New Archives Intern: Lauren Wolters

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Lauren Wolters

Lauren Wolters is a rising junior undergraduate student at Skidmore College. She is double majoring in History and Psychology and is interested in learning the basics of archival theory and practice. Being a history major, Lauren is fascinated by old artifacts and is excited to have the unique opportunity to work with collections that are not always available to the public eye. Currently, she has been assisting by taking inventory of a collection of photographs and organizing a digital list of metadata. Eventually, she will be transitioning to aid on a project relating to the Langley Porter Psychiatric Institute Records. This project is perfectly tailored towards both of her interests as it combines her two majors.

Lauren was born and raised in San Francisco, CA. She plays volleyball at Skidmore College and enjoys photography as a hobby. Lauren is enjoying working in the library with the archivists and looks forward to learning even more about the archives.

Experiments with Digital Tools in the Archives — OCR

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Working on digital “stuff” in the archives is always fascinating, because it blurs the borders between digital and physical. Most of the work the takes up my time is at these borders. Physical stuff requires lots of human touches to transition to “digital,” and digital stuff similarly requires lots tending by humans to ensure that it is preserved physically. After all, the 1s and 0s are stored physically somewhere, even if on the cloud or in DNA.

We’re currently working on several projects to convert physical materials to digital text. The huge quantities of rich and complicated textual material in archival collections is full of potential for use as data in both computational health research and also digital medical humanities work, but to be usable for these kinds of projects it needs to be converted to digital text or data, so that it can be interpreted by computers. To get to this point the documents must be scanned, and the scanned documents must either be transcribed, which can be immensely labor intensive, or converted directly by computers using a software that can perform Optical Character Recognition, or OCR. One of our projects using OCR to extract text from a document provides a fascinating look into the world of computer vision.

A pen and ink illustration of the lungs and a lymph gland from the Ralph Sweet Collection of Medical Illustrations

An example of the illustrations in the Ralph Sweet Collection

The Ralph Sweet Collection of Medical Illustration contains extraordinary examples of the work of one of the most renowned medical illustrators in the United States, so we’re working on digitizing the collection and putting it online. To do this we need to have detailed metadata — the kind of information you might expect to find in a catalog record, title, date, author — about each illustration. Currently this metadata for the Sweet Collection exists only in the form of printed index that was written on a typewriter. We can scan the index, but we do not have the labor to transcribe each of the 2500 or so entries. This is a job for OCR.

The image below shows what a page of the Ralph Sweet index looks like. This is the metadata that we want to be able to extract and turn into digital text so that it can be understood by a computer and used as data.

A page of an type-written index of the Ralph Sweet Collection, showing metadata about each illustration in the colleciton.

A page of the index for the Ralph Sweet Collection.

One of the first problems we encountered in attempting to extract text from this document is a classic difficulty of computer vision. As English-speaking humans, we know by looking at this document that it contains three columns, and that the order in which to read the page is top to bottom by column, starting on the left and moving right. To a computer however, it is simply a page full of text, and there is no way to know whether or not the text is broken into columns or whether each line should be read all the way across the page. This simple task presented a difficulty for most of the software that we tested, but we found one software which could identify these columns easily. The software is called Tesseract, and it was actually developed in the 1980’s but continues to be a good open-source tool to perform OCR.

If we plug the above page into Tesseract, we get mostly recognizable text, which in itself is pretty miraculous when you think about it. Looking at the text though, it quickly becomes clear that it is not an exact transcription of what’s on the page. There are misspellings (“Iivev”), and some chunks of text have been separated from the entry in which they should appear (“horizontal”).

An image of the text-output of the software tesseract showing errors in transciption.

An example of the text extracted from the Ralph Sweet Collection Index by Tesseract.

Digging into the way that Tesseract (and OCR software more generally) works can help us begin to understand why these errors are cropping up. Plus, it looks really cool.

OCR programs have to go through a set of image manipulation processes to help them decide which marks on the page are text — and hence should be interpreted — and which are other marks that can be ignored. This all happen behind the scenes, and usually this involves deciding what the background parts of the image are and blurring them out, increasing the image contrast, and making the image bi-tonal so that everything on the page is only black or white. Then, the computer can trace the black pixels on the image and get a series of shapes which it can use to begin attempting to interpret as text. The image below shows the shapes that Tesseract has identified as letters and traced out for interpretation. Each new color indicates that the computer believes it has moved on to a new letter.

A page of colorful text on a black background illustrating the text that has been automatically traced from the Ralph Sweet Index by the computer program Tessearact.

The result of Tesseract tracing the letters it has interpreted. Each new color is something that’s been identified as a new letter.

Interestingly, when comparing the computer tracing of the letters to the original image you can see that Tesseract has already made the assumption that the black spaces from the three-hole punch in the top of the page are not letters, and thus it should not bother to trace them. Lucky for us, that’s correct.

Next the computer has to take all these letters and turn them into words. In actual practice it’s not quite this simple, but basically the computer iterates on each letter identification that it believes it has made by testing whether or not that word is in its dictionary, and thus whether or not it is likely to be a word. If the combination of letters that the computer thinks it sees are not a word, then it will go back and make a new guess about the letters and test whether or not that’s a word, and so on. Part of this whole process is to chunk the letters into words using their actual spacing on the page. Below you can see an image of how Tesseract has begun to identify words using the spaces between lines and letters.

A view of a page of the Ralph Sweet Index showing each word as a blue rectangle encompassing the space taken up by that block of text against a black background -- the "word" output of the OCR program Tesseract.

The “words” that the OCR software has identified on the page. Each blue rectangle represents a space that Tesseract has marked as containing a word.

In addition to checking the word against the dictionary though, most OCR programs also use the context of the surrounding words to attempt to make a better guess about the text. In most cases this is helpful — if the computer has read a sentence that says “the plant requires wader” it should be a relatively easy task to decide that the last word is actually “water.” In our case though, this approach breaks down. The text we want the computer to extract in this case is not sentences, but rather (meta)data. The meaning of the language has little influence on how each individual word should be read. One of the next steps for us will be trying to figure out how to better instruct Tesseract about the importance of context in making word-identification decisions (i.e., that it’s not important).

Finally, as the OCR software interprets the text it also identifies blocks of words that it believes should be grouped together, like a paragraph. Below you can see the results of this process with Tesseract.

A view of the different elements of tesseract's text identification showing letters traced in primary colors and contained in yellow bounding boxes, words set against blue rectangles outlining the space they encompass, and blocks of text outlined in larger bounding boxes and numbered -- all of this set against a black background.

This view shows all of the elements of Tesseract’s word identification combined. Text has been traced in color, separate letters are contained in bounding boxes, words are contained in blue rectangles, and blocks are contained in larger bounding boxes and are numbered (though the numbers are a bit difficult to see).

A line has been drawn around each block of text, and it has been given a number indicating the order in which the computer is reading it. Here we can see the source of one of the biggest problems of the OCR-generated text from earlier. Tesseract is in-accurately excluding a lot of words from their proper blocks. In the above photo, the word “Pen” is a good example. It is a part of block 20, but it has been interpreted by the computer as it’s own block — block 21 — and has been set aside to appear in the text file after block 20. Attempting to solve this problem will be our next hurdle, and hopefully we can catch you up after we are successful.

Using OCR to extract text from digital images can be a frustrating endeavor if accuracy is a necessity, but it is also a fascinating illustration of the way computers see and make decisions. Anytime we ask computers to perform tasks that interface with humans, we will always be grappling with similar issues.

Base Hospital No. 30, One Hundred Years Later – Part Two: France

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This is a guest post by Aaron J. Jackson, PhD student, UCSF Department of Anthropology, History and Social Medicine. 

One hundred years ago, the men and women of U.S. Army Base Hospital No. 30—the University of California School of Medicine Unit—arrived in France to support the American war effort after more than a year of preparation in the United States. They had already faced many challenges by the time they first set foot in Europe, including navigating the Army bureaucracy, going through extensive military and medical training, traveling from San Francisco to New York, and treating thousands of soldiers who had developed acute infections as a result of the massive mobilization efforts taking place in 1917 and 1918. They crossed the Atlantic in late April and arrived in France in May, expecting to occupy a prepared site, where they could set to the important work of caring for America’s wounded soldiers as the American Expeditionary Forces moved into the Western Front and helped blunt the German Spring Offensive of 1918. But they would still have to overcome significant obstacles before that work could begin. In this entry—the second part of four planned posts—I will cover the experience of Base Hospital No. 30 as they landed in France and made preparations to support the wounded between May and June, 1918. These stories are derived from primary source materials on Base Hospital No. 30 kept at the UCSF Archives & Special Collections, and it is with great appreciation to the archivists there that I am able to write about the experiences of the men and women of the University of California School of Medicine and their experience in the Great War. If you have not done so yet, please read Part One: Organization, Mobilization, and Travel here.

The U.S.S. Leviathan arrived in Brest, France on May 2, 1918. The port city at that time was a bustle of activity as the Americans established supply depots and warehouses and scrambled to offload the massive influx of war materiel and men arriving from across the Atlantic. Base Hospital No. 30 was but one of hundreds of American units transitioning into France at the time. Until that point, the unit managed to keep track of the $100,000 worth of Red Cross supplies and equipment it had drawn from the quartermaster and medical supply depot back in San Francisco. But with everything operating at a frantic pace in Brest, they found it impossible to ensure that these supplies remained with the unit. They received orders to board a train for Royat a mere two days after arriving in Brest, and while they were assured that their supplies would catch up, Lieutenant Colonel Eugene S. Kilgore later recalled that the unit was “dismayed at the apparent rough handling of [their] cargo in shipment, and were not surprised that much of it failed to reach us in Royat.”

Figure 6 – Royat Advertisements ca. 1900-1910.

“Royat les Bains is a small town, situated in the very heart of France, in the Auvergne Mountains,” begins the U.S. Army Hospitalization Report prepared by acquisition officers who scouted the location and rented the buildings that Base Hospital No. 30 was to occupy. Royat was (and remains) a spa town that advertised its natural hot springs and a history dating back to the Roman occupation of Gaul—the Romans constructed baths that utilized the hot springs, making Royat’s tourist heritage a truly ancient affair. Unfortunately, for an American hospital unit interested in operating a modern medical institution, Royat’s ancient roots left much to be desired, despite its charms.

In their hospitalization report, the acquisition officers noted that the town was “clean, quiet and healthful” with plenty of fresh air and sunshine—an atmosphere that attracted a clientele “of a very high class, comprising, as it does for the most part, the wealthy and nobility.” Due to this, the acquisition officers noted that the rents were quite high in Royat, but the environment seemed appropriate to them for a hospital due to the town’s reputation as a health resort and the advertised healing properties of its thermal springs, which “are taken for gout, rheumatism, gravel, kidney and bladder trouble, and… anemia, blood trouble, diabetes and dyspepsia.” With this in mind, the acquisition officers rented eleven buildings—eight hotels, one villa, one casino, and one garage—for the purposes of establishing a base hospital in the town. They left detailed instructions for the officers of Base Hospital No. 30 regarding the costs of tram fares to the nearby city of Clermont, the costs of maintaining and operating telephone service in the rented buildings, and how to go about securing sewage and garbage disposal. They were even so helpful as to provide the locations of local laundries and markets and to coordinate with local restaurants and cafes to ensure that price lists were printed in English as well as French “to prevent the unfair exploitation of foreigners.” However, they advised the officers of Base Hospital No. 30 that, as elsewhere in France, manpower for labor was in drastically short supply as almost all of it was involved in the war effort. They warned that the enlisted men of the hospital unit would likely be tasked with “street cleaning and watering and removal of rubbage and waste,” for which the local municipality would be grateful.

In short, while the acquisition officers obviously considered Royat to be an ideal location for a hospital due to its atmosphere, access to clean water, location relative to a railway, and the availability of seemingly suitable buildings—assuming, of course, that one believes a hospital and a resort hotel are sufficiently alike as to seem suitable—they noted that Base Hospital No. 30 would have its work cut out for it. The acquisition officers had done what they could and moved on. The rest would be up to the medical personnel, some of whom arrived in Royat on the morning of May 7, 1918, and immediately set about the task of transforming the sleepy spa village into a modern medical facility.

The nurses of Base Hospital No. 30 were diverted to Vichy, France for a short stay while the men went ahead to prepare the hospital site. In Vichy, the nurses attached to Base Hospital No. 1, which had organized out of Bellevue Hospital in New York City. While there, the nurses tended to a number of personnel who had contracted measles, which head nurse Arabella Lombard described as “a childhood pleasure evidently foregone in younger days.”

In Royat, Base Hospital No. 30’s officers immediately noted that the requisition team had secured the most undesirable hotels in the town and that the task before them to prepare the site to receive patients was indeed Herculean. The kitchens, primarily located in hotel basements, were particularly bad. Lt. Col. Kilgore later recalled in The Record that the kitchen in the hotel Continental was a veritable dungeon, but it had to be used because the adjoining mess hall was the only place large enough to install the main patients’ kitchen. Unfortunately, concerns about the kitchens were only the beginning.

The electrical supply, generated by hydraulic powerplants and initially reported to be ample, was found to be woefully insufficient in the dry summer months, leaving the hospital without electricity three days out of every seven and without power to run the new X-ray and laboratory incubator equipment. The hospital personnel installed multiple gas lines only to find that France’s coal scarcity reduced the gas pressure to such a point that the lines were practically useless. Worse, the water supply to the hotels, intended for a few dozen tourists, was inadequate for the needs of a several-hundred bed hospital. After installing a make-shift shower and bath system, hospital personnel discovered that it could not be operated without completely depriving at least one of the hotels of water entirely, and it was necessary to carry water in buckets up several flights of stairs in order to operate toilets and wash dishes. In spite of these complications, hospital personnel were able to establish well-prepared surgical clinics and patient wards, but the continuous complications they encountered certainly made the work more difficult than they anticipated.

The many complications were frustrating, “but worse than all these together was the hopeless inadequacy of the drainage system,” reported Lt. Col. Kilgore. Only two of the buildings had direct access to sewer lines with the rest relying on antiquated cesspool systems that were, again, intended to service the needs of at most a few dozen tourists. Kilgore noted that, “even in our condition of what we felt to be disgraceful water economy, it was evident that the numbers we put in the buildings and the use they made of water was greatly in excess of that contemplated by those who have used the buildings heretofore as summer hotels and boarding places. And very shortly after our hospital became open to patients, our cesspools began to overflow.” This problem was compounded on multiple levels. First, the only way to deal with an overflowing cesspool was to have it pumped by the Societe d’Assainissement of Clermont, whose horse-drawn steam pump and tank wagons—dubbed “honey wagons” by the Americans—had to serve the entirety of Clermont and Royat and so required three weeks’ advance notice for services. This was an impossible situation for Base Hospital No. 30 as the cesspools would overflow again as soon as seven days after they had been emptied, and even when the honey wagons could be secured, they were insufficient to empty all the hospital’s cesspools at one time, often leaving the work half done, at best. And if the misery of overflowing cesspools alone was not enough, the pools were often located directly under the hotel basements, where the kitchens were often located, including the main patients’ kitchen in the basement of the Continental. Thus, when the Continental’s cesspool overflowed, it did so directly into the newly refurbished main patients’ kitchen and dining hall. The officers and enlisted men attempted to deal with these issues as they were able, but they often lacked the tools and experience necessary to properly tackle the various tasks. The problems grew so great that the Army was forced to divert an engineer detachment from the front lines in August to install better drainage, additional cesspools, showers, wash troughs and heating stoves.

The nurses arrived from Vichy on May 23 and found that the hospital was far from the promised state of preparedness required. They immediately set to work sanitizing the hotels to “get them ready for the boys from the front,” as Arabella Lombard put it. The nurses scrubbed the rooms so thoroughly that one of the officers remarked that “three coats of paint were scrubbed off before we considered the buildings ready for occupancy.” It was hard work that left the nurses weary and sore, but there were breaks. On May 28, the nurses were invited to celebrate Decoration Day—the precursor to Memorial Day, celebrated in honor of the Civil War dead through the decoration of grave markers—with an aviation unit stationed in nearby Clermont. They observed an afternoon of sports, enjoyed a buffet dinner outside the Red Cross Headquarters overlooking the hills and the setting sun, and were entertained by a band concert, speeches, and dancing after dark.

By June, the men and women of Base Hospital No. 30 were still dealing with the cacophony of unforeseen difficulties associated with occupying Royat. The cesspools were still overflowing from time to time, the water and electrical supplies were still inefficient, the enlisted men were still helping clean the streets of Royat and installing new kitchens, and some of the old hotel rooms remained to be cleaned and refitted for the purpose of housing patients, but the hospital was operational enough to receive its first trainload of patients on June 12, 1918. Thankfully, the 360 patients aboard the train were convalescent for the most part, but even so these men represented a significant difficulty for hospital staff as the kitchen installations were not yet complete.

After more than a year of preparation for the deployment to France, the men and women of Base Hospital No. 30 found themselves scrambling to prepare their ad hoc hospital to receive patients, and time had run out. Patient trains were arriving, and the hospital was about to get very busy indeed. Approximately five-hundred kilometers north of Royat, near Château-Thierry, the German Spring Offensive of 1918 was grinding forward as the Germans attempted to cross the Marne River. Standing in their way were the men of the 5th and 6th Marines and the 9th and 23rd Infantry. The resulting fighting was among the most intense experienced by any Americans in the war, and as Base Hospital No. 30 attempted to figure out how they were going to feed their first trainload of convalescent patients, several more hospital trains carrying troops fresh from the front lines and in need of surgery were making their way to Royat.

In Part Three of this four-part blog installment, we will explore what Lt. Col. Kilgore characterized as the “Work of the Hospital” in treating battlefield casualties and how they dealt with the Influenza Pandemic of 1918. We will also discuss the experiences of the forward-deployed surgical teams led by Lt. Col. Alanson Weeks (Surgical Team No. 50) and Maj. Herbet S. Thomson (Surgical Team No. 51), who operated under extreme conditions between June 1918 and the Armistice in November.

Figures:

5 – “Loading at Brest for a Long Journey,” circa 1918, Woolsey (John Homer) Papers, UC San Francisco, Library, Special Collections, Calisphere, https://calisphere.org/item/8caee2bc-704e-4647-9218-d32ed2a4d9c8/, accessed May 21, 2018.

6 – “Royat Advertisements,” author’s compilation from “Affice Chemin de Fer D’Orleans Auvergne Geo Dorival,” circa 1910 (left) and “Royat Vintage Poster” by Gustave Fraipont, c. 1900 (right).

7 – “Base Hospital #30 at Royat, France,” ca. 1917-1919, Woolsey (John Homer) Papers, UC San Francisco, Library, Special Collections, Calisphere, https://calisphere.org/item/2cb5cbf5-d0c0-412a-9e15-a161a291d1e2/, accessed May 21, 2018.

8 – “Surgical Clinic, Metropole Hotel,” 1918, Base Hospital #30 Collection, UC San Francisco, Library, Special Collections, Calisphere, https://calisphere.org/item/b7ca9276-989e-468f-adb2-ece162e4ad01/, accessed May 21, 2018.

9 – “Base Hospital #30 Nurses,” 1918, Woolsey (John Homer) Papers, UC San Francisco, Library, Special Collections, Calisphere, https://calisphere.org/item/500d7be8-79c5-430e-86f6-f3a15d3a0d87/, accessed May 21, 2018.

10 – “Hospital Train with Hiram Miller and ‘Rug’ Ruggles,” 1918, Woolsey (John Homer) Papers, UC San Francisco, Library, Special Collections, Calisphere, https://calisphere.org/item/f4ec0c1f-b30c-48b4-9746-2d34420fcc4d/, accessed May 21, 2018.

Guest Curator: Sabrina Oliveros

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“Open Wide” exhibit poster

Sabrina Oliveros joined UCSF Archives & Special Collections in April 2018 as the guest curator for Open Wide: 500 Years of Dentistry in Art. Opening this summer, the show will feature selections from the collection of Dr. Morton G. Rivo, D.D.S. that were previously exhibited at the University at Buffalo. Together with artifacts, rare books, and other items in UCSF’s holdings, the artworks will show how perspectives on dentistry – and dentistry itself – have changed through the years.

Sabrina holds a master’s degree in Museum Studies from the University of San Francisco. She co-curated Reformations: Dürer & the New Age of Print at the school’s Thacher Gallery and was the curatorial intern for Company’s Coming: San Francisco Hosts the Panama-Pacific International Exposition at the San Francisco Public Library. She has also been a researcher, scriptwriter, and project assistant for Earprint, an award-winning creator of audio tours, interactives, and immersive sound experiences for museums. Lately, she has been working with the exhibits department at the San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park. Her main jobs are to shore up the Maritime Museum’s research on its WPA-era murals and to develop interpretation for exhibits.

Sabrina Oliveros

Born in New York City and raised in the Philippines, Sabrina has undergraduate degrees in Communication and History from the Ateneo de Manila. She worked for a publishing house and an online marketing firm before venturing into the museum field. Nowadays, when she’s not on exhibit-related projects, she ghostwrites articles for professionals ranging from kitchen remodelers and accountants to dog trainers and, yes – dentists.

UC 150th Anniversary Highlight: Choh Hao Li

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The University of California is celebrating its 150th anniversary this year. Over the 150 years, the UC campuses have accomplished great things that have changed California and the world for the better. To commemorate the anniversary, a 150 year timeline has been created that features the history and accomplishments of the UC and its students, faculty, and staff.

It was very nice to see UCSF Biochemist Choh Hao Li recognized for his accomplishments in the 1971 section of the timeline:

“Choh Hao Li synthesizes human growth hormone at UCSF, making possible later development of successful treatments for childhood growth disorders. Li spent more than 30 years at UC Berkeley and UCSF.”

The Archives had previously profiled Li in the “Forgotten Super Heroes of Science and Medicine” series. It is nice to see that his accomplishments were not forgotten at all when the timeline was put together.

Do-It-Yourself Archiving in the Makers Lab

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Join us on June 20th from 12-2pm in the UCSF Library Makers Lab for Do-It-Yourself Archiving! The UCSF Archives staff will provide supplies and instruction on how to preserve and organize your personal records. Participants are encouraged to bring in material they want to archive, like photograph albums, childhood drawings, early writings or research, even love letters! The UCSF Digital Archivist will also be on hand to provide tips on managing your personal digital archive.

REGISTER HERE

This pop-up is a collaboration between the UCSF Archives & Special Collections and the Makers Lab. All Makers Lab pop-ups are open to the UCSF community.

Early Days of the San Francisco Emergency Service: From the Police Infirmary to Mission Emergency

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This is a guest post by Griffin Burgess, ZSFG Archivist.

The first San Francisco City and County Hospital located on Potrero Avenue was completed in 1872, but it was far from the city center and difficult to get to, which made it less than ideal for emergency cases.

At the time, City Hall housed the police prison, which included an infirmary. This infirmary always had a physician present, so the police and the public became used to using the prison infirmary for emergencies. In 1877, the city formally changed the prison infirmary to the Receiving Hospital and put the Department of Public Health in charge of it.

While the Receiving Hospital provided emergency care to anyone who needed it and played an important role in providing care to the people of San Francisco, the city had no ambulances. To help with this, the police department purchased Chicago-style police patrol wagons, which could carry a stretcher and transport the sick or injured.

In 1893, The World Columbian Exposition and Fair was held in Chicago, Illinois. The new publisher of the San Francisco Chronicle, Michael de Young, attended the fair and saw the working display of the new Studebaker horse-drawn ambulance. When the fair that he organized in San Francisco the next year needed an ambulance, he sent away for a Studebaker ambulance to serve the fair’s hospital.

The first San Francisco ambulance in front of Park Emergency Hospital on Stanyan Street, circa 1910.

After the fair, the Studebaker sat in a warehouse until two members of a women’s society group, Theresa Fair Oelrichs and her sister Virginia Fair, bought it and donated it to the Receiving Hospital. It was up to the city to buy the horses, which was done after a bit of politicking.

The director of the Receiving Hospital, Dr. George Somers, insisted that the ambulance be staffed by interns so that medical care could be provided immediately and en route to the hospital, a unique idea at the time. The ambulances were staffed by male nurses until WWII, when former medical corpsmen began working ambulances. Paramedics were introduced in 1973.

Ambulance in front of the temporary Central Emergency, built after the 1906 earthquake. From left to right: James O’Dea, Annie Andrew, Dr. Fred Zumwalt, Theresa Gile, Charles Bucher RN, William Sullivan, John Thoma (in ambulance).

The 1906 earthquake and fire destroyed much of the city, including City Hall and the Receiving Hospital located in its basement.  A new, temporary Central Emergency building in Jefferson Square on Golden Gate Avenue was the first structure completed after the quake.

Ambulance in front of the temporary Mission Emergency building at 23rd St. and Potrero Ave. Circa 1915.

The first Mission Emergency opened in 1909 at 23rd and Potrero. It was later demolished when the red brick San Francisco City and County Hospital was completed and the new Mission Emergency at 22nd and Potrero was opened in 1917.

In 1912, the Emergency Service received its first automobile ambulance. It was stationed at Park Emergency Hospital so that drivers, who until then had only driven horse-drawn ambulances, could learn to operate it on the relatively empty roads of Golden Gate Park.

Ambulance beside Mission Emergency at 22nd and Potrero Ave, completed in 1917. Photo circa 1920.

Not all of the drivers adjusted well to the switch to automobiles, however. “One of the Park Emergency ambulance drivers eventually required transfer to another City department. On his transfer orders, the hospital’s surgeon wrote, ‘… after numerous attempts to convince him to the contrary, this driver still persists in trying to stop the automobile ambulance by pulling back on the steering wheel as hard as he can and screaming at the top of his lungs, ‘Woooh there!’ I feel he is better suited for a department that still uses horses.'” (From Catastrophes, Epidemics and Neglected Diseases by F. William Blaisdell and Moses Grossman, page 134).

Ambulance at Central Emergency Hospital, circa 1930s.

The new City and County Hospital was one of the most modern complexes in the country and Mission Emergency soon became the hospital best equipped to care for the severely sick and injured, with updated operating rooms, staff, and equipment. By the end of the 1930s, all of the city’s ambulances were taking emergency cases to Mission Emergency rather than the Central Emergency hospital in Civic Center.

Base Hospital No. 30, One Hundred Years Later – Part One: Organization, Mobilization, and Travel

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This is a guest post by Aaron J. Jackson, PhD student, UCSF Department of Anthropology, History and Social Medicine.

One hundred years ago today, April 24, 1918, the 240 men and women of U.S. Army Base Hospital No. 30—the University of California School of Medicine Unit—left American soil to support the war effort by operating a modern hospital in France. Their stories survive in the UCSF Archives & Special Collections, where they contribute to the rich history of the UCSF and San Francisco communities. In this four-part series, I hope to introduce you to the stories of the men and women of Base Hospital No. 30, and I encourage you to learn more by visiting the UCSF Archives & Special Collections in the Parnassus Library.

Figure 1 – U.S. Army Base Hospital No. 30, World War I

“This book purports to be a record, not merely of the happenings and the activities of Base Hospital Number Thirty, but a permanent record of the personnel with the addresses, that we may always keep in touch with one another and thus preserve the bonds of friendship now existent among us.” – Foreword, The Record

As the foreword to the book they commissioned to commemorate their experience expresses, the men and women of Base Hospital No. 30 formed a tight-knit community during their time in the service in the First World War. When Congress declared war on Germany on April 4, 1917, the American Red Cross Society quickly set to work in establishing, organizing, and supplying medical units in the nation’s leading medical institutions with the intent of creating a system of hospitals in France to treat the inevitable casualties of the war. The American medical community was enthusiastic about the effort. Famed surgeons George Crile and Harvey Cushing had been working with America’s French and British allies since 1915 to establish new medical techniques and organizational methods. Many physicians viewed the war as an opportunity to advance medical knowledge while simultaneously serving their country, and many members of the University of California Department of Medicine felt the same. With the assistance of the Red Cross, Base Hospital No. 30 began to organize in the spring and early summer of 1917. Consisting roughly of twenty-five officers, sixty-five nurses, and one-hundred-fifty enlisted men, the unit marched down Market Street as part of a Liberty Loan parade to raise money for the base hospital and to support the war effort.

Figure 2 – Liberty Loan Parade, San Francisco, Cal.

Unfortunately, the initial excitement of the spring and early summer became a period of uneasy waiting and bureaucratic frustration that dragged into the fall as the unit waited on official orders to arrive. Many members of the unit, including one or two officers and several of the nurses and enlisted men, anticipating immediate entrance into the service, had packed and stored their belongings and quit their jobs, and the commanding officers had to continuously combat rumors that the organization had been broken up or that no more base hospitals would be sent to France. Thankfully, the Red Cross had managed to secure $100,000 in funding, which it used to collect supplies while the Army bureaucracy plodded along. Finally, on November 20, 1917, Base Hospital No. 30 received official orders to muster at Fort Mason in San Francisco.

While the unit drilled and trained in the operation of a military hospital, the nurses received separate orders to travel to New York. They were able to enjoy the Christmas holiday with their friends and family before taking their oath of service at the Presidio on December 26, 1917 and setting out on a five-day, frigid train ride to New York City. They arrived on New Year’s Day and spent the next three weeks on Ellis Island preparing their uniforms and equipment and receiving training. On January 25, they were divided into five groups bound for Army camps in South Carolina, Maryland, Ohio, Georgia, and Virginia, where soldiers gathering from across the nation were coming down with acute infections like measles and mumps in large numbers. While the nurses expressed disappointment at not being able to set out for France immediately, Chief Nurse Arabella Lombard expressed that they were happy to be of service and to gain valuable experience before receiving orders to return to New York in March.

Figure 3 – Nurses of Base Hospital No. 30

Back in San Francisco, the officers spent their time working at clinics in the city and training the enlisted personnel. On March 3, 1918, nearly a year after the declaration of war, the unit received orders to pack their supplies and board the steamship S.S. Northern Pacific en route to New York. The trip took two weeks—a near-record pace at the time—and the unit was assigned temporary barracks at Camp Merritt. While in New York, several of the officers attended clinics on the latest medical techniques, such as instruction on the treatment of pneumonia and meningitis at the Rockefeller Institute and the Carrel-Dakin course on aseptic surgery and wound treatment—essentially the use of diluted chlorine and bleach solution to hasten the separation of dead from living tissue, which was cutting-edge lifesaving technology before the discovery of antibiotics.

On April 22, the nurses rejoined Base Hospital No. 30 as the unit boarded the U.S.S. Leviathan, a former German luxury liner originally named the Vaterland that had been seized by the U.S. government the year prior and converted into a troopship. They set sail on April 24, 1918. More than one year after Congress’s declaration of war on Germany, the members of Base Hospital No. 30 were finally travelling to France. They anticipated the hard but meaningful work of repairing the broken bodies of America’s soldiers, but in France, they would have to overcome a number of unexpected obstacles before that work could take place.

Click here to read Part Two of the series.

Figure 4 – USS Leviathan

Figures:

1 – “U.S. Army Base Hospital No. 30, World War I,” circa 1917, UC San Francisco, Library, University Archives, Base Hospital #30 Collection.

2 – “Liberty Loan Parade, San Francisco, Cal.,” circa 1917, California State Library, California History Section Picture Catalog.

3 – “Nurses of Base Hospital No. 30,” January 1918, UC San Francisco, Library, University Archives, Base Hospital #30 Collection.

4 – “USS Leviathan,” 8 July 1918, Naval History & Heritage Command, 19-N-1707.

Reproducible Research and the problems of preserving computer code and software

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We collect and preserve a lot of the documentary evidence of science happening at UCSF — everything from lab notebooks to lab websites detailing research processes. We even hold tons and tons of data in our collections, mostly in physical form, as patient surveys or health records, or even raw data as it was initially recorded by hand in the lab.

But what about the products of contemporary science, where key digital elements such as computer code or software might be crucial to an understanding of the research? This is already presenting problems for research reproducibility. Think, for example, of a set of results which were obtained using a computer script written in the Python computer programming language. If you want to verify these results, are you able to view the source code which produced them? Are you able to execute that code on your own computer? Can you tell what each piece of the code does? Does the code rely on access to an external data set to work correctly, and can you access and/or assess that data set to test the code?

As we work more closely with our Data Science Initiative team on these issues, it becomes clear that these are preservation questions as well. A critical understanding of the scientific past and present requires access to the primary source documentation of that research, including computer code and software. Being able to understand and interpret that computer code involves many of the same questions mentioned above — executions of code, documentation of each process in the code, access to necessary data, etc.

To begin to address this, we are working with the Data Science team to assess researcher coding practices as a first step in understanding how the library can encourage better documentation and preservation of code in the service of reproducible research and the persistence of the scientific scholarly record. And if you’re a researcher who codes for your work, then we want feedback from you! Please consider attending one of our lunchtime listening sessions in the coming weeks — 4/20 from 12-1:30 pm at Mission Bay, and 4/27 from 12-1:30 pm at Parnassus. We will have an informal chat about research coding practices and will discuss some of the issues we encounter as information professionals, as well as talking about what the library can do to aid in these areas.

Join us as we make some in-roads on this challenging information problem.

Volunteer Report: The Papers of Robert Langley Porter

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This is a guest post by Seth Cotterell, UCSF Archives Volunteer.

As a UCSF Archives volunteer, I get to play an important supporting role in achieving our mission to identify and provide access to rare and unique material and support research and teaching of the health sciences, medical humanities, and the history of UCSF. Toward that end I have been updating old records and creating new ones that will result in making new, detailed finding aids for collections available online to researchers soon. You’ll have to come back for my next guest blog post to hear the details of that project, though. Today I thought I’d share with you a sneak peek at one of those collections.

If you’re familiar with the history of UCSF you’ve probably heard of Robert Langley Porter. Dr. Porter was a pediatrician and later served as dean of the UC School of Medicine from 1927-1940. He may be best known for spearheading the creation of the Langley Porter Institute, today called the Langley Porter Psychiatric Hospital and Clinics, which receives more than 20,000 visits per year. Of course, this is the kind of information you can get from any web search. What I love about archival research, what you don’t find anywhere else, is the added insight. It’s the glimpse into the mind of the creator, the display of personality, and the richness of character captured in archival collections. For example, did you know that Dr. Porter was also a poet, sometimes writing verses on the back of Office of the Dean letterhead? This collection includes a love sonnet, a poem about potatoes, and this one which he apparently wrote in the bath!

Poem by Robert Langley Porter, 1924. Porter papers, MSS 77-11. Carton 1, folder 6.

Research is about so much more than simply gathering and reporting data points. Where else but in an archival collection could you expect to find a historical figure’s musings on the great questions, like what is life and what separates human beings from animals and microscopic organisms, next to guidelines for managing the “behavior abnormalities of children,” alongside the outline for an opera he wrote starring a Pan-like deity symbolizing the antithesis of materialism and destruction of nature? Spoiler alert: all this and more can be found in just the miscellaneous writings folders of this collection. And I, for one, would love to know in what context he used these jokes:

From miscellaneous writings (1), Porter papers, MSS 77-11. Carton 1, folder 14.

One of the most interesting items in the collection for me is a scrapbook that may have been given to Porter on the occasion of his retirement. Included are heartfelt and humorous well wishes from students and colleagues that give us an idea of the impact he had on those around him, not just as a highly respected professional in his field, but as a genuine human being.

Scrapbook, Porter papers, MSS 77-1. Oversize folder 1.

I look forward to continuing to work with our fascinating collections and to improving accessibility by publishing a number of new finding aids in the very near future for your viewing pleasure.