head of the Medical Historical Library
Melissa Grafe is the Head of the Medical Historical Library at Yale School of Medicine and joined Yale University in 2011 as the John R. Bumstead Librarian for Medical History at the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library. She leads the Medical Historical Library team and manages the library's collections, including over 100,000 medical and scientific volumes from the 12th-21st centuries, as well as a growing digital collection. She also works with students and faculty on research and classes; develops grants and publications; oversees major digitization projects; curates and stages exhibitions; and manages gifts and donations, among other duties.
Grafe received her Ph.D. in the History of Medicine from Johns Hopkins University and was a Council of Library and Information Resources (CLIR) postdoctoral fellow at Lehigh University Library followed by an appointment as the Humanities Librarian at Lehigh before coming to Yale. She is past president for the Medical Heritage Library (2018-2020) and Archivists and Librarians in the History of the Health Sciences (renamed Librarians, Archivists, and Museum Professionals in the History of the Health Sciences).