Anatomy and Surgery Instruction on Halloween

Posted on October 26, 2016 by Kelsi Evans

As Halloween approaches, we thought it’d be a perfect time to highlight these 19^th-century UC Medical Department surgery and anatomy lecture admission tickets, dated October 31, 1878!

Lecture admission card, 1878, ArchClass H152

Anatomy lecture admission ticket, 1878. Archives Classification H152.

The UC Medical Department tracked attendance and enrollment using lecture admission cards. Note that the lecture on clinical surgery was given by Hugh Toland. This is the same Hugh Toland who gifted his medical school to the University of California in 1873, thus creating what would eventually be the UCSF School of Medicine.

Lecture admission ticket, 1878, ArchClass H152

Clinical surgery lecture admission ticket, 1878. Archives Classification H152.

While these tickets were originally designed for academic use, they now look tailor-made for Halloween party invitations!

Students performing dissection in University of California Medical College, 1896. Photograph Collection.

For more spooky fun in the archives, join us Monday, October 31, for a Halloween Open House in the Archives.

Halloween Open House in the Archives

Posted on October 21, 2016 by Kelsi Evans

Sketch by Alfred Augustus Crawford Williams MD (d. 1870), found tucked inside his surgical instrument case. Historical Medical Artifact Collection, item 79.

Sketch by A.A.C. Williams MD (d. 1870), found tucked inside his surgical instrument case. Artifact Collection, item 79.

We’re closing out Archives Month with a Halloween Open House in the Archives. Join us from 12noon-1pm on Halloween, Monday, October 31, in the Archives Reading Room. View some of our favorite oddities from the past and a few of our more gruesome historical medical artifacts.

Transfusion kit, circa 1870. Artifact Collection, item 240.

Plus, receive a Halloween goodie bag while supplies last!

UCSF School of Nursing students at table with Halloween decorations, 1944. Photograph Collection.

Archives Talk 10/21/16: Historical Medical Collections in the 21st Century

Posted on October 11, 2016 by Polina Ilieva

Date: Friday, October 21, 2016
Time: 12 pm – 1:15 pm
Lecturer: Jeffrey S. Reznick, PhD (NLM)
Location: Lange Room, 5th Floor, UCSF Library – Parnassus
530 Parnassus Ave, SF, CA 94143

This event is free and open to the public. Light refreshments will be provided.
REGISTRATION REQUIRED: http://calendars.library.ucsf.edu/event/2851245

Join UCSF Archives & Special Collections for an afternoon talk with Jeffrey S. Reznick, PhD, chief of the History of Medicine of the National Library of Medicine, the world’s largest biomedical library, located on the Bethesda, Maryland, campus of the National Institutes of Health.
In this talk, Reznick will offer an overview of the division, its current partnerships and programs, and its future plans as he and his colleagues embrace the future as stewards of the past, as the NLM itself anticipates its third century under the leadership of Patricia Flatley Brennan, PhD, RN., RN.

Jeffrey S. Reznick, PhD, chief of the History of Medicine of the National Library of Medicine

Jeffrey S. Reznick, PhD, chief of the History of Medicine at the National Library of Medicine

Reznick joined the NLM in 2009 following his tenure as director of the Institute for the Study of Occupation and Health of the American Occupational Therapy Foundation. Dr. Reznick’s record of scholarly historical research is as extensive as his executive career in the national nonprofit sector. As a social and cultural historian of medicine and war, he maintains and active research portfolio supported by the Intramural Research Program of the National Institutes of Health, and he is the author of two books, both published by Manchester University Press in its Cultural History of Modern War series, as well as numerous book reviews, articles for the popular press, and entries in major reference works.

About the UCSF Archives & Special Collections Lecture Series
UCSF Archives & Special Collections launched this lecture series to introduce a wider community to treasures and collections from its holdings, to provide an opportunity for researchers to discuss how they use this material, and to celebrate clinicians, scientists, and health care professionals who donated their papers to the archives.

Archives Month – October 2016

Posted on September 29, 2016 by Kelsi Evans

October is Archives Month! Along with archives from across the country, we’re celebrating the value of historical records and the preservation of the past.

We have special events planned on Wednesday, October 5. Visit us in the Library 5th floor Reading Room from 12noon-1pm to view historical collections, tour library exhibits, and meet archives staff. Also, tweet your questions all day @ucsf_archives using #AskAnArchivist. RSVP preferred for the open house – sign up here.

Upcoming Lecture: “Vaccination and Society Since the Sixties”

Posted on September 7, 2016 by Polina Ilieva

Date: Friday, September 30, 2016
Time: 12 pm – 1:15 pm
Lecturer: Elena Conis, PhD (UC Berkeley & UCSF)
Location: Lange Room, 5th Floor, UCSF Library – Parnassus
530 Parnassus Ave, SF, CA 94143

This event is free and open to the public. Light refreshments will be provided.
REGISTRATION REQUIRED: tiny.ucsf.edu/vaccination930

Join UCSF Archives & Special Collections for an afternoon talk with author Elena Conis as she discusses her book Vaccine Nation: America’s Changing Relationship with Immunization. A limited number of books will be available for purchase.

W. McD. Hammon with triplets participating in a polio study at the Hooper Foundation (UCSF)

The past fifty years have witnessed an enormous upsurge in vaccine use in the United States: American children now receive more vaccines than any previous generation, and laws requiring their immunization against a litany of diseases are standard. And yet, while vaccination rates have soared and cases of preventable infections have plummeted, an increasingly vocal cross-section of Americans have questioned the safety and necessity of vaccines. In this talk, Elena Conis explores the emergence of widespread acceptance – and rejection – of vaccines from the 1960s to the present, finding the origins of today’s vaccination controversies in historical debates over topics ranging from national security to body piercing to the role of women in contemporary society. Vaccine acceptance, she argues, has never been simply a scientific matter, but one profoundly shaped by our politics, economics, and culture.

Elena Conis, PhD

Elena Conis is a writer and historian of medicine, public health, and the environment. She is a member of the faculty of the Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley and an affiliated faculty member of the Department of Anthropology, History, and Social Medicine at UCSF. Previously, she was a history professor and the Mellon Fellow in Health and Humanities at Emory University; the Cain Fellow at the Chemical Heritage Foundation; and an award-winning health columnist for the Los Angeles Times. Her first book, Vaccine Nation, won the Arthur J. Viseltear Award from the American Public Health Association and was named a Choice magazine outstanding title and a pick of the week by the journal Nature. She is currently working on a book on the history of the pesticide DDT. She holds a PhD in the history of health sciences from UCSF, masters degrees in journalism and public health from Berkeley, and a bachelors degree in biology from Columbia University.

Internet Archive Partners Lunch

Posted on June 6, 2016 by David Krah

Friday the 13th of May was the auspicious date of our visit to one of our partner organizations, the Internet Archive, just across Golden Gate Park in the Richmond District. The Internet Archive is a non-profit digital library of millions of freely accessible books, movies, software, music, websites and more. Internet Archive graciously hosts a bi-weekly Partners Lunch, inviting anyone working in partnership with IA to tour the facility (a gorgeous re-purposed Christian Science church), meet staff in person, and participate in a lunchtime roundtable where IA folks and visitors share their projects’ progress, successes and failures. The whole UCSF Archives team, plus UCSF collections staff members Beatrice Mallek and David MacFarland, were in attendance.

UCSF Archives and Special Collections staff with Internet Archive digitization staff.

We met with our IA liason Jesse Bell, who gave us a look into the progress of some of our projects ongoing at Internet Archive. Here Eliza Zhuang is using a specially designed scanning booth to digitize volumes of bound medical journals for the State Medical Journal project. The “scanner” actually uses two conventional DSLR cameras to simultaneously photograph the pages of the book, optimally positioned by the pedal-operated V-shaped glass plate shown here.

Eliza Zhuang scanning a medical journal from UCSF’s collection.

After photography, the images undergo QA and metadata association before being uploaded to the Internet Archive, where they look like this.

IA’s lobby provides plenty of excitement. A prominently displayed monitor shows the digitization currently underway on a number of different systems. Below, David Uhlich watches as pages from the book scanner are photographed. Immediately behind the monitor is a film scanner that similarly feeds the live-view monitor. The lobby also houses a beautiful antique gramophone near a small listening station that includes an iPad loaded with digitized music and other recorded sound.

David Uhlich observes the progress of digitized images entering the system.

After lunch, we took a more in depth tour of IA’s facility. We saw an example of IA’s specially designed “portable” book scanner, which is basically a scaled-down version of the one used by IA staff. Approximately $10,000 will get you your own book scanning station, software, and support from IA for your own scanning projects. We also looked inside the refurbished church that, in addition to the pews, now houses some of IA’s servers and digitization equipment.

Internet Archive servers occupy a niche.

Sculptures of miniature people inhabit the aisles. Long-term IA staff are thanked for their service with a sculpture of their likeness; many depicted holding an item that reflects their interests or passions.

Some of Internet Archive’s long-term staff immortalized in figurine form.

It was great to meet the IA team in person. Our partnership with IA continues to provide new opportunities to preserve and make accessible our material. We look forward to exciting projects in the future!

Songs of a Nurse…

Posted on May 12, 2016 by Polina Ilieva

We would like to commemorate this International Nurses Day by sharing with you a poem that was written by a San Francisco nurse, Margaret Helen Florine a century ago:

MHFlorine_nurse_poem

This poem comes from a book, Songs of a Nurse that was published in 1917.

Florine_bookcover

Ms. Florine’s poetry was later advertised in the Pacific Coast Journal of Nursing (volume 15, 1919, p.770).

Songs_of_a_nurse_ad

Upcoming Lecture: Heightened Expectations

Posted on May 6, 2016 by Polina Ilieva

Date: Tuesday, May 17th, 2016
Time: 12 pm – 1:15 pm
Lecturer: Aimee Medeiros, PhD (UCSF)
Location: Lange Room, 5th Floor, UCSF Library – Parnassus
530 Parnassus Ave, SF, CA 94143
This event is free and open to the public. Light refreshments will be provided.

REGISTRATION REQUIRED: http://calendars.library.ucsf.edu/event/2544252

Join UCSF Archives & Special Collections for an afternoon talk with author Aimee Medeiros as she discusses her book Heightened Expectations: The Rise of the Human Growth Hormone Industry in America.

Heightened Expectations: The Rise of the Human Growth Hormone Industry in America

Heightened Expectations is a groundbreaking history that illuminates the foundations of the multibillion-dollar human growth hormone (HGH) industry. Drawing on medical and public health histories as well as on photography, film, music, prose, and other examples from popular culture, Aimee Medeiros tracks how the stigmatization of short stature in boys and growth hormone technology came together in the twentieth century. Historical materials from the UCSF Archives collection were used in the research for this book.

Aimee Medeiros, PhD

Aimee Medeiros is an assistant professor of the history of health sciences at the University of California, San Francisco.

Early MRI technology on display now at the UCSF Library

Posted on March 30, 2016 by Kelsi Evans

The UCSF Archives and Special Collections is pleased to announce the opening of a new exhibit at the UCSF Library, Vision for the Future: Advancing MRI Technology at UCSF’s Radiologic Imaging Laboratory, 1975-2000. The exhibit explores the pivotal role UCSF researchers played in developing imaging technology that revolutionized patient care and transformed the way we see our bodies. View material from the Radiologic Imaging Laboratory records housed in the UCSF Archives, including research notebooks, MRI coil prototypes, rare photographs, and more.

Join us April 5th at 12 noon for the exhibit’s official opening. Archivists will be on hand to answer any of your questions!

MRI scale model and coil prototype on display.

The Radiologic Imaging Laboratory (RIL) was founded in the mid-1970s by a team of UCSF scientists and engineers. Their goal was to create a clinically viable diagnostic tool using nuclear magnetic resonance imaging, later called MRI. Over the course of 25 years, the lab brought together venture capitalists, researchers, and clinicians to develop, evaluate, and market new imaging systems and instruments. The lab’s interdisciplinary approach and partnerships with private corporations, including Pfizer, Diasonics, and Toshiba, led to rapid innovation and numerous patents that continue to impact clinical care today.

Lab researchers and technicians Lawrence Crooks, Bob McCree, Ian Duff, and Roger Littlewood, circa 1981. Photograph collection.

RIL researchers and technicians Lawrence Crooks, Bob McCree, Ian Duff, and Roger Littlewood, circa 1981. Photograph collection.

The exhibit showcases just a fraction of the over 90 linear feet of engineering records, correspondence, and other material in the collection (call number MSS 2002-08). Through the generous support of RIL engineer, Dr. Lawrence E. Crooks, the UCSF Archives has processed the collection and created a detailed inventory available to researchers on the Online Archive of California. Archives staff have also made hundreds of documents and photographs from the collection available digitally on Calisphere, a public online portal.

MRI coil on display.

The exhibit is located on the main floor (3rd floor) of the UCSF Library, 530 Parnassus Ave. It is free and open to the public during Library hours, April 2016-April 2017.

Library Open House and Exhibit

Posted on March 14, 2016 by Kelsi Evans

Join us this Wednesday, March 16, from 12noon-2pm for an afternoon of activities and history! View the newly opened Library exhibit, An Engine of Inquiry and Change: The UCSF Library, and take a sneak peek at the soon-to-open Makers Lab.

Meet us on the main floor of the UCSF Library for 3D printing demos, knitting, coloring, and more at the Makers Lab preview. Talk to a roaming Library expert to get your questions answered and learn more about how the Library serves students, faculty and staff. View silent films from the Archives and Special Collections then head to the 5th floor to explore the exhibit.

An Engine of Inquiry and Change: The UCSF Library celebrates 150 years of growth, evolution, and user-centered service at the UCSF Library. Discover how the collection grew from less than 2,000 volumes into one of the world’s preeminent health sciences libraries.

View rare books and medical artifacts from the Archives and Special Collections and learn about exciting, technologically-advanced tools for the post-digital age. And don’t forget to “catalog” your Library memories and ideas for the future at our interactive card catalog display!

Brought to Light

Stories from UCSF Archives & Special Collections

Category Archives: Events