Category: From Our Partners

Event: Bullitt History of Medicine Club Lecture

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~Post courtesy Dawne Lucas, Technical Services Archivist, Wilson Special Collections Library, UNC-Chapel Hill.

Please join us for our next Bullitt History of Medicine Club lecture on October 15!

Tuesday, October 15, 2019  12:00 NOON-1:00 PM  Bondurant 2025 (light lunch provided)

Artificial Hearts: A Controversial Medical Technology and Its Sensational Patient Cases from Haskell Karp to Dick Cheney

Shelley McKellar, PhD, Hannah Professor in the History of Medicine, Schulich School of Medicine & Dentistry, Western University, London, Ontario, Canada

Today artificial hearts are a clinical reality after decades of contentious development. Former U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney told reporters that it ‘saved his life’ when asked about living with an artificial heart device for 20 months in 2010-2012. But not all artificial heart implant patients, like Haskell Karp and Barney Clark, enjoyed such successful recoveries.

In this presentation, McKellar examines the clinical use of artificial hearts since the 1960s, situating the triumphant narrative of this technology and its ‘resurrectionist capacity’ alongside technical device challenges and difficult patient experiences. Who would not want a life-saving, off-the-shelf device fix for a loved one dying of heart failure? The appeal was the promissory nature of artificial hearts as a life-sustaining treatment, a medical technology that might alter the usual course of events that when a person’s heart failed, that person died. McKellar argues that desirability—rather than feasibility or practicality of artificial hearts—drove the development of this technology. Artificial hearts were (and are) an imperfect technology, and its controversial history speaks to questions of expectations, limitations and uncertainty in a high-technology medical world.

Shelley McKellar, PhD is the Hannah Chair in the History of Medicine at the Schulich School of Medicine & Dentistry at Western University. She is also a Full Professor in the Department of History at Western University. She earned her PhD degree in History from the University of Toronto, after which she worked on a documentary history project at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, and then she accepted her academic position at Western University in London, Ontario, Canada. Her research focuses on the history of surgery, medical technology and the material culture of medicine. She is the author of several books and articles: her first book, entitled Surgical Limits, is a biography of Canadian surgeon Gordon Murray, one of Canada’s most prominent and controversial surgeons, who was also dubbed Canada’s ‘blue baby doctor’ for fixing congenital heart malformations in the era before open-heart surgery; she co-authored the book Medicine and Technology in Canada, 1900-1950, which highlights medical devices and practices in Canada, such as insulin, TB x-ray screening, and the use of iron lungs. Her most recent book, Artificial Hearts: The Allure and Ambivalence of a Controversial Medical Technology published by Johns Hopkins University Press, traces the potential and promise of this medical technology from the 1950s to present day. At Western University, she teaches history of disease courses that focus on epidemic outbreaks and social response to history students in the Faculty of Social Science. She also teaches the history of medicine, the medical profession, and related historical aspects of ‘doctoring’ to medical students in the medical school at Western University. She is also curator of the Medical Artifact Collection at Western – a small research and teaching university collection – that allows her to play with amputation saws, toothkeys, bloodletting instruments and more with her students.

About the Bullitt History of Medicine Club

Formed in 1953, the Bullitt History of Medicine Club is a student organization within the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s School of Medicine. The club promotes the understanding and appreciation of the historical foundations upon which current medical knowledge and practice is constructed, by encouraging social and intellectual exchanges between faculty members, medical students, and members of the community. The club’s annual McLendon-Thomas Award recognizes the best unpublished essay on an historical topic in the health sciences written by a UNC-Chapel Hill student. Please visit the Bullitt History of Medicine Club website for more information.

News from Our Partners: Warren Anatomical Museum Exhibition Gallery Now Closed Until Spring 2021

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~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.

Keep an eye out on the Center for the History Medicine news feed and the Countway Library website for updates on the renovation and ways you can give input on the next Warren Anatomical Museum gallery.

From Our Partners: Memory Lives On: Documenting the HIV/AIDS Epidemic

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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.

From Our Partners: NYAM Fellowships

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The New York Academy of Medicine is currently accepting applications for both of their fellowships — the application period closes on August 23, 2019.

The Audrey and William H. Helfand Fellowship in the History of Medicine and Public Health

The Helfand Fellowship supports research using Academy library resources for scholarly study of the history of medicine and public health. It is intended specifically for a scholar in residence at the Academy Library. While all proposals will be thoroughly considered, preference will be given to applications that include an emphasis on the use of visual materials held in the Academy collections and in other area institutions.

The Paul Klemperer Fellowship in the History of Medicine

The Klemperer Fellowship supports research using the Academy Library’s resources for scholarly study of the history of medicine. It is intended specifically for a scholar in residence at the Academy Library.

From Our Partners: Journals Digitisation at the Wellcome Collection

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~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.

From Our Partners: Bullitt History of Medicine Club fall lecture schedule

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~This post courtesy Dawne Lucas, Technical Services Archivist, Wilson Special Collections Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Tuesday, September 3, 2019  12:00 NOON-1:00 PM  Bondurant G-100 (light lunch provided)

Bringing Big Data to Asylum Studies: Historical Possibilities, Ethical Challenges

Dr. Robert C. Allen, James Logan Godfrey Professor of American Studies and Co-Director of the Community Histories Workshop, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Sarah E. Almond, Assistant Director, Community Histories Workshop, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Using material from the State Archives of North Carolina, Dr. Allen and Ms. Almond have overseen the creation of what they believe to be the first comprehensive, searchable patient database of a nineteenth-century American insane asylum, some 7200 admissions between 1856 and 1918. Complementing the database is a collection of some 5500 extended intake forms (1887-1918), and hospital/state administrative records, including a hospital cemetery inventory of more than 700 interred patients, minutes of hospital board meetings, comprehensive medical staff meetings and interviews with patients (1916-17), and records of the N.C. Eugenics Board (1958-59). Utilizing a multi-disciplinary approach, Allen and Almond, together with their students, are exploring these unique materials and their ethical use in research, graduate and professional teaching/training, and public engagement. 

Dr. Robert C. Allen is the James Logan Godfrey Professor of American Studies and Co-Director of the Community Histories Workshop. He co-founded and was Director of the Digital Innovation Lab (2011-2016) and Co-PI of the Carolina Digital Humanities Initiative (2012-14). His work on “Going to the Show,” an online digital resource documenting the history of moviegoing in North Carolina, was awarded the American Historical Association’s Rosenzweig Prize for Innovation in Digital History in 2011.

Sarah E. Almond is the assistant director of UNC’s Community Histories Workshop. She previously served two years as the program coordinator of the Dorothea Dix Park History Initiative. She is a recent graduate of the joint Masters program between NCSU and UNC-SILS, and holds a MA in Public History in addition to a MSLS with a focus on archives and records management. Her primary interests include archival accessibility and representation, implementation of community archiving practices, and digital humanities pedagogy. She holds certificates in Digital History (NCSU) as well as Digital Curation (UNC-SILS), and is the designer and co-creator of Redlining Hayti, which links discriminatory lending practices and urban renewal in her hometown of Durham, NC. She holds a BA, summa cum laude, in Literature and Language from the University of North Carolina at Asheville.

Tuesday, October 15, 2019  12:00 NOON-1:00 PM  Bondurant 2025 (light lunch provided)

Artificial Hearts: A Controversial Medical Technology and Its Sensational Patient Cases from Haskell Karp to Dick Cheney

Shelley McKellar, PhD, Hannah Professor in the History of Medicine, Schulich School of Medicine & Dentistry, Western University, London, Ontario, Canada

Today artificial hearts are a clinical reality after decades of contentious development. Former U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney told reporters that it ‘saved his life’ when asked about living with an artificial heart device for 20 months in 2010-2012. But not all artificial heart implant patients, like Haskell Karp and Barney Clark, enjoyed such successful recoveries.

In this presentation, McKellar examines the clinical use of artificial hearts since the 1960s, situating the triumphant narrative of this technology and its ‘resurrectionist capacity’ alongside technical device challenges and difficult patient experiences. Who would not want a life-saving, off-the-shelf device fix for a loved one dying of heart failure? The appeal was the promissory nature of artificial hearts as a life-sustaining treatment, a medical technology that might alter the usual course of events that when a person’s heart failed, that person died.

McKellar argues that desirability—rather than feasibility or practicality of artificial hearts—drove the development of this technology. Artificial hearts were (and are) an imperfect technology, and its controversial history speaks to questions of expectations, limitations and uncertainty in a high-technology medical world.

Shelley McKellar, PhD is the Hannah Chair in the History of Medicine at the Schulich School of Medicine & Dentistry at Western University. She is also a Full Professor in the Department of History at Western University. She earned her PhD degree in History from the University of Toronto, after which she worked on a documentary history project at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, and then she accepted her academic position at Western University in London, Ontario, Canada.

Her research focuses on the history of surgery, medical technology and the material culture of medicine. She is the author of several books and articles: her first book, entitled Surgical Limits, is a biography of Canadian surgeon Gordon Murray, one of Canada’s most prominent and controversial surgeons, who was also dubbed Canada’s ‘blue baby doctor’ for fixing congenital heart malformations in the era before open-heart surgery; she co-authored the book Medicine and Technology in Canada, 1900-1950, which highlights medical devices and practices in Canada, such as insulin, TB x-ray screening, and the use of iron lungs. Her most recent book, Artificial Hearts: The Allure and Ambivalence of a Controversial Medical Technology published by Johns Hopkins University Press, traces the potential and promise of this medical technology from the 1950s to present day.

At Western University, she teaches history of disease courses that focus on epidemic outbreaks and social response to history students in the Faculty of Social Science. She also teaches the history of medicine, the medical profession, and related historical aspects of ‘doctoring’ to medical students in the medical school at Western University. She is also curator of the Medical Artifact Collection at Western – a small research and teaching university collection – that allows her to play with amputation saws, toothkeys, bloodletting instruments and more with her students.

Tuesday, November 12, 2019  12:00 NOON-2:00 PM  Fearrington Reading Room, Wilson Special Collections Library (light lunch NOT provided for this one!)

Drop by to compare what you’ve seen in the gross anatomy lab with historical representations of human anatomy over the centuries. Materials are drawn from holdings at the Wilson Special Collections Library. You don’t want to miss this fun and educational open house event.

About the Bullitt History of Medicine Club

The Bullitt History of Medicine Club is a student organization within the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s School of Medicine. The club promotes the understanding and appreciation of the historical foundations upon which current medical knowledge and practice is constructed, by encouraging social and intellectual exchanges between faculty members, medical students, and members of the community. The club’s annual McLendon-Thomas Award recognizes the best unpublished essay on an historical topic in the health sciences written by a UNC-Chapel Hill student. Please visit the Bullitt History of Medicine Club website for more information.

From Our Partners: Dr. Brooks’ Sanatorium

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~by Caitlin Angelone

This month we are heading to New Canaan, Connecticut. The original building that later held Brooks’ Sanatorium was built in 1898 by a wealthy summer resident, Ellen Josephine Hall. Hall purchased the 11 acre property with the intention of opening a sanatorium for her nephew, Dr. Charles Osborne. They left town and the building was sold to Dr. Myron J. Brooks and his wife, Marion.

The Brooks’ Sanatorium opened shortly after, specializing in the recovery of tuberculosis patients and other lung diseases. The sanatorium boasted it was “not for the care, but…for the modern and scientific treatment of Disease of the Lungs.” Aerotherapy (use of hot air and climate to treat diseases), hydrotherapy (use of water for pain treatment), suralimentation (forced feeding of nutrients), and inhalation-therapy (use of nebulizers with drugs to treat lungs) were practiced regularly along with detailed attention to sanitation practices. Dr. Brooks became New Canaan’s health officer and medical examiner during World War l and kept the title until 1929.

He closed his practice during this time and made it a private residence, living there until the death of his wife in 1935. After his death in 1937, local developers bought the land and named the road, Brooks Road, after the doctor. Since then, the home has been the Buttonball Inn, Three Hundred Inn, and Carlton Manor Inn.

In 1956 it was sold as a private residence and has remained a private residence since, with its caretakers paying special attention to its rich history.

Sources:

Brooks’ Sanatorium. (Medical Trade Ephemera Collection) Historical Medical Library of The College of Physicians of Philadelphia, Philadelphia, PA.

Dinan, Terry. “South Avenue Landmark: Brooks Sanatorium, Reincarnated.” New Canaanite, April 8, 2018. Website. March 29, 2018. https://newcanaanite.com/south-avenue-landmark-brooks-sanatorium-reincarnated-1936

From Our Partners: CfP: Memory Lives On: Documenting the HIV/AIDS Epidemic

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~This post courtesy Polina Ilieva, Head of Archives and Special Collections, University of California, San Francisco.

Deadline for submissions extended to June 17

Memory Lives On: Documenting the HIV/AIDS Epidemic is an 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. Questions of “what do we collect and from where” and “whose stories do we know best.”  The ways in which we handle documentary evidence and produce knowledge from that evidence has profound effects on a huge range of social, economic and health outcomes. 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 program committee invites submissions for presentations addressing the HIV/AIDS epidemic from the wide-ranging perspectives of historians, archivists and librarians, artists, journalists, activists and community groups, scientific researchers, health care providers, and people living with HIV. We invite proposals from individuals with diverse experience and expertise on the HIV/AIDS epidemic in scholarship, research and advocacy. Proposals will be considered in a variety of forms including paper presentations, panel discussions and posters. 

The Symposium will take place in Byers Auditorium in Genentech Hall at the UCSF Mission Bay Campus in San Francisco, October 4th and 5th 2019.  The program will be an afternoon session and evening reception the first day, followed by a full day of presentations the second. 

The Program Committee has identified the following themes to consider when developing your proposal, though we encourage creativity and experimentation in exploring themes, partnerships, and narrative ideas. 

  • Documenting the epidemic: Gaps, silences and unheard voices
  • Creating an interdisciplinary narrative of an epidemic
  • Silent no more: Community, caretaker and patient stories 
  • The San Francisco Bay Area’s Response to the AIDS Epidemic 
  • Biomedical story: From mystery disease to cure 
  • From local to global: Learning from AIDS to address future epidemics

The Program Committee welcomes proposals for individual papers, panel discussion and posters. Individual papers with a similar focus will be assembled into a single session by the program committee. Usually 3-4 papers are included in a session.

To allow adequate time for questions and discussion,  panels should be limited to four participants in addition to a chair/facilitator.

Please include the following in your complete proposal

  • Session title if submitting a full panel proposal (of no more than 20 words)
  • Session abstract if submitting a full panel proposal (up to 500 words)
  • Short session abstract for the program if submitting a full panel proposal (up to 50 words)
  • Paper or poster or presentation titles (if any), and names of corresponding presenters
  •  Biographical paragraph for each presenter
  •  E-mail address for each participant
  •  Affiliation, city, state, and country for each participant
  •  Social media handles or web addresses for each participant (optional)
  •  Audiovisual needs
  • Special accommodation needs

The deadline for submissions is June 17. We will notify presenters if their proposal has been accepted by July 22. 

Memory Lives On Program Committee

Monica Green, Ph.D.,  Professor of History, Arizona State University

Victoria Harden, Ph.D., Director (retired) of the Office of NIH History

Richard  McKay, DPhil,  Wellcome Trust Research Fellow, University of Cambridge

Barbara A. Koenig, Professor of Medical Anthropology & Bioethics in the Department of Social & Behavioral Sciences, Institute for Health & Aging and Head of UCSF Bioethics Program

Jay Levy, MD, Professor UCSF School of Medicine

Eric Jost, Digital Marketing Manager, SF AIDS Foundation

Jon Cohen, Staff writer for Science Magazine

Mark Harrington, Executive Director, Treatment Action Group

William Schupbach, Wellcome Library 

Jason Baumann, Susan and Douglas Dillon Assistant Director for Collection Development and Coordinator of Humanities and LGBT Collections, NYPL

Polina Ilieva, Head of Archives & Special Collections, UCSF Library

Submit a proposal: http://tiny.ucsf.edu/A2nohy

For any inquiries contact David Krah david.krah@ucsf.edu 

More information about the UCSF AIDS History Project:https://www.library.ucsf.edu/archives/aids/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/2289554314666452/

From Our Partners: Normalizing Sex Research and Education in America: Robert Latou Dickinson in Perspective

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~This post courtesy Emily Gustainis, Deputy Director, Center for the History of Medicine at the Francis A. Countway Library of Harvard Medical School and vice-president of the Medical Heritage Library, Inc.

Physician Robert Latou Dickinson (1861–1950) resists categorization. He was a long-time obstetrician and gynecologist; a research scientist invested in sexual health who influenced Alfred Kinsey and notions of sexuality; a birth control and reproductive sterilization advocate; an anatomist who authored an influential atlas of reproductive anatomy/ an artist who illustrated his own scientific texts; and a public health educator whose popular sculptures and models changed the way the public visualized the birth process. “Normalizing Sex Research and Education in America: Robert Latou Dickinson in Perspective” will explore different aspects of Dickinson’s long career, addressing his work in reproductive health and family planning, his time spent as a sex educator and artist at the New York Academy of Medicine, his Birth Series models created for the 1939 World’s Fair, and his depictions of human anatomy and concepts of normalization through his models Norma and Normman. Dickinson’s legacy is still with us today, and his personal papers and models remain some of the Center for the History of Medicine’s most-used collections. With the help of these four scholars, we hope to better understand the impact and legacy that Robert Latou Dickinson continues to exert on our current health science and clinical care community.

An exhibition also entitled Normalizing Sex Research and Education in America: Robert Latou Dickinson in Perspective will be on display for the event (L1 of the Countway Library of Medicine).

Speakers

Sarah B. Rodriguez, Ph.D., Senior Lecturer, Global Health Studies, Weinberg College of Arts & Sciences; Lecturer, Medical Education, Feinberg School of Medicine; Faculty, Medical Humanities & Bioethics Graduate Program, all at Northwestern University, Robert Latou Dickinson: Pioneering Researcher.

A founding father of sex research in the United States, a prominent physician who used his position to advocate for access to birth control, and a distinguished clinician: Robert Latou Dickinson, with his deep interest in women’s health, took on all of these roles. In this presentation, Rodriguez will discuss these three roles – sex researcher, birth control advocate, and clinician – of this historically understudied physician, focusing on his pioneering research regarding female sexuality.

Anne Garner, MLS, Curator, Rare Books and Manuscripts Library, The New York Academy of Medicine Library, From the stacks to the studio:  Robert Latou Dickinson’s Academy of Medicine.

Robert Latou Dickinson’s relationship with the New York Academy of Medicine was a critical part of both his professional and creative identity. In 1891, Dickinson became a Fellow of the organization and served on numerous committees, including as Chairman of the Academy’s art committee from 1935-1940.  At the Academy Dickinson was given a dedicated studio space, where he worked on the Birth Series and other three-dimensional anatomical models. While de facto artist-in-residence, Dickinson also engaged Alfred Kinsey to lobby the Academy to open a sex education library. This talk will explore Dickinson’s role as influencer and occasional disrupter within the Academy, as he advocated for sex education and for greater access to medical information for public audiences.

Rosemarie Holz, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Practice, Associate Director, Women’s and Gender Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, “So that which has been lost is now found!” Exploring the magic of the 1939 Dickinson-Belskie Birth Series Sculptures.”

In this presentation Holz will discuss the creation and dissemination of the hugely influential yet surprisingly overlooked 1939 Dickinson-Belskie Birth Series sculptures, which illustrate the process of human development from fertilization through delivery. First displayed at the 1939-1940 World’s Fair in New York City, they were reproduced in a variety of forms and sent out across the United States and overseas, giving rise to modern views of pregnancy decades before Lennart Nilsson’s much-heralded in utero photographs in Lifemagazine in the 1960s. Despite their enormous popularity, by the 1970s and ‘80s the Birth Series began to disappear from public knowledge, eclipsed by new technologies, such as ultrasound, that offered modern ways to view in utero development. Holz will conclude her presentation by describing the Birth Series’ surprising re-birth since their 2014 recovery from the dusty storage collection of the University of Nebraska State Museum, a re-birth that is prompting renewed fascination with these evocative forms and new conversations.

Anna Creadick, Ph.D., Professor of English and American Studies, Hobart and William Smith Colleges, Model bodies, normal curves: Norm and Norma in Postwar America. 

In the early 1940s, with their Birth Series models completed, sexologist Robert L. Dickinson and his sculptor-collaborator Abram Belskie created two anthropometric sculptures representing the “average” American male and female bodies. Dickinson named them “Normman and Norma.” Dickinson’s effort to model the “normal” body was indicative of a broader obsession taking hold in midcentury America, as doctors, psychiatrists, physical anthropologists, and scientists began to isolate the normal as a subject, to try and define normality with increasing precision.  In 1945, Dickinson donated the “Norm and Norma” statues along with his Birth Series and other medical models to the Cleveland Health Museum, where they might have just gathered dust. But instead, Norm and Norma began a decade-long tour of the postwar public sphere, appearing in newspaper articles, popular science magazines, television shows, and even a look-alike contest. This presentation tells the story of the wartime production and postwar reception of these models, whose “normal” curves helped to promote a powerful organizing category of postwar culture.

Call for Proposals: Memory Lives On: Documenting the HIV/AIDS Epidemic

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~This post courtesy Polina Ilieva, Head of Archives and Special Collections, University of California, San Francisco.

Memory Lives On: Documenting the HIV/AIDS Epidemic is an 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. Questions of “what do we collect and from where” and “whose stories do we know best.”  The ways in which we handle documentary evidence and produce knowledge from that evidence has profound effects on a huge range of social, economic and health outcomes. 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 program committee invites  submissions for presentations addressing the HIV/AIDS epidemic from the wide-ranging perspectives of historians, archivists and librarians, artists, journalists, activists and community groups, scientific researchers, health care providers, and people living with HIV. We invite proposals from individuals with diverse experience and expertise on the HIV/AIDS epidemic in scholarship, research and advocacy. Proposals will be considered in a variety of forms including paper presentations, panel discussions and posters. 

The Symposium will take place in Byers Auditorium in Genentech Hall at the UCSF Mission Bay Campus in San Francisco, October 4th and 5th 2019.  The program will be an afternoon session and evening reception the first day, followed by a full day of presentations the second. 

The Program Committee has identified the following themes to consider when developing your proposal, though we encourage creativity and experimentation in exploring themes, partnerships, and narrative ideas. 

  • Documenting the epidemic: Gaps, silences and unheard voices
  • Creating an interdisciplinary narrative of an epidemic
  • Silent no more: Community, caretaker and patient stories 
  • The San Francisco Bay Area’s Response to the AIDS Epidemic 
  • Biomedical story: From mystery disease to cure 
  • From local to global: Learning from AIDS to address future epidemics

The Program Committee welcomes proposals for individual papers, panel discussion and posters. Individual papers with a similar focus will be assembled into a single session by the program committee. Usually 3-4 papers are included in a session.

To allow adequate time for questions and discussion,  panels should be limited to four participants in addition to a chair/facilitator.

Please include the following in your complete proposal

  • Session title if submitting a full panel proposal (of no more than 20 words)
  • Session abstract if submitting a full panel proposal (up to 500 words)
  • Short session abstract for the program if submitting a full panel proposal (up to 50 words)
  • Paper or poster or presentation titles (if any), and names of corresponding presenters
  •  Biographical paragraph for each presenter
  •  E-mail address for each participant
  •  Affiliation, city, state, and country for each participant
  •  Social media handles or web addresses for each participant (optional)
  •  Audiovisual needs
  • Special accommodation needs

The deadline for submissions is June 3. We will notify presenters if their proposal has been accepted by July 22. 

Memory Lives On Program Committee

Monica Green, Ph.D.,  Professor of History, Arizona State University

Victoria Harden, Ph.D., Director (retired) of the Office of NIH History

Richard  McKay, DPhil,  Director of Studies for HPS at Magdalene College

Barbara A. Koenig, Professor of Medical Anthropology & Bioethics in the Department of Social & Behavioral Sciences, Institute for Health & Aging and Head of UCSF Bioethics Program

Jay Levy, MD, Professor UCSF School of Medicine

Eric Jost, Digital Marketing Manager, SF AIDS Foundation

Jon Cohen, Staff writer for Science Magazine

Mark Harrington, Executive Director, Treatment Action Group

William Schupbach, Wellcome Library 

Jason Baumann, Susan and Douglas Dillon Assistant Director for Collection Development and Coordinator of Humanities and LGBT Collections

Polina Ilieva, Head of Archives & Special Collections, UCSF Library

Submit a proposal: http://tiny.ucsf.edu/A2nohy

For any inquiries contact David Krah david.krah@ucsf.edu 

More information about the UCSF AIDS History Project: https://www.library.ucsf.edu/archives/aids/