~This post courtesy Polina Ilieva, Archivist, UCSF Archives and Special Collections.
We posted a couple of weeks back about the “Memory Lives On” event upcoming at the UCSF Archives and Special Collections and we have a great announcement from Polina Ilieva:
Dear Colleagues,
Please be advised that due to recent gifts from our supporters, we are now able to lower the symposium registration fee to $30 to allow a broader audience of students and community members to attend our event.
If you have already signed up for the event and paid the higher fee, the difference will be refunded to you.
~Post courtesy Dominic Hall, Warren Anatomical Museum curator.
As of Wednesday, 8/21/2019, the Warren Anatomical Museum exhibition gallery will be closed until Spring 2021 to prepare for its redesign as part of the larger renovation of the Countway Library of Medicine. Throughout August, the exhibits will be taken down both for their protection during the upcoming construction and to allow for the curation of the next iteration of the Warren Anatomical Museum exhibition gallery.
The second collection of documents I curated this summer focus on the topic of disabilities in medical history. This is topic that is rich for exploration and requires careful contextualization. The words used to describe physical, mental, and emotional impairments have, over time, come to be used as degrading and dehumanizing terms, yet many such (including “cripple,” “feeble-minded,” “moron,” and the like) were commonly used in medical literature of the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. My goal with these collections, therefore, was to provide ample specific context and to demonstrate how understandings of physical, mental, and developmental disabilities have changed over time.
Two collection areas are organized around what historians of disabilities have called the medical and social models of disability: the former sees conditions labeled as disabling as based in an abnormal process that must be corrected, while the latter considers disabilities to be the problem of the social or built environment (to cite a common example: using a wheelchair isn’t inherently a problem, until one encounters stairs). The sources contained in the medical model collections (which I termed interventions/care), were chosen because they each give a perspective on how the medical community at a specific point in time approached care for people with disabilities. This 1867 text, Infantile Paralysis and its Attendant Deformities by Charles F. Taylor, details not only the design of various apparatuses to treat children with lingering paralysis, but expounds on the author’s theory as to why the disease developed (nervously-exhausted parents were to blame!).
Likewise, the social model collection (policy/society) highlights items from MHL’s collections that show how individuals with disabilities coped with the challenges of their day, or how society has tried to accommodate people with disabilities. One particularly rich set of sources was produced by the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Labor, which in 1944 set out to survey the prevalence and types of assistance available to citizens with disabilities (in all likelihood, for the purpose of having a list of what soldiers returning from World War II might expect). The “Hearings on Aids to the Physically Handicapped” ran to eight sessions and produced 1,138 total pages of testimony pertaining to services available to individuals with disabilities (and often on what was NOT available). The first volume in the series can be located here.
Rather than organize around specific types of disability, I chose these classifications in order to highlight commonalities across those categories. However, I thought a sort of “case-study” approach would also be useful, as it could provide a through-line narrative. For this, I chose the topic of veterans with disabilities. This allowed me to take advantage of collections digitized by the U.S. National Library of Medicine and the Navy Bureau of Medicine and Surgery Office of Medical History Collection. One common theme was that of rehabilitation, especially in the wake of World War I. This magazine, Carry On: A Magazine on the Reconstruction of Crippled Soldiers and Sailors, was produced by the American Red Cross as a resource for individuals and relief societies interested in veterans with disabilities. It’s oft-repeated message was “not charity, but a chance.”
Creating this collection necessarily turned up sources that may be unsettling or disturbing to some, and where necessary I have included notes to that effect. One tendency in historical medical literature that discusses patients with disabilities is the use of images of patients (clothed and unclothed, face obscured or not) to illustrate examples. While the case can be made that these have been valuable teaching tools for medical students in the past, the question of whether the patient consented to the use of their image is not always answered. Unfortunately, it’s often safe to say that consent was not considered in the era prior to the 1970s.
We’ll be showcasing more of Kelly’s work from this summer when our blog redesign is fully complete.
Memory Lives On: Documenting the HIV/AIDS Epidemic
Friday, October 4 – Saturday, October 5
Byers Auditorium in Genentech Hall, UCSF Mission Bay campus
Join UCSF Archives & Special Collections for this interdisciplinary symposium exploring and reflecting on topics related to archives and the practice of documenting the stories of HIV/AIDS.
The task of documenting the history of HIV/AIDS and thinking about the present and future of the epidemic is daunting. The enormity and complexity of the stories and perspectives on the disease, which has affected so many millions of patients and families around the world, present significant challenges that demand continual reexamination. In examining and reflecting on our knowledge of the history of the HIV/AIDS epidemic and its future, we hope to improve our understanding of the true effects of the disease, and what it can teach us about future epidemics.
The Symposium will take place in Byers Auditorium in Genentech Hall at the UCSF Mission Bay Campus in San Francisco. The program will be an afternoon session and evening reception on day one, followed by a full day of presentations on day two.
Early bird tickets will be sold at $125/person for a limited time. Register NOW!
Presented by UCSF Library Archives and Special Collections, GLBT Historical Society, San Francisco Public Library History Center, and UC Merced Library as part of the NEH Funded grant project The Bay Area’s Response to the AIDS Epidemic. Food will be provided to attendees. Symposium is Open to the Public.
Following the “animal turn” in historical research, more work has been done in the history of medicine on animals as research subjects. In the realm of vaccination, this history should be immediately apparent: it’s right there in the name. Edward Jenner in his 1798 treatise, An Inquiry into the Causes and Effects of the Variolae Vaccinae, applied a Latin name to the cowpox: variolae vaccinae (smallpox + from cows), from which the noun “vaccination” is derived. Jenner developed the first vaccine against a disease after observing that dairymaids and farm hands who had contracted cowpox from livestock were not susceptible either to smallpox infection or inoculation. Jenner’s innovation, as those familiar with the story know, was not greeted with universal enthusiasm.
Image 1: harvesting cowpox lymph from a calf for use in smallpox vaccine. Source: J. Aitchbee, What is Vaccine Lymph?Kilmarnock, Scotland: Joseph Scott, 1904, p. 6
For one thing, just because a substance prevented deadly disease did not make all individuals wild about having it injected into their bodies. The author of “What is Vaccine Lymph?” certainly thought lymph collected from live cows was not suitable for human use. Referencing illustrations from a government report on the process of vaccine collection (see above), he explained that 18-month-old calves were walked alongside a rotating table, strapped to it, and then elevated into a horizontal position. This position and the restraints made it easier for the cultivators to inflict small cuts and rub cowpox matter into them, encouraging more cowpox sores to grow, and later harvested the lymph for use as smallpox vaccine. Once the cow had recovered from its cultivated cowpox, it was, according to this author, sold to the slaughterhouse.
In all likelihood, the original intent of the photographer was to reassure officials that the vaccine was collected in a regimented manner, but the photos were spun differently by Aitchbee.
The reader was expected to conclude that cultivating vaccine lymph was not only cruel to animals, but that the matter potentially contained the germs of other diseases, such as tuberculosis – cows were also a vector for that terrible disease – and thus posed a danger to human health. Visions of filthy stockyards and the sickly cattle from which vaccine lymph was harvested abound in anti-vaccination literature. One critic argued that inoculation with “puss,” whether from animals or humans, was unnatural and compulsory vaccination, therefore, constituted “assault and a crime in the nature of rape.”
Unsurprisingly, there was a great amount of overlap between anti-vivisectionist societies and anti-vaccination societies in the early twentieth century.
Contrast with this, the story of the diphtheria antitoxin. Whereas Jenner’s discovery took advantage of knowledge from farmers confirmed through his own clinical experiments and observations, the diphtheria antitoxin was developed in laboratories in France and Germany, using then-cutting-edge scientific techniques. As the antitoxin must be generated in an animal body, horses were used as they produce large quantities of blood and generate a fairly quick immune response to the antibodies (for a short history of the New York City Health Department’s diphtheria antitoxin farm, click here).
The antitoxin’s equine origin was not hidden from the public: newspapers coverage from 1895 included photographs of horses standing patiently, allowing their blood to be collected for use in serums that would save the lives of sick children.
Western cultural perceptions of horses as opposed to cows – horses are beautiful and dignified and cows are clumsy and well, unintelligent (I personally do not endorse either of those positions) – may have had an influence on how the public reacted to news that the latest vaccine on the market was also cultivated in animals. Portrayals of horses nobly giving their blood for the sake of innocent children would have gone a long way towards assuaging any qualms about their use as cultivators. Adding to the image of valued service, these horses, once they had given several serum donations, were retired to rural pastures.
Anti-vaccinationists still referenced cultivation in animals generally, but illustrated anti-vaccination sources in the MHL collections only use images of cattle for the purpose of discomforting the reader.
A 1945 educational film produced in collaboration with the Wellcome Physiological Research Laboratories gave audiences a first-hand look at the conditions in which horses were kept during the process of cultivating and harvesting diphtheria antitoxin. The horse was led into a clean tiled room, the site for injections and blood draws was scrubbed and sterilized, and the veterinarians and technicians wore surgical scrubs. The horse is removed from the barnyard and becomes part of the laboratory (I will caution you that the film is overall horrendously dull, as one might expect from a 1940s-era educational film).*
Image 3: Vaccinating a sheep against anthrax. Two men working together in this method could immunize up to 150 sheep in an hour, assuming the remaining 149 stood still after watching this procedure. Source: George Fleming,Pasteur and His Work, from an Agricultural and Veterinary Point of View(London: William Clowes and Sons, 1886), p. 51.
So far I have highlighted the history of perceptions of the use of animals in the production of vaccines, but what about the effects of vaccines on animals themselves? As both vectors and victims of contagious diseases, animals have been recipients of vaccines to prevent illnesses such as rabies, anthrax, and distemper. Agriculturalists early realized the potential benefits to humans from vaccinating livestock: herds would live longer, healthier lives and produce more young.
Agricultural and veterinary historians have no doubt included vaccines in their accounts of the development of modern animal husbandry, but how have human and animal health alike been affected by vaccines? While the usual metaphor of the two-way street is an overstatement, given greater human agency, these sources indicate an inter-relationship between humans and the animals we’ve vaccinated.
*For more on mass media and its effects on popular perception of medicine, see Bert Hansen, Picturing Medical Progress from Pasteur to Polio (Rutgers University Press, 2009).
I’ve spent the first month of my fellowship culling through documents in the Medical Heritage Library Collections that illustrate moments in the history of vaccine development and use. These have ranged from notices in state medical society journals about new serums and state laws to scientific reports to anti-vaccination tracts. In selecting items for inclusion in the exhibit, I gravitated towards those that were representative of key events or themes in vaccine history and that had visual appeal.
I want this collection to meet two goals: 1) making primary sources on the history of vaccines more accessible to the public, and 2) showcasing the different types of sources that are available through the MHL’s collections. This is why, for example, I chose to feature three editorials from state medical society journals to depict trials of the Salk polio vaccine trials in the early 1950s. I also leaned heavily, whenever possible, towards documents that clearly lay out a position (e.g. for or against vaccination) or that explain a development using case studies and statistics (Edward Jenner’s 1798 pamphlet is, conveniently, a useful example). This is for the benefit of K-12 instructors who may be looking for materials that students can evaluate for argument or to explain the scientific method.
These mini exhibits do not contain all there is to find on the history of vaccines; researchers with an interest in public policy and federal aid to promote vaccination will find ample sources documenting that history. Nor are the MHL collections – despite including nearly 300,000 items – comprehensive on this topic. I especially wanted to find more public education ephemera and PSAs, but few have been added to the collection to date. Such is the nature of historical collections.
~This post courtesy Paul Horn, Digitisation Support Officer, Wellcome Collection.
We are at the beginning of a project to digitise Wellcome’s collections of journals – the periodical publications of a range of societies, organisations, and academic disciplines concerned with health. The project is exciting because of its scale, the new challenges it presents, and the benefits it will offer to researchers and other users.
The journal holdings are substantial and are
representative of Wellcome’s wide-ranging and unusual collection. Whilst some have a narrow focus on a geographic
region and/or special interest, such as the Annual report and transactions of
the Plymouth Institution and Devon and Cornwall Natural History Society, others are overtly miscellanies. The Gentleman’s
Magazine (first published in 1731) pioneered such an approach: its emphasis was to create a monthly digest of news,
commentary and satire for the educated public.
Contributions to that
magazine take the form of letters to the editor, Sylvanus Urban (the pen name of
its founder, Edward Cave), and range in one volume (selected at random) for 1790,
from a consideration of ‘The Celibacy of Fellowes of Colleges’, to remarks on
Jamaican vegetable soap from a correspondent in Bermuda, and an illustrated account
of a new apparatus ‘for communicating Heat to Bodies apparently dead.’ Debates carried out through its letters could
run for several issues. It was the first
periodical to use the term magazine
(from the French, meaning ‘storehouse’), and utilised a vast distribution
system, established by Cave, being read throughout the English-speaking world.
For now, we are focussing only on
digitising runs of journals which start and end before the beginning of the
twentieth century. Based on the average
page count per item, average number of items per serial, and the in-scope to
out-of-scope ratio of the material we have assessed so far, we expect the
journals currently selected for digitisation to take around a calendar year to
photograph, accounting for 4 million individual images. The remainder of titles that begin before
1900 but continue into the twentieth century, and those that begin and end
after 1900 would, if we were to digitise them, take almost 7 years to produce
nearly 30 million more images.
The journals digitisation project follows
on from our work with the Internet Archive to digitise our nineteenth century
books collection, which concluded this spring after four years spent preparing,
photographing and ingesting 12 million images from 35,000 monographs charting
the history of medicine. Whilst the journals
share physical characteristics with these books, they differ in ways which
present new challenges. Different categories of metadata pertain to them, and
the library only holds a single serial level catalogue record for each of the
publications we are digitising.
Therefore, it is necessary for us, when assessing the material, to
decide whether the journal divides most naturally into volumes or issues, and
then, using the serial records as templates, to create new records in our digitisation
database for each new item, adding volume, issue, edition, and date
information. The level of existing metadata
is not consistent from one serial to another, so we must maintain attention to
detail. The journals are a large
collection with limited catalogue information.
Therefore, forecasting the duration of the project and refining the
schedule is an ongoing process. Creating
new records with enhanced metadata not only facilitates scheduling but enables
us to develop a more detailed picture of Wellcome’s own holdings.
Together with the Internet Archive, whose
staff photograph the journals in a dedicated studio on-site at Wellcome, we
have worked towards an easily searchable and browsable way to display the digitised
journals on their website. Included as
part of the ‘scan list’ we send to the Internet Archive when delivering each
batch of journals are composite titles for each item automatically generated from
the metadata concerning the journal name, date range, volume, issue and edition. These descriptive titles replace the simpler serial
titles in Wellcome’s catalogue when the Internet Archive pull the records for ingest,
and are displayed on the Internet Archive site as the main heading for each
item. The journals are collected and
searchable as part of the main MHL collection at http://www.archive.org/details/medicalheritagelibrary. When we have the capability to do so, they
will be displayed on Wellcome’s own site, too.
The journals project has the potential to
provide an excellent resource for researchers and other users. Journals lend themselves to fruitful speculative
keyword searches which can reveal interesting and unexpected connections,
including the juxtaposition of articles with pictorial content such as adverts. They also attract browsing more than other
forms – researchers will want to flick through titles to see what changes from
volume to volume, month to month, week to week, etc.
As our journals become available online, a
more detailed picture of the varied nature of science writing across history
will emerge, and researchers will be able to use the breadth of collection to
situate material in its cultural context.
We’re pleased to introduce our other fellow, working this summer on ArchiveSpark and our full-text search tool.
Who are you?
My name
is Garrett Morton, and I just finished my Master of Science in Information at
the University of Michigan School of Information.
What’s your background?
As an
undergraduate, I majored in history, which is how I got into archives in the
first place. Before going back to school to pursue my master’s degree in
information, I worked variously in archival processing, records management, and
bookstores, all of which have contributed to who I am now in ways both
intuitive and unexpected. I learned that you don’t have to be a historian
to contribute to our collective understanding of our past, but also that
helping people ends up being the most fulfilling aspect of anything I do.
During my graduate degree, I have had opportunities to write finding aids for
the William L. Clements Library at U-M, teach consulting and contextual inquiry
to master’s students, perform program evaluation research, and work on a cross-disciplinary
platform design team at Harvard Library. Over the course of my
graduate education, I also realized that I have a strong interest in the
technical side of archival and library resources, especially relating to
metadata and the computer systems by which we access material. I devoured
all the coursework I could find, and some besides, that allowed me to learn
more about programming, systems administration, and metadata creation and
maintenance. I also found classroom and non-classroom opportunities to
try my hand at user experience research, turning patron experiences into the
actionable building blocks that guide us in making it easier for patrons to
achieve their goals.
Why are you interested?
Coming
at my technical interests without particularly strong prior technical knowledge
or experience, it was easy for me to view systems both from the perspective of
researchers and patrons who use them and from the perspective of the technical
and information professionals who create and maintain them. I find the
problem-solving challenge of designing an app or system to be rewarding and
enjoyable, but it is particularly fulfilling to be able to see the tangible
beneficial effects on patrons and researchers. I found this opportunity
with the MHL particularly exciting because it offered me a chance to bring a
lot of my sometimes-divergent interests together. Working with these
valuable historical collections I could facilitate research, at the same time as
using and growing my technical skills, while also applying my knowledge of user
experience research to bring these aspects together. It feels so rare, as
a current or recent graduate student, to see an opportunity where you can have
such a direct impact on the individual people using an institution’s
collection, but that’s exactly what this position at the MHL offers.
What do you hope to do?
Over the
remaining weeks of this fellowship, I will conduct further interviews with
researchers which will help me gain a concrete, empirical understanding of ways
in which current tools fall short of researcher needs. I then hope to
build those observable needs into a prototype for a new advanced search tool
for the MHL collections.
The National Library of Medicine (NLM) signed a three-year memorandum of understanding with the Medical Heritage Library (MHL) to promote free and open access to quality historical resources in medicine and the human health sciences.
Under the agreement, the MHL will include digitized NLM historical materials and associated metadata in its free and open archive of historical resources. Additionally, staff of the organizations will exchange expertise to ensure and share accurate metadata for the materials, data-driven analyses of usage of the materials, as well as transparent and open engagement efforts with researchers who could benefit from knowing about the free availability of the materials.
MHL—a nonprofit organization—is a digital curation collaborative among some of the world’s leading medical libraries promoting free and open access to quality historical resources in medicine. Through the partnership with the MHL, the NLM strengthens its connections to U.S. and international peer institutions and their communities, including Harvard University, the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, the New York Academy of Medicine, the Wellcome Library in London and the Bibliothèque interuniversitaire de Santé in Paris.
NLM holds collections spanning ten centuries of global medical history. “This agreement supports the shared goals of NLM and MHL to open these collections to new audiences and provide access that supports a variety of current and developing research methods,” said Jeffrey S. Reznick, PhD, Chief of the NLM History of Medicine Division.
“This agreement with the NLM strengthens the MHL’s core mission, as a collaborative digitization and discovery organization committed to providing open access resources in the history of healthcare and the health sciences,” said Melissa Grafe, PhD, President of the Medical Heritage Library and Head of the Medical Historical Library at Yale. “Since 2010, the NLM’s world-renowned collections have been—and with this memorandum of understanding will continue to be—a core part of the nearly 300,000 freely and openly available digitized items in the Medical Heritage Library, used in research and education throughout the world.”
Since its founding in 1836, the National Library of Medicine https://www.nlm.nih.gov has played a pivotal role in translating biomedical research into practice and is a leader in information innovation. NLM is the world’s largest medical library, and millions of scientists, health professionals and the public around the world use NLM services every day.
We are excited to announce the end of a big transformation for the Medical Heritage Library! Last year, our governance board decided to incorporate the Medical Heritage Library, separating the organization from our parent non-profit educational and cultural institutions. As our own stand-alone entity, and to continue our mission as a collaborative digitization and discovery organization committed to providing open access resources in the history of healthcare and the health sciences, we applied for 501(c)(3) non-profit status. In early June we finally received the great news from the IRS that our non-profit status was approved. We want to take this opportunity to thank Dustin Lauermann, formerly an associate with Blank Rome in Philadelphia, and now an associate with Seyfarth Shaw in Los Angeles, for his – and Blank Rome’s – pro bono support of this effort. We look forward to continuing our work through grants and support from our users and other organizations.
