Miriam Pauls Hardy
Photo is courtesy of the Alan Mason Chesney Medical Archives
I am entering into my third year of graduate study in history at Johns Hopkins. As a graduate student in the early stages of dissertation research, my experience working with the William G. and Miriam P. Hardy Collection has been an interesting and instructive one.
I have spent the summer working at the Chesney Medical Archives as a student archival assistant helping to process the Hardy Collection as part of the CLIR grant’s mission to uncover and make accessible “hidden” collections.
The Hardy Collection consists of 23 boxes and measures approximately 28 cubic feet. The full date range of the collection stretches from William Hardy’s 1933 M.A. thesis to correspondence written just prior Miriam Hardy’s death in 2009, with the bulk of the collection spanning the years between 1960 and 1982.
The Hardy Collection arrived at the archives a year after Miriam Hardy’s death. Since parts of the collection had been boxed at various intervals of their careers, and moved many times, it was not possible to ascertain its original order. To facilitate researcher accessibility, the Archives has thus imposed an organization that, as the student assigned to this project, I have helped to apply. Although somewhat daunting, the creative work of ordering the collection has enabled me to do a considerable amount of what I aspire to do best as a historian: research.
Typically I would examine historical collections from a historical researcher’s perspective; this project has enabled me to take critical stock of the activity of processing. It has prompted me to think more actively about how collections are organized – the “logic” of any given collection – and how information is highlighted, preserved, or channeled by the prerogatives of order and organization.
In the case of the Hardy Collection, the original order of which has likely been lost in translation, I have been able to learn much more about the Hardys as historical actors, their work and contributions, than might otherwise be necessary.
The Hardys’ work is of particular significance for my own research. I am in the early stages of research on the history of medicalized notions of intelligence and mental classifications based on IQ, and how these scientific ideas have impacted human rights and inequality over the twentieth century. The Hardy Collection, a previously “hidden” collection, complicates the picture for my research in a surprising way. Intuitively, when thinking about the history of mental and intellectual classification, my first forays into archives would not have been to research the contributions of audiologists. The Hardys were nonetheless important players in this field. As advocates for the deaf and hearing impaired, they introduced the idea that people heard – not with the ears – but with the brain. They applied their knowledge and research to produce methods of prevention and education so that early intervention might alleviate what they believed were “communicative,” rather than mental or intellectual, disorders.
The availability of this collection has the potential to influence my research in unexpected ways. It is
William G. Hardy
Photo is courtesy of the Alan Mason Chesney Medical Archives
exciting to gain some insight into archival processing while at the same time making available new information to researchers that may influence and inspire researchers in public health writ large. It is still more exciting to anticipate those insights and inspirations that this collection might provide for researchers including and apart from me.