John S. Greenspan Papers Update: The Women’s Interagency HIV Study

We are currently processing and digitizing material from the John S. Greenspan papers as part of our National Archives NHPRC grant, “Evolution of San Francisco’s Response to a Public Health Crisis: Providing Access to New AIDS History Collections.”

John S. Greenspan and Deborah Greenspan. Photograph by David Powers. AR 2015-31, carton 2.

Included in the Greenspan papers are files related to the Women’s Interagency HIV Study (WIHS). WIHS was organized in 1993 to investigate the impact of HIV infection on women. It is one of the largest and longest ongoing U.S. studies of its kind, with clinical sites and cohorts throughout the country. John Greenspan and Deborah Greenspan, his wife and longtime research partner, participated in research activities associated with WIHS.

In the collection are copies of WIHS newsletters created for and by women living with HIV. The newsletters include updates on WIHS research, stories and letters from participating women, event announcements, and other related information. Below are sample pages from the Spring 1997 issue of Health WIHS, a publication of the Women’s lnteragency HIV Study in Chicago.

To learn more about the Greenspan papers read our earlier post, “Processing the John Greenspan Papers.”

You can view the complete Greenspan digital collection on Calisphere.

Intern Report: Learning to Process Collections

This is a guest post by Lauren Wolters, UCSF Archives Intern.

I have recently completed my internship working in the UCSF Archives and Special Collections. I really enjoyed the challenge of a new experience and learned a tremendous amount in my short time working there.

During my internship I was able to complete several processing and arrangement projects. I created two finding aids, one for the Langley Porter Psychiatric Institute records and another for the files of Bernice Hemphill, longtime head of the Irwin Memorial Blood Bank.

I appreciated the opportunity to learn from an archival mentor and gain practical experience by independently processing each collection and working with tangible materials. It was very satisfying being able to contribute to the preservation of these documents and their history and help make them more accessible for future use. I look forward to being able to pursue future endeavors with an informed understanding of the archival process.

New Tobacco Control Archives Project Archivist

Edith Martinez, our former intern who has been assisting with the NHPRC project to process the AIDS History Project newly acquired collections, has joined the archives team as a part-time Project Archivist for the Tobacco Control Archives.

The Tobacco Control Archives (TCA) was established in 1994 with the initial support from the University of California Tobacco Related Disease Research Program (TRDRP), the Centers for Disease Control, and private funding.  The TCA serves as a major resource for public policy research. The Project Archivist is responsible for processing the TCA collections stored onsite and offsite. Over the past twenty years, the UCSF Archives & Special Collections has amassed an extensive collection of organizational records of government agencies and activist groups, as well as papers of individuals active in tobacco control. Currently TCA contains almost 100 collection titles, however only 40 of them are cataloged and even fewer are fully processed. The Project Archivist will arrange and describe the remaining unprocessed material, create or update finding aids, upload them to the Online Archive of California, create catalog records, and update the TCA section on the archives website.

A French Dentist, Snow White, and a Victorian Gentleman: A Sneak Peek at Open Wide

Post by Sabrina Oliveros, Guest Curator for Open Wide: 500 Years of Dentistry in Art.

What do a famous French dentist, Snow White, and a Victorian gentleman with a pesky toothache have in common? They are a few of the harassed, horrified, and often hilarious figures you can find in Open Wide: 500 Years of Dentistry in Art, UCSF Archives & Special Collections’ new exhibit that will open to the public on August 1, 2018.

Developed around selections from the collection of Dr. Morton G. Rivo, D.D.S., former Chief of Periodontics at the UCSF Medical Center at Mount Zion, Open Wide offers a glimpse into how perspectives on dentistry – and dentistry itself – have changed over the centuries. The artworks, supplemented by artifacts, rare books, and other materials from the UCSF Archives, will be on display on three floors of the UCSF Library.

You can find the artworks featuring the French dentist in the main lobby, Snow White on the first floor, and the Victorian gentleman on the fifth. Each speaks to a theme in Open Wide: developments in dental practices; symbolism and beliefs that have grown around the teeth; and, perhaps not the least, that all-too-familiar feeling of not wanting to go to the dentist.

The French Dentist

The French Dentist Shewing a Specimen of His Artificial Teeth and False Palates (1811) by Thomas Rowlandson.

If you’ve explored the UCSF Library or its social media recently, you might have already spotted the French dentist and his grinning patient in the exhibition poster, which is based on an 1811 etching, The French Dentist Shewing a Specimen of His Artificial Teeth and False Palates. The dentist of the title is Nicholas Dubois de Chémant, who was credited with the patents for the first porcelain teeth in Paris and London. The print pokes fun at a moment in history when these were all the rage among the upper classes, having been considered better than earlier ones of ivory and bone.

The French Dentist and his patient may seem very pleased with themselves, but the technology behind dentures still had to be perfected in the decades to come. You’ll find other samples of false teeth, developed through the first half of the 20th century, exhibited alongside this print.

The Toothache

An illustration from The Toothache (c. 1849) written by Horace Mayhew and illustrated by George Cruikshank.

Who would do anything not to go to the dentist? One Victorian gentleman, the protagonist of a comic strip published around 1849, certainly does. He even attempts to cauterize his own tooth with a red-hot poker and tries “240 infallible cures”– which include filling his mouth with cold water and sitting on the fireplace hob to let it boil – just to avoid a visit.

Discover whether his attempts at self-treatment amount to anything through panels that have been reproduced from the original illustrations. This Victorian gentleman’s adventures are complemented by similarly humorous cartoons from UCSF School of Dentistry yearbooks published in the 1900s.

Out Hunting for Teeth

A caza de dientes (Out Hunting for Teeth) from the series Return to Goya’s Caprichos (1999) by Enrique Chagoya.

Amidst all the amusing images in Open Wide, several prints strike a graver tone. These include three etchings depicting an 18th-century practice: pulling a hanged man’s teeth to use them for love potions. The earliest etching, by the Spanish master Francisco Goya, critiques this superstition; the second, by Salvador Dalí, mimics Goya’s and echoes some of Dalí’s sexual beliefs about teeth.

Snow White appears in the latest iteration of the scene, a commentary on Eurocentrism in art made by the Mexican-born American artist Enrique Chagoya. Here the Disney princess has replaced the young girl taking the corpse’s teeth in the original print, while another cartoon character, Rat Fink, has replaced the dead man. Superstitions about the teeth may no longer be the focal point of the piece, but it still has bite.

Goya and Dalí are not the only international luminaries represented in the show; Open Wide also features pieces by Marc Chagall, Utagawa Kuniyoshi, and Joan Miró. Aside from Chagoya, the exhibit also showcases other artists with connections to the San Francisco Bay Area, like Matt Phillips, Jeff Leedy, Art Hazelwood, and Dorothy Winslade.

Open Wide: 500 Years of Dentistry in Art will be on view until the summer of 2019.

New Collections on Calisphere: The Bay Area’s Response to the AIDS Epidemic NEH Grant

New collections have been digitized and are available for research on Calisphere as part of our NEH Grant-funded project The Bay Area’s Response to the AIDS Epidemic. 

UCSF’s holdings of the Shanti Project Records (MSS 98-48) document the organizations efforts to provide peer to peer supportive care for people suffering from terminal AIDS-related illnesses.

Shanti Project Executive Director Jim Geary

Shanti Project Executive Director Jim Geary.

Founded in 1974 by Dr. Charles Garfield, Shanti was a nearly defunct organization with no funding when Jim Geary took it over in 1982, working for no pay. He built it into a successful volunteer peer support organization supporting exclusively AIDS patients over the following six years. He resigned in 1988 amidst an array of mismanagement allegations.

Volunteer Counselor Training, 1983

Volunteer Counselor Training, 1983

The Mobilization Against AIDS Records (MSS 95-03) documents the advocacy and lobbying organization founded in 1984. They are perhaps best known for their Dance-a-thon and Candlelight Vigil fundraising and awareness raising activities.

Mobilization Against AIDS flyer, 1985.

Mobilization Against AIDS flyer, 1985.