The UCSF Digital Health Humanities Interdisciplinary Symposium: Summary and Recordings Release

attendees at a presentation

This summer, the UCSF Library Archives and Special Collections hosted the first UCSF Digital Health Humanities Interdisciplinary Symposium. The symposium brought together researchers working at the intersections of health sciences, data science, and digital humanities. The program kicked off with an introduction to Digital Health Humanities (DHH) at UCSF followed by a lightning talk session. These sessions showcased research projects and works in progress related to this emerging domain. The afternoon sessions were topically-oriented panels and speakers shared their projects and resources for analyzing medical literature and addressing challenges and opportunities when working with historical patient records. The post-session discussions emphasized how researchers across disciplines can converge to compare ways of working with digital methods and historical materials. Multi-disciplinary collaborations can provide significant insights into health and healthcare experiences and influences. Researchers from the UCSF community gave lightning talks covering research processes, exploration and experimentation, early findings, challenges, and new research questions under consideration.

Common threads included:  

  • using industry documents and new analysis methods to identify patterns of industry influence on community organizations and scientific discourse;
  • the role of geography in understanding landscapes of disease and activism;
  • surfacing and confronting omissions in the historical record, particularly that of marginalized communities; and
  • the value and importance of integrating personal experiences in health care provision and historical interpretation of the health sciences.  

Each lightning talk included provocative descriptions of how digital methods have been or could be employed to further understanding of health humanities materials. Presenters also discussed how digital methods can support the inclusion of significant, yet overlooked or underrepresented experiences or perspectives. A forthcoming post will summarize presentations from the lightning talk showcase session. 

Working with historical patient records

A session on the challenges and opportunities of working with historical patient records as data included panelist presentations representing archival, technological, and historical perspectives. UCSF Associate University Librarian for Collections and UCSF Archivist Polina Ilieva shared how archivists can address the access complications presented by historical patient records to realize their potential as the research subject. Methods include digitizing and presenting data within innovative discovery and responsible access platforms proposed by UCSF Archives and Special Collections. Aimee Medeiros, vice chair and associate professor for the UCSF Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, discussed how research benefits from liberating data from historical patient records for quantitative and qualitative inquiry, especially that which expands and deepens understanding of health sciences knowledge networks, including historical structures of oppression, clinical care, and patient and care providers’ social contexts. The panel presentations concluded with Kim Pham, currently research technology officer at the Max Planck Institute. Pham shared both process insights and ethical access considerations from a “collections as data” project she was involved in at the University of Denver that made patient data from historical records of the Jewish Consumptive’s Relief Society available.  

Examining racism in medical literature

Symposium programming closed with a panel presentation and discussion about analyzing medical literature, particularly medical journal archives, to track social topics over time including racism in medicine. Claudia von Vacano the founding executive director and senior research associate of D-Lab and digital humanities at the University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley), and Pratik Sachdeva, senior data scientist at the UC Berkeley D-Lab shared an initiative to identify racism narratives in medical literature. Dr. von Vacano explained the need for this project, noting the pervasive reality of structural racism in healthcare and its significant negative impacts particularly on Black and Latino individuals. Sachdeva shared their approach to studying narratives of racism in prominent published medical literature. They identify and analyze racism and power-related terms by adapting a corpus labeling and analysis methodology they established in an earlier D-Lab initiative that measured hate speech.

Melissa Grafe, board member for the Medical Heritage Library, John R. Bumstead Librarian for Medical History and head of the Medical Historical Library at Yale University, presented the range of digitized resources made publicly available by the Medical Heritage Library that can be analyzed to inform research around racism narratives in medicine. This includes State Medical Society JournalsHistorical American Medical Journals as well as the curated collection sets Roots of Racism, and Anti-Black Racism in Medicine. Finally, Moustafa Abdalla, a surgical resident and an independent principal investigator at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, presented on his textual analysis work. Abdalla has conducted computational research at Harvard Medical School and the University of Oxford and shared his findings from text analysis on more than 200 years of the Journal of the American Medical Association and the New England Journal of Medicine articles. He has also built and shared an N-gram viewer for this data to help others conduct exploratory research across the corpus.

Access symposium recordings

The DHH pilot program has been humbled by the breadth and depth of meaningful work presented during the symposium. We are encouraged by the insights, conversations, and opportunities for future collaboration that were seeded throughout the day. As UCSF DHH programming continues and researcher networks grow, we intend to host future events that build upon the momentum from this symposium! All symposium recordings are now available on the UCSF CLE. 

About the Digital Health Humanities program

The UCSF Digital Health Humanities pilot program is funded by the Academic Senate Chancellor’s Fund, via the Committee on Library and Scholarly Communication to facilitate interdisciplinary scholarship that advances understanding of the profound effects of illness and disease on patients, health professionals, and the social worlds in which they live and work. The UCSF DHH was launched in 2022 and provides programming and resources to guide and support researchers in their engagement with digital tools and methods. The program also provides resources for working with archives as data.

UCSF Library and San Francisco poets create space for the San Francisco community to “Pause, Breathe, and Re-Connect” during the COVID-19 pandemic

This is a guest post by Dr. Michelle-Linh (Michelle) Nguyen, a primary care doctor and researcher at UCSF and the Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital. 

As social distancing rules and regulations begin to relax, many of us are feeling the strain of prolonged social isolation and re-learning how to reach out to others.

On April 29th, 2021, 48 San Francisco and UCSF community members gathered virtually during the lunch hour on Zoom for a series of poetry readings and discussion centered around the human experience of medicine. Farah Hamade, the inaugural UCSF Library Artist-in-Residence, took visual notes and created an art piece that represents the event and experience (featured below).

Pause, Breath, Re-Connect artwork.
© Farah Hamade 2021. All rights reserved.
© Farah Hamade 2021. All rights reserved

Three poets—Kathleen McClung, Sharon Pretti, and Peggy Tahir—were selected through a submissions process from the San Francisco community to read their work. Sharon Pretti read a series of poems written during and after her brother’s pancreatic cancer diagnosis, treatment, and eventual death. Kathleen McClung read a sequence of sonnets inspired by her partner and her experiences navigating his treatment and surgery for a pituitary mass.

© Farah Hamade 2021. All rights reserved.

Peggy Tahir read a series of poems written for each radiation treatment she underwent for breast cancer. The readings were followed by a 10-second pause to create space for reflection and a rich discussion.

Michelle-Linh (Michelle) Nguyen closed the event with a reading from The Book of Delights by Ross Gay, which can be accessed here: https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2019/02/14/sharing-love/.

© Farah Hamade 2021. All rights reserved.

The introduction of the event and poetry readings were recorded with the poets’ permission. The recording was turned off for the discussion and closing to create a more comfortable, intimate space. After the event, the poetry reading recording, Farah Hamade’s art piece and a poem by Michelle-Linh (Michelle) Nguyen was shared with event registrants and the public.

© Farah Hamade 2021. All rights reserved.

The public can access the recording at the following link: https://archive.org/details/ucsf-pause-breathe-re-connect-poetry-and-discussion-2021-1.

The event was organized by Michelle-Linh (Michelle) Nguyen, Farah Hamade, Polina Ilieva, and Joanna Kang with support from the UCSF Library.

Learning at the Medical Heritage Library Conference

The Medical Heritage Library 10th Anniversary Conference took place on November 13, 2020. UCSF Archives & Special Collections staff attended the day of virtual presentations, and our Industry Documents Library archivists delivered a talk titled “Smoke on Screens: Audiovisual Evidence of the Tobacco Industry’s Harms to Public Health.”

The conference was convened to celebrate a decade of digitizing and making available medical history resources. Keynote speaker Dr. Jaipreet Virdi, Assistant Professor for the Department of History at the University of Delaware, presented her work on Digitized Disability Histories. She discussed disability identity as represented through material objects of disability, and examined how disability history is separate from medical history.

The program also included fascinating talks from nine other speakers, ranging from the rhetoric used in early 20th century motherhood manuals to medicalize infant care and degrade traditional knowledge, to using convolutional neural networks (CNN) to identify and label objects in historical images in order to visualize thematic collections at scale, to studying the historical lessons from popular culture and medical discourse of face masks during the 1918-1919 Flu epidemic.

All talks were recorded and are being made available with captioning on the Medical Heritage Library YouTube channel (see Session 2 for the “Smoke on Screens” talk).

The Medical Heritage Library (MHL) is “a collaborative digitization and discovery organization committed to providing open access to the history of medicine and health resources.” It was established in 2009 with a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to begin digitizing 50,000 medical history texts, and now includes more than 323,000 items made available by multiple contributors through an access portal on the Internet Archive.

UCSF Archives & Special Collections is a contributing partner to the Medical Heritage Library. In 2015-2017 A&SC collaborated with four other medical libraries to digitize and make publicly accessible state medical journals, funded by a $275,000 National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) grant. 97 journal titles were digitized (nearly every state medical journal in the U.S.) resulting in over 2.7 million full-text searchable pages.

The Industry Documents Library has contributed over 5,000 video recordings to the MHL, beginning in 2012. These videos are part of our Truth Tobacco Industry Documents collection and include recordings of cigarette commercials, marketing focus groups, internal corporate meetings and trainings, depositions of tobacco company employees, and congressional hearings. The recordings document the industry’s marketing and public relations strategies to cast doubt on the harms of smoking and to prevent or delay public health regulations.

Screenshot from 1960 Flintstones commercial for Winstons cigarettes.
Screenshot of 1960 Flintstones TV commercial for Winston cigarettes, available in the Industry Documents Library collection of the Medical Heritage Library on the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/tobacco_djq03d00

October is Archives Month!

Every October we celebrate Archives Month to reflect on the value of historical materials and to highlight UCSF Archives programs and services. This year we are marking the occasion in the midst of the era-defining triple pandemic of COVID-19, systemic racism, and police violence, not to mention momentous political upheaval.

Now as much as ever, it is critical to protect the records of the past and of the present. We are living through and making history; we must ensure that a diverse and inclusive record of this time is preserved for those in the future to access and understand.

Here are some ways you can get involved to celebrate Archives Month:

Get started collecting and caring for your records (emails, photos, blogs, social media, reports, websites, etc). Consider submitting your materials to the UCSF COVID-19 Pandemic Chronicles.

Do you manage or contribute to a UCSF website? Check out our guidelines for preserving UCSF websites as part of the historical record of the University.

Join us on Wednesday October 7 for #AskAnArchivist Day! UCSF archivists will be standing by from 10am-2pm PDT on Twitter to answer your questions and chat about archives and UCSF history. Ask us anything at @ucsf_archives.

Interested in learning from the history of the health sciences to address current challenges? We’re excited to co-present Vesalius and Wrist Pain: Using Medical History to Solve Current Problems with the Bay Area History of Medicine Society on October 21 at 6:30pm PDT, with speaker Dr. David Lincoln Nelson. Please register in advance.

Visit our free online exhibit “’They Were Really Us’: The UCSF Community’s Early Response to AIDS” for a fascinating and moving story of how UCSF leaders in the 1980s and 1990s broke ground in the fight against the virus, launching the first AIDS clinic in the world and contributing to the identification of what came to be known as HIV.

To explore recordings of our past Archives Talks on topics ranging from Black Women Physicians’ Careers, Elderhood, Documenting While Black, and the Myth of the Perfect Pregnancy, please visit our Archives Events and Exhibits page.

Celebrating International Archives Week

This week, we join the International Council on Archives and colleagues around the world in celebrating archives and their role in empowering knowledge societies. Against a pervasive backdrop of disinformation, manipulated facts, and extreme prejudice which has fostered such horrific pain and suffering in our world, we recognize the value of archives and all those who uphold truth, accountability, and justice.

Archives perform an essential function as keepers of the records of evidence of human activities and experience. They directly encourage the creation of knowledge, the affirmation of the histories and identities of individuals and communities, and the transparency and accountability of government and other entities of power. Archives are not dusty enclaves of archaic knowledge for the privileged; they are living repositories of information which should reflect our societies, our decisions, and our lived experience. To celebrate archives is to celebrate a record of human progress, and to celebrate our collective ability to scrutinize and call out disparities and injustices embedded in that progress.

The theme of this year’s International Archives Week is Empowering Knowledge Societies. The concept of a “knowledge society” emerged from work first attributed to the management theorist Peter Drucker in the 1960s, and by the 1990s was being defined and contrasted against the idea of an “information society” as the proliferation of technologies like the internet and World Wide Web increased the production and spread of data. A crucial difference is that an information society is one which simply creates and disseminates raw data, often relying on technological innovation; a knowledge society is one which can study and evaluate that data in context to create knowledge which informs action.  

UNESCO declares that “knowledge societies must build on four pillars: freedom of expression; universal access to information and knowledge; respect for cultural and linguistic diversity; and quality education for all.” These principles are echoed in the code of ethics of archives and library organizations, including the International Council on Archives, the Society of American Archivists, and the American Library Association.

Beyond our validation and promotion of these principles, archives and libraries must design our workflows and services to actively enable and empower these pillars of knowledge societies. Here at UCSF Archives & Special Collections, we strive to empower knowledge societies by providing open access to our collections, to the greatest extent possible, to all users, regardless of location or affiliation. We practice collection development which is aware and inclusive of diverse cultures and communities in the history of the health sciences, and we work to amplify voices which have historically been silenced or marginalized. We preserve evidence of harmful activities in industries which influence public health to enable researchers, policymakers, and members of the public to thoroughly investigate these sources and determine the best course of action to protect the health of our communities and our environment.

In 2005 UNESCO published a World Report titled Towards Knowledge Societies to lay out the global benefits of building knowledge societies, and the challenges many countries face in reaching that goal. The report emphasizes that “knowledge has not only become one of the keys to economic development; it also contributes to human development and individual empowerment. In this sense, knowledge is a source of power because it creates a capacity for action.”

We continue to work towards empowering knowledge societies through archives, to enable the action that’s urgently needed to address the systemic inequalities, racism, violence and injustice threatening the lives of people of color and the future of our communities worldwide. We are committed to building this capacity in partnership with and in awareness of the histories and experiences of all people, in respect and solidarity.  

Crisis, Community, and Connections: 1918 and 2020

This is a guest post by Aaron J. Jackson, M.A, Ph.D. Candidate, UCSF History of Health Sciences.

From time to time, events in the present so closely resemble events from the past that the aphorism “history repeats itself” seems feasible. This can be demonstrated by comparing the current crisis of the novel coronavirus with the influenza pandemic of 1918-1919. The similarities are compelling. Like the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, the variety of H1N1 influenza that swept across the world in 1918 and 1919 produced a significant shock. It spread like wildfire, was frustratingly resistant to contemporary therapeutics, exhibited novel characteristics, and forced governments to resort to what some considered to be heavy-handed public health interventions. Bay Area residents in 1918 were required to wear masks and practice social distancing, just as they are required to do so today. Such historical similarities are not, however, proof that history repeats itself. But they do provide interesting opportunities for comparison between the past and the present—opportunities that hold the potential to make the past more relatable by building connections through common circumstances. And perhaps, through that understanding, an opportunity for hope to shine in dark times.

This post is not an exhaustive study comparing 1918 and 2020. Rather, it focuses on responses to crises and specifically the ways that communities innovatively addressed shortages of personal protective equipment (PPE). So, of course, it will be about war, pandemics, socks, and sheet protectors. Naturally.

When the United States declared war on the Imperial Government of Germany in April 1917, the nation was woefully unprepared for the conflict. The war represented an unprecedented crisis—one that required the federal government to assume new powers in order to coordinate the resources of the entire nation. President Woodrow Wilson’s administration worked with Congress to institute a draft to raise an army, enacted strict economic control measures to conserve and direct resources towards the production of war materiel, and passed laws that infringed on civil liberties, all in the name of the war effort. To ensure public support for these moves, the government mounted a massive propaganda campaign that appealed to a specific version of American patriotism, appealing to citizens’ sense of duty.

Mustering an army of sufficient size presented significant challenges. The men not only had to be inducted into military service—either by volunteering or being drafted—they required hundreds of training camps, transportation to those camps, equipment to train with, uniforms to wear. Once at the camps, they required food, shelter, and medical support. Military training was and remains a dangerous business, but the most significant medical problem at the cantonments was disease.

Base Hospital No. 30 “Officers and Enlisted Personnel” from the Woolsey (John Homer) Papers, MSS 70-5, UCSF Archives and Special Collections
Base Hospital No. 30 “Officers and Enlisted Personnel” from the Woolsey (John Homer) Papers, MSS 70-5, UCSF Archives and Special Collections

As tens of thousands of American recruits assembled at Army camps across the United States, they unwittingly brought diseases with them, which found ample opportunity to spread in cramped camp conditions. Most of these infections fell into the category of “common respiratory unknown disease”—an unofficial designation among military recruits who learned to add C.R.U.D. to the lexicon of military acronyms they learned. The crud largely consisted of the common cold and other respiratory infections, but cases of measles, mumps, and chicken pox were also common. Most cases of the crud cleared up without need for treatment, but the prevalence of these infections and the fact that new waves of infections would spring up with every new trainload of recruits had the effect of masking a more dangerous threat. Army physicians first identified more than 100 soldiers who had developed a rather severe flu-like illness in March 1918. Within a week, the number of flu cases at Fort Riley was over 500 and climbing. The H1N1 virus that caused the influenza pandemic of 1918-1919 had arrived, but the nation was focused on the war. And as American troops began arriving in France and moving into the front lines—many of them no doubt bringing the virus with them—medical personnel tasked with supporting the war effort shifted their focus from induction screening and camp illnesses to other health concerns.

The First World War introduced a bevy of new ways to mangle and maim human bodies. From high-velocity rifle rounds and machine guns to high-explosive artillery shells, flamethrowers, hand grenades, aerial bombardment, and chemical weapons, the U.S. Army Medical Corps understood that the hospital system it established in France had to be prepared first and foremost for trauma care, which posed significant challenges. Not only did modern weapons cause extensive damage, the risks of sepsis and gangrene in an era before the discovery of antibiotics were high. Complicating this, European battlefields tended to stretch across agricultural land, teeming with bacteria after years of fertilization. Soldiers wounded on the front lines thus ran an extremely high risk of bacterial infection. To address this, the Medical Corps and its affiliates prioritized training Army health care workers in antiseptic wound care.

"U.S. Army Base Hospital No. 30, World War I (University of California School of Medicine Unit)," from The Thirtieth, AR 207-16, UCSF Archives and Special Collections
“U.S. Army Base Hospital No. 30, World War I (University of California School of Medicine Unit),” from The Thirtieth, AR 207-16, UCSF Archives and Special Collections

The experiences of the personnel of Base Hospital No. 30 are instructive in this regard. Base Hospital Thirty was the military hospital unit assembled from physicians, surgeons, and nurses associated with the University of California’s School of Medicine—the precursor to UCSF. Organized with the help of the American Red Cross Society shortly after Congress declared war, the unit spent more than a year training for the anticipated challenges of running a hospital for wounded soldiers in France. The unit’s nurses received orders to depart San Francisco on December 26, 1917 and reported to Army cantonment camps along the East Coast to help care for soldiers who had fallen ill with the crud, gaining invaluable experience in nursing soldiers and recognizing disease presentation. The unit’s surgeons practiced the ancient technique of wound debridement—removing foreign objects and cutting away dead and dying flesh to produce a clean wound—and attended clinical instruction that prepared them for the types of injuries they would face. And the unit’s corpsmen trained in the production and use of the Carrell-Dakin solution, a novel antiseptic more effective than carbolic acid and iodine but also a solution that required careful training and preparation. Thanks to training like this, the base hospital system was able to treat more than 300,000 sick and wounded soldiers with remarkably low mortality rates compared to previous wars.

Indeed, the medical apparatus and personnel organized to support the American Expeditionary Forces were well prepared for the anticipated hazards of the war. But in one of the remarkable parallels to the current coronavirus crisis, their job was perhaps made more difficult by the failure of American logistics in providing adequate personal protective equipment. But the shortage in 1918 was not one of N95 masks; rather, it was a matter of needing socks.

From left to right: “American Red Cross: Our boys need sox; knit your bit,” Hoover Institution Digital Collections; “You can help: American Red Cross,” Charles B. Burdick War Poster Collection, San Jose State University, Special Collections and Archives; Cover of the Priscilla War Work Book, Library of Congress, digitized by the Internet Archive.
From left to right: “American Red Cross: Our boys need sox; knit your bit,” Hoover Institution Digital Collections; “You can help: American Red Cross,” Charles B. Burdick War Poster Collection, San Jose State University, Special Collections and Archives; Cover of the Priscilla War Work Book, Library of Congress, digitized by the Internet Archive

Today, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration defines PPE as “equipment worn to minimize exposure to hazards that cause serious workplace injuries and illnesses.”[i] Under this definition, and in the context of soldiering, a good pair of socks certainly applies. Trench warfare was a dirty business. It also tended to be cold and wet—the perfect climate for a condition known today as “trench foot.” Afflicted soldiers’ feet would go numb, swell, develop sore and infections, and in extreme cases become gangrenous, possibly requiring amputation. Obviously, this ran the risk of keeping soldiers from the front lines and thus undermining the war effort. But ensuring a plentiful supply of clean dry socks somehow slipped through the cracks of the Army’s logistical efforts to prepare for the war. Fortunately, the American Red Cross and thousands of civilian volunteers found ways to meet the challenge.

Beginning in 1917, the Red Cross put out calls for knitted garments, especially socks. The organization distributed officially-endorsed knitting patterns and free wool to anyone willing to “knit your bit.” The Priscilla War Work Book contains roughly a dozen such patterns ranging from socks to coats and winter hats.[ii] But the demand was greatest for socks. Across the country, knitters worked individually at home and collectively in social groups to try to keep up with the demand. Those who could not knit were urged to purchase or donate wool for the cause. Some organizations turned to mechanical solutions. The Seattle Red Cross utilized a knitting machine to produce long wool tubes that could be cut into 27-inch lengths, requiring only the toes to be stitched by hand.[iii] In this way, those behind the front lines were able to support the war effort by providing the PPE the soldiers needed to keep themselves in fighting shape.

Celebrating the end of the First World War in San Francisco, November 11, 1918. Image from The San Francisco Chronicle files.
Celebrating the end of the First World War in San Francisco, November 11, 1918. Image from The San Francisco Chronicle files.

Celebrating the end of the First World War in San Francisco, November 11, 1918. Image from The San Francisco Chronicle files.

The knitting campaign continued until the war ended with the declaration of the armistice on November 11, 1918. By then, the nation was in the midst of the first wave of the influenza pandemic. On October 9, 1918, San Francisco’s hospitals reported 169 influenza cases. A week later, there were more than 2,000 and the city’s Board of Health issued recommendations for social distancing.[iv] With so many health care professionals supporting the war effort, the Bay Area’s medical infrastructure was stretched to the limit and cities put out calls for volunteers. Hospital space soon became a valuable commodity and many facilities, including the Oakland Municipal Auditorium, were converted into temporary hospitals, and public health officials began recommending the use of face masks, which they later made mandatory.[v] But it is important to remember that these were local efforts to respond to the pandemic. The federal government, which had mustered the resources of the entire nation to fight the war in Europe, was unwilling to do the same to combat the pandemic at home, leaving it up to local authorities, medical institutions, and volunteer organizations to make do as best they could.

Celebrating the end of the First World War in San Francisco, November 11, 1918. Image from The San Francisco Chronicle files.
“Oakland Municipal Auditorium is used as a temporary hospital,” 1918, Oakland Public Library

Unfortunately, we find ourselves in a similar situation today. As the novel coronavirus took on pandemic proportions, stores of PPE for frontline healthcare workers reached critical levels. Before the pandemic, China produced approximately half the world’s supply of medical masks. As the infection spread in China, their exports stopped, and the resulting shortage spurred competition between institutions and governments to secure PPE, which only exacerbated the situation. Thankfully, a multidisciplinary team at UCSF found a way to be a part of the solution, echoing the efforts of American knitters from over a century ago.

Left to right:  UCSF shield frames,; A completely assembled UCSF face shield;  Dr. Alexis Dang wears an assembled face shield over a N-95 respirator. For additional information please read the UCSF Library Makers Lab story.
From left to right: UCSF shield frames,; A completely assembled UCSF face shield; Dr. Alexis Dang wears an assembled face shield over a N-95 respirator. For additional information please read the UCSF Library Makers Lab story. UCSF Library Makers Lab Left to right: UCSF shield frames,; A completely assembled UCSF face shield; Dr. Alexis Dang wears an assembled face shield over a N-95 respirator. For additional information please read the UCSF Library Makers Lab story

Noting the need for face shields, experts at UCSF specializing in biochemistry, engineering, logistics, medical workplace safety, and 3D model design came together in March 2020 to develop something that could help address the PPE shortage. By April, the team completed designs for three different models of 3D-printable face shield frames that, when combined with rubber bands and transparent document protectors, serve as functional and reusable face shields. They then collected seventeen 3D printers from across the university and turned the UCSF Makers Lab in the Kalmanovitz Library into an ad hoc face shield factory that can produce more than 300 shields each day—enough to supply UCSF’s front-line health care workers and then some.[vi] Extra shields are distributed to Bay Area hospitals. Moreover, like the Red Cross with the distribution of the Priscilla War Work Book, the UCSF team is sharing their plans in an open source repository so that others can emulate their efforts.[vii] This allows those with access to 3D printers and a few dollars’ worth of office supplies to contribute to the ongoing PPE shortage by producing face shields that have been designed, tested, and vetted by experts at one of the nation’s leading medical institutions.

Certainly, there are remarkable similarities to be drawn between the modern crisis and those in the past. Once again, the government was unprepared for a crisis despite advanced warning. Once again, people are working in the front lines to save others despite inadequate supplies. And once again, like the First World War and the influenza pandemic of 1918-1919, the coronavirus pandemic is a devastating event likely to be measured in the tally of lives lost. In the face of such grim statistics, it is easy to fall into cynicism and say that history is repeating.

In 1905, philosopher George Santayana explored the notion of progress—the idea that things move toward improvement—and stated that “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”[viii] This is likely the origin of the aphorism “history repeats itself.” But Santaya was not making a hopeless argument; rather, he noted that if progress is to be achieved, it will be because humans not only record the past, they engage with it, learn from it, and seek to understand it. And how that is achieved depends on the ability to draw relatable connections with the past that emphasize human agency. In 1918, knitters took up their needles. Today, a team of scientists, engineers, and others figured out how to make face shields using 3D printers and office supplies. These may seem like small contributions in the grand scheme of things, but they are important examples of positive human agency in the face of crisis.


[i] Occupational Safety and Health Administration, “Personal Protective Equipment.” http://osha.gov/SLTC/personalprotectiveequipment/

[ii] Elsa Schappel Barsaloux and the American National Red Cross, The Priscilla War Work Book: Including Directions for Knitted Garments and Comfort Kits from the American Red Cross, and Knitted Garments for the Boy Scout. Boston, Mass.: The Priscilla Publishing Company, 1917. Available at the HathiTrust Digital Library. https://hdl.handle.net/2027/loc.ark:/13960/t2988wd21

[iii] Paula Becker, “Knitting for Victory – World War I,” Historylink.org, 2004. https://www.historylink.org/File/4721

[iv] “Thirty-Seven New Cases Found in S.F.,” San Francisco Chronicle 10 Oct. 1918, 3; “Hassler Urges Churches and Theaters to Close,” San Francisco Chronicle 17 Oct. 1918, 5.

[v] “Wear a Mask and Save Your Life!” San Francisco Chronicle, 22 Oct. 1918.

[vi] Robin Marks, “Lifesaving Face Shields for Health Care Workers are Newest 3D-Printing Project at UCSF,” University of California, San Francisco. April 7, 2020. https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2020/04/417101/lifesaving-face-shields-health-care-workers-are-newest-3d-printing-project-ucsf

[vii] Jenny Tai, “UCSF 3D Printed Face Shield Project,” UCSF Library, April 1, 2020. https://library.ucsf.edu/news/ucsf-3d-printed-face-shield-project

[viii] George Santayana, The Life of Reason. 1: Reason in Common Sense, Reprint (New York: Dover Publications, 1982), p. 284. Available at the Gutenberg Project. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/15000/15000-h/15000-h.htm

Celebrating National Nurses Week and Florence Nightingale, handwashing innovator

By Erin Hurley, User Services & Accessioning Archivist

Although, in 2020, advice like “wash your hands” and “cover your mouth when you cough” seem fairly obvious and common sense, there was a time when this was not the case. That time was March 1855, when the situation in British hospitals outside of Constantinople (now Istanbul, Turkey) during the Crimean War had become so dire that Florence Nightingale and 40 other women acting as trained volunteer nurses were finally allowed access to patients (they had previously been denied access because of their gender). Hospitals were overcrowded and extremely unsanitary conditions encouraged the spread of infectious diseases like cholera, typhoid, typhus and dysentery, which Nightingale recognized immediately. She implemented basic cleanliness measures, such as baths for patients, clean facilities, and fresh linens, and advocated for an approach that addressed the psychological and emotional, as well as the physical, needs of patients. Her improvements brought a dramatic decline in the mortality rate at these hospitals, which had previously been as high as 40%.

While Nightingale is well known as one of the world’s first nurses, she is less well known for her strikingly lovely data visualizations (including pie charts and a rose-shaped design called the “coxcomb”), which she used to highlight the number of deaths from diseases, in addition to deaths from wounds or injury, during the Crimean War. Nightingale, a mathematician and statistician, recognized the importance of eye-catching visuals in communicating the impact of her innovations.

National Nurses Week begins each year on May 6th (National Nurses Day) and ends each year on May 12th (Florence Nightingale’s birthday). Today, we celebrate the history of nursing and nurses of all kinds, and the essential, life-saving work that they perform. We hope you enjoy this series of digital images from UCSF’s Archives & Special Collections, all digitized and available online through Calisphere. Archives & Special Collections also holds the fascinating Florence Nightingale Memorial Collection, created by Country Joe McDonald of Country Joe & the Fish, which you can read more about here.

Happy Holidays (and 2019/20 Winter Closure)

The archives team is wishing you joy and peace during the holidays and throughout the New Year.

As 2019 comes to an end, we wanted to express our gratitude for the ongoing support of our colleagues, donors, interns, and collaborators.

The Archives & Special Collections will be closed from Saturday, December 21, 2019 through Wednesday, January 1st, 2020. We will reopen on Thursday, January 2nd.

Cabrol, Barthelemy. Ontleeding des menschelycken lichaems, 1633.
Find it at the UCSF Library: ucsfcat.library.ucsf.edu/record=b2286635~S0

If you submit a question through Ask an Archivist or make a reservation for the reading room during that time, please note that we will begin reviewing reference questions and reading room bookings when we re-open on Thursday, January 2, 2020.

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


AIDS activist Bobbi Campbell making a peace sign, wearing University of California San Francisco School of Nursing t-shirt.

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

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


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

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/

Happy Holidays (and 2018/19 Winter Closure)

Photo by Elisabeth Fall

The archives team would like to express our gratitude to all our supporters, donors, users, collaborators, interns and colleagues for helping us grow our holdings, uncover, describe, and digitize previously hidden collections.

We hope to see many of you next year, please join us for the upcoming Archives Lectures and come view the recently opened new exhibit, Open Wide: 500 Years of Dentistry in Art.

The Archives & Special Collections will be closed from Saturday, December 22, 2017 through Tuesday, January 1st, 2018. We will reopen on Wednesday, January 2nd.

Best wishes for a wonderful New Year!