New HIV/AIDS History Material on Calisphere

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Highlighting some recently added HIV/AIDS history material now available on our digital collections on Calisphere:

AIDS History Project Ephemera Collection

Material includes posters and pamphlets related to the medical and/or social aspects of AIDS and HIV, with a focus on prevention and on addressing misconceptions about the virus and disease. Call number: MSS 2000-31.

Campbell (Bobbi) Diary

Selected material from the diary of Bobbi Campbell, nurse and self-identified “AIDS Poster Boy.” Campbell was one of the first and most public People with AIDS (PWAs), speaking at numerous conferences and other events. The diary is dated July 1983 through February 1984. Call number: MSS 96-33.

Sally Hughes AIDS Research Collection

Selections from research materials collected by historian Sally Hughes in preparation for AIDS oral histories that she conducted. The interviews document the experiences of physicians, nurses, and scientists who played key roles in the early years of the AIDS epidemic. Call number: MSS 2001-04.

AIDS-Patient Needs flowchart. Sally Hughes AIDS Research Collection.

San Francisco AIDS Foundation Records

Material from the San Francisco AIDS Foundation, an organization founded in 1982 to help end the HIV/AIDS epidemic through education, advocacy and direct services for prevention and care. Call number: MSS 94-60.

San Francisco General Hospital Ward 84/86 Records

Selections from the records of San Francisco General Hospital (SFGH) Ward 84/86, one of the first clinics in the country to treat and care for HIV/AIDS patients. Call number: MSS 94-61.

Staff of SFGH Ward 84/86, circa 1985. San Francisco General Hospital Ward 84/86 Records.

As we begin our recently awarded NHPRC grant to provide access to new AIDS history collections, we will be adding more digital items to Calisphere. We will keep you posted as we continue to update our collections.

Irene Pope, Nurse and Activist

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

In honor of Women’s History Month and International Women’s Day, we’re recognizing Irene Pope, nurse and activist.

Irene Pope

Irene Pope was born in Berkeley, CA and graduated from the UCSF School of Nursing in 1947. She worked as a nurse at UC Hospital for eighteen months, then continued her education at Western Reserve University in Cleveland, earning her master’s degree. She returned to the UC as head nurse and later became the assistant director of nursing.

Irene Pope (back row, center) with her UC classmates. From Medi-Cal yearbook, 1947.

Pope came to San Francisco General Hospital in 1960 as director of nursing. She inherited an institution with constant nursing turnover and little to no high-level coordination of nursing activity. Pope transformed the nursing service into a functional, united group while also focusing on improving working conditions for nurses.

At the time, nurses at SFGH were paid very little compared to other San Francisco city workers and nurses around the country. Nurses had never gone on strike before in the U.S. and were in fact prohibited from striking, so in 1966, the SFGH nurses staged a “sickout.” All staff nurses called in sick while Pope and other head nurses kept the hospital going. The sickout lasted three days and resulted in a 40 percent pay raise for the nursing staff.

When asked about the sickout, Pope gave her full support and said, “we are interested in saving the profession, as well as seeking betterment for ourselves.”

In 1971, Pope left SFGH to serve as president-elect and then president of the California Nurses Association, where she lobbied to pass the Nurses Practice Act, paving the way for nurse practitioners. Pope spent her career working tirelessly for nurses and the nursing profession as a whole, and her efforts have created lasting change at ZSFG and beyond.

Archives Talk 3/3/17: The History of Higher Education in California: A Big Data Approach

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UCSF School of Medicine class of 1964

Date: Friday, March 3rd, 2017
Time: 12 pm – 1:15 pm
Lecturer: Zach Bleemer (UCB)
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/2941746

In his talk at the UCSF Archives & Special Collections, Zach Bleemer will discuss how he has used data science – thousands of computer-processed versions of annual registers, directories, and catalogs –  to reconstruct a near-complete database of all students, faculty, and courses at four-year universities in California in the first half of the 20th century, including UC San Francisco (which taught both undergraduates and graduate students at the time). Visualizations of this database display the expansion of higher education into rural California communities, the rise and fall of various academic departments and disciplines, and the slow (and still-incomplete) transition towards egalitarian major selection.

Zach will also discuss his recent CSHE Working Paper, in which he uses additional digitized records to analyze the social impact of the early 20th century’s expansion of female high school science teachers and female doctors across rural California communities. He finds that newly-arrived female STEM professionals serve as important role models for young women in these rural communities, causing substantial increases in female college-going. However, these young women are no more likely to study STEM fields or become doctors themselves.

Zach Bleemer

Zach Bleemer

Zach Bleemer is a PhD student in Economics and Digital Humanities Fellow at UC Berkeley, where his research examines the educational and occupational decisions of young Americans. He has previously held senior research analyst positions at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and Mathematica Policy Research, and has published working papers on student debt, parental coresidence, and university attendance. He is also currently a Research Associate at UC Berkeley’s Center for Studies in Higher Education and a Visiting Scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco.

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.

In Process: Harold S. Luft papers

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It’s Valentines Day, thus we bring you an update on progress in processing the professional papers of Harold S. Luft. (This one’s a bit abstract.)

Harold S. Luft. Photo: UCSF Philip R. Lee Institute for Health Policy Studies

Photo: UCSF Philip R. Lee Institute for Health Policy Studies

Luft is an esteemed health economist, serving the UCSF Philip R. Lee Health Policy Institute from 1978-2007, including a term as director from 1993-2007. His career encompasses extensive research in the realm of health care “big data”, analyzing health care markets, the functionalities of Health Maintenance Organizations and Preferred Provider Organizations, retail medicine and dentistry, risk pools, the relationships between volume and outcome of specific procedures, and many other subjects. His public service, including serving as a member of the Institute of Medicine, is vast and includes advising the UC System on structuring employee benefits. He has taken a crack at envisioning a national health care system that balances competition and judicious use of services to achieve stability and provide quality care in his book Total Cure. 

Archives & Special Collections received donations of Luft’s papers in 2000 and 2004, and processing is underway for this circa 100 linear foot collection. Look for it under call number MSS 2000-13. The collection includes extensive documentation (computer printouts, correspondence, drafts, project administration) of Luft’s research and data analysis for most of his published output. The material reflects earlier days of big data analysis, when Luft and his colleagues visited computer centers, wrote programs and queries, and carried it all home on long dot-matrix printouts or borrowed/rented open reel tapes for data storage. Often analysis was performed painstakingly by hand, as in the creation of the chart below.

Hospital resource allocation chart

Hospital resource allocation chart

Amongst the piles of journal article manuscripts, data and research angles are a number of analyses of various surgical procedures including – you guessed it – vascular surgeries, i.e. HEART ORIENTED PROCEDURES ♥. Luft used data relating to vascular surgeries and especially Coronary Artery Bypass Graft surgery to analyze a number of health care delivery dynamics. One example is his analysis of the relationship between the volume of CABG surgeries performed in a given hospital and the likelihood of a favorable outcome. This led to the question “does practice make perfect?”

Figures for actual and expected death rates after vascular surgeries

 

New Faces in Archives: Caitlin Toomey

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Caitlin Toomey

Caitlin Toomey

This spring semester, the UCSF Archives & Special Collections is hosting an intern from the University of San Francisco (USF) Museum Studies Masters Program. Born and raised in California, Caitlin Toomey has spent her life working towards her goal of becoming a museum professional.  While in high school, she began her museum career by volunteering at a local art gallery after school and on the weekends. Caitlin’s biggest adventure started when she left home to pursue a Bachelor’s degree in history and anthropology from UCLA. It was at UCLA that Caitlin truly began to explore her passions for history, art, and museum education by interning at both the Hammer Museum and the Fowler Museum in Los Angeles. Caitlin finished up her degree in Southern California and returned back home to Sacramento. Instead of jumping right into graduate school, Caitlin took some time to explore her interests in museum education by becoming a museum assistant at the Wells Fargo History Museum and an intern at the Crocker Art Museum. At these institutions, Caitlin not only worked with the public by giving tours and interacting with visitors, but she also was integral in policy and program development.

Her time at the Wells Fargo Museum and the Crocker gave Caitlin a clear understanding of what she is passionate about and fueled her desire to pursue a graduate degree in museum studies; therefore, Caitlin entered the Masters Degree program at the University of San Francisco for the 2016 school year.  During her first semester, Caitlin co-curated the Thatcher Gallery exhibition “The Depravities of War: Sandow Birk and the Art of Social Critique” as part of the Fall Semester Curatorial Practicum lead by Associate Professor Catherine Lusheck.  Her newest role of intern at the UCSF Archives & Special Collections is an exciting next step and Caitlin is looking forward to the challenge and prospect of gaining new skills and experiences within the museum field.

Caitlin will be working in the archives through May 2017 and will be assisting with research, design, and installation of the upcoming exhibit, “University of California Medical Service in World War I.” She will also help with collection processing, cataloging, digitization, and exhibit curation.

Samuel Kountz, Pioneering Kidney Transplant Surgeon

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In honor of Black History Month, we’re recognizing Dr. Samuel Kountz, pioneering kidney transplant surgeon.

Samuel Kountz, MD (1930-1981) was born in Lexa, Arkansas and attended the Agricultural, Mechanical and Normal College of Arkansas and the University of Arkansas Medical School. He received surgical training at Stanford Medical Center and later became a faculty member at Stanford.

In 1967, Kountz joined the UCSF faculty and became head of the Kidney Transplant Service. During his time at UCSF, Kountz performed numerous kidney transplant surgeries, discovered more effective drug techniques, and advocated for increased organ donations and funding for transplant surgery research. Additionally, Kountz and his colleague, Dr. Folkert Belzer, developed a perfusion preservation machine that allowed organs to remain viable for much longer than previously possible, a major development in the field. Under Kountz’s leadership, the Kidney Transplant Service at UCSF became one of the most respected programs in the world.

Kountz worked to increase diversity on campus through minority student recruitment and advocated for better care regardless of class or race. He was invested in what he called “human aspects” of transplant surgery, including documenting patients’ lives before and after surgery.

In 1972, Kountz left UCSF for an appointment with the State University of New York. On the east coast, Kountz continued his surgical and advocacy work. He passed away in 1981, leaving a legacy that still impacts the field today.

To learn more about Dr. Kountz and his work, check out these articles available in our digital collection on HathiTrust:

Fighting the Plague: A Story of HIV/AIDS

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As we prepare for our upcoming NHPRC grant project, Evolution of San Francisco’s Response to a Public Health Crisis: Providing Access to New AIDS History Collections, we wanted to highlight some of the work researchers have created using our AIDS History Project collections.

Fighting the Plague: A Story of HIV/AIDS

Thomas Packard, PhD, postdoctoral scholar and HIV researcher with Gladstone Institutes, recently visited us and dug into the collections. Read his complete article, “Fighting the Plague: A Story of HIV/AIDS” on his blog.

Bobbi Campbell, Person With AIDS, Activist. Photo Credit: Roger Ressmeyer.

Excerpt from Thomas Packard’s “Fighting the Plague: A Story of HIV/AIDS”:

In the beginning of the twentieth century, a plague was born. A new retrovirus started infecting humans that would later be named Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV), the virus that causes Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS). Though it wasn’t the first retrovirus to infect humans, it became the most feared, deadly, studied, and written about….Though this a story about a plague, which means it’s about fear and death, it’s more about fighting for life, the extraordinary strength of humanity, and crafting new weapons against the virus using research and medicine.

Following a jump from monkeys to humans over a hundred years ago, HIV lurked in Africa near the Congo River. It was unknown to medicine until an outbreak in the gay populations of San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles in 1980. We may never understand the full implications of the unlucky fact that HIV exploded into popular awareness as a disease associated with homosexuality. Entrenched intolerance caused a cross-pollination of stigma: this was a disease of the other.

Naming a disease “Gay Cancer” or “Gay-related immune deficiency (GRID),” as it was called in the early eighties, sounds ridiculous today. Of course, HIV doesn’t care if you’re gay or straight. The cancer component came from associations with KS (Kaposi’s Sarcoma), a type of skin cancer caused by a virus that can attack when your immune system is not functioning. This type of sickness is called an “opportunistic infection”, which means that the germ exploits an opportunity — the crack in immune defense — to infect a person. These opportunistic infections (commonly Pneumocystis pneumonia and KS, but also many others) are the executioners of the HIV/AIDS death sentence. It was the sudden appearance of these diseases among young gay men that were the harbingers of a plague.

Though popular opinion in the early eighties was largely ignorant or unsupportive, a group of heroes in the gay community, healthcare workers, and scientists became our first fighters in the new war. As an HIV researcher today, living in San Francisco and talking with the pioneers that are still alive, I feel very lucky to do my part as a new group of scientists on the front lines of HIV research. The early chapter of HIV history is incredible, and my brief exposure to it has changed my perspective, fundamentally shifted my reasons for research, and given me a deep love for the humans involved…Read the complete article.

Embracing the Future as Stewards of the Past: Historical Medical Collections in the 21st Century

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This is a guest post by Jeffrey S. Reznick, PhD, Chief, History of Medicine Division, National Library of Medicine

It is a privilege to offer this blog post as a follow-up and complement to my October 21, 2016, Archives Talk at UCSF, and to do so as my NLM colleagues and I work with our leadership to craft the NLM’s third century and encourage public feedback on its strategic planning process.

For several years now, the NLM’s History of Medicine Division has been embracing the future as we continue our mission to collect, preserve, make freely available, and curate for diverse audiences the NLM’s treasured historical collections, which span ten centuries. I’ve described this mission as stewardship of the past, and I have argued that it is not mutually exclusive of embracing the future. This is because to be the best steward of history during times of change, it is important to anticipate, explore, and chart the paths toward many possible futures. So what do I mean by embracing the future?

Embracing the future means facing change. It means engaging and grappling with it, because studying history can contribute meaningfully to contextualizing and shaping change.

Embracing the future means supporting open and “citizen-centered” government. It means enabling access to all, not just a few. It means engaging new audiences, not only the traditional ones. It involves engagement across the disciplines, and across the spectrum of the public, to ensure that scholars, educators, and interested people of today and tomorrow can have access to the world’s historical medical heritage for research, teaching, and learning.

NLM’s treasured historical collections span ten centuries and originate from nearly every part of the world. Our digitization of these materials, for greater access by researchers of all disciplines, goes hand in hand with our preservation of them, in their original form, for future generations of researchers.

Embracing the future means embracing fair use and supporting robust digitization as a means of both access and preservation, and achieving these goals through mutually-supportive public and private partnerships. Moreover, embracing the future means appreciating and understanding that digitized historical medical collections exist in a format appealing not only to those focused on deep reading and close study of individual works, but also to scholars and to entirely new audiences who are interested in mining these digital surrogates and their associated metadata data for more data-focused research. The evolving digital world is producing an ever-increasing volume of digitized physical material and born-digital resources. The worlds of “big data” and data science are meeting a longstanding world of persistent physical objects that contain records of the human condition. As these worlds collide and coexist, opportunities abound to advance interdisciplinary collaboration and expand cooperation among institutions and organizations that preserve history and support current and future medical research, and research in all disciplines.

A Chorus of Voices. Through its blog Circulating Now, the NLM is giving voice our patrons from a variety of disciplines and backgrounds, whoeach in their own way and together recognize the research and educational value of our world-renowned historical collections.

Embracing the future means pursuing exhibitions and otherwise giving voice to theresearch and educational value of our historical collections as they speak to important contemporary and historical topics like confronting domestic violence, understanding AIDS, politics, and culture, exploring 20th-century healthcare professionalization, and revealing how meals offer insights into the relationships between and among individuals.

And finally, from a leadership perspective, embracing the future means meeting individuals where they stand, treating them as colleagues and as part of a team. It means supporting mentorship to advance careers, and continuous learning to advance interdisciplinary research and teaching focused on historical and contemporary issues of health and the human condition. These initiatives are not only keys to embracing the future of challenges and opportunities. They are keys to succeeding in that future.

To learn more about my thoughts about embracing the future as stewards of the past, you can read this article or, if you wish, watch my October 21, 2016, Archives Talk at UCSF.

NHPRC awarded a grant to UCSF Archives and Special Collections

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NHPRC logo

UCSF Archives and Special Collections (A&SC) is pleased to announce it has been awarded a 2016 National Historical Publications & Records Commission (NHPRC) grant from the National Archives in support of the project, Evolution of San Francisco’s Response to a Public Health Crisis: Providing Access to New AIDS History Collections, an expansion of the AIDS History Project (AHP).

The project will greatly expand the historical record of San Francisco’s broad-based response to the AIDS public health crisis, and make discoverable and accessible by a wide audience a new corpus of materials related to the evolution of that response. These collections reveal breakthroughs in containing the AIDS epidemic and treating AIDS patients that were made possible by the collaborative efforts of educators, researchers, clinicians, and community advocates. The collections included in this grant are interconnected and form a unique body of research materials.

Dr. Selma Dritz, ca. 1982. MSS 2001-04.

The $86,258 award will aid in creating and making accessible detailed finding aids for seven recently acquired collections comprising a total of 373 linear feet. These collections range from the research files of science writer Laurie Garrett and the papers of Drs. Don Francis and John Greenspan of UCSF and Selma Dritz of San Francisco’s Department of Public Health, to the records of two UCSF entities, the Center for AIDS Prevention Studies and the AIDS Health Project, and files from the early and pioneering publication AIDS Treatment News, produced by community activist John James. Diverse audiences will benefit from having access to the archival collections comprising this new project. They include scholars and students in disciplines such as history, literature, medicine, jurisprudence, journalism, and sociology,and members of the general public pursuing individual areas of interest, especially younger members of the GLBT community who seek a better understanding of this important period in history.

A small portion of the collections will be digitized and made accessible online. This 18-month project will commence on March 1, 2017.

A&SC would like to thank the National Historical Publications & Records Commission, the UCSF AIDS Research Institute, the California Historical Records Advisory Board, and other supporters for their help with this proposal.

About UCSF Archives & Special Collections
The mission of the UCSF Archives & Special Collections is to identify, collect, organize, interpret, and maintain rare and unique material to support research and teaching of the health sciences and medical humanities and to preserve institutional memory.

Please contact Polina Ilieva, Head of UCSF Archives & Special Collections with questions about this award.

Download a copy of the press release ArchivesJan2017_NHPRC_grant.

UCSF First Digital Archivist

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UCSF Digital Archivist Charlie Macquarie

In the increasingly digital world when the majority of scholarly output comes in a digital format or is being digitized for ease of access, the UCSF Archives & Special Collection has been working the past 20 years on digitizing its holdings and building digital collections. However, now that the number of born-digital materials produced by UCSF faculty and researchers as well as outside donors is growing exponentially, there is a need to establish a Digital Archives Program within our department.

I’m happy to introduce our first recently hired Digital Archivist, Charlie Macquarie who will lead this program.

Charlie is an archivist, artist, and experimental librarian. Born in the Bay Area, he grew up in Carson City, NV and considers himself a Nevadan at heart. Charlie received his undergraduate degree in English from Lewis & Clark College in Portland, OR, and his graduate degree in Information and Library Science from Pratt Institute in New York, NY. Employed most recently as a digital archivist at UC Berkeley’s Bancroft Library, Charlie has worked as a library and information professional at a variety of institutions, including Columbia University, the New York City Transit Authority, and the little old Carson High School library.

Charlie is also interested in using libraries and the opportunities of digital information creatively as a lens to examine possible expansions of the commons within the public consciousness, and to remind people of the power of shared ownership in an increasingly privatized world. As part of this, he has a creative practice that takes the form of the Library of Approximate Location — an ongoing itinerant project engaging with the confounding nature of environmental materiality and its disparate networks and landscapes in the Western United States through the installation of small scale, site-specific libraries. He is also a library research fellow and librarian in residence at the Prelinger Library.
He loves trains, bicycles, and heavy metal music.