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.

Remembering Thomas N. Burbridge, Superhero of Science and Medicine

Posted on October 19, 2016 by Kelsi Evans

The Society of American Archivists’ Science, Technology and Health Care roundtable recently launched a project titled Forgotten Superheroes of Science and Medicine to highlight “underrepresented and diverse persons and groups in collections of the history of science, technology and health care.” We’ll be contributing to this project by periodically posting to the blog regarding these heroes.

Thomas N. Burbridge, MD, PhD (1921-1972), was an African-American scientist, physician, and civil rights activist. He devoted his life to social justice and his work continues to impact UCSF and the larger San Francisco community.

Thomas N. Burbridge. Photograph collection, portraits.

Burbridge was born in New Orleans, Louisiana in 1921. He attended Talladega College and later joined the US Navy. After years of military service, he enrolled in the UCSF School of Medicine, earning his MD in 1948. He completed his residency at San Francisco General Hospital and then enrolled in a graduate program in the UCSF Department of Pharmacology.

While in graduate school, Burbridge helped lead UC’s efforts to support development of medical education at the University of Indonesia, following the Indonesian fight for independence. Burbridge worked with local students and officials in Jakarta from 1952-1955.

Thomas N. Burbridge with his wife and medical students at the University of Indonesia, circa 1952-1955. Photograph published in the Alumni-Faculty Association Bulletin of the UCSF School of Medicine, Winter 1956. University Publications.

Thomas N. Burbridge with his wife and medical students at the University of Indonesia, 1952-1955. Photograph published in the Alumni-Faculty Association Bulletin of the UCSF School of Medicine, Winter 1956. University Publications.

After returning to the US, Burbridge joined the faculty of the UCSF School of Medicine in 1956, where he conducted research related to the pharmacology of alcohol and the metabolism of marijuana. As a teacher and scientist, Burbridge advocated for increased minority student enrollment at UCSF. In the 1960s, he led recruiting trips to predominantly black universities in the southern United States, speaking with students about opportunities in the health sciences. He also served as a leader of the San Francisco chapter of the NAACP and organized sit-ins of auto dealerships and other businesses in protest of their discriminatory employment practices. This non-violent, direct action strategy brought about equal employment opportunities for people of color in San Francisco.

Memorial of Dr. Thomas Burbridge. Published on the back cover of the October 1972 edition of the Black Bulletin, a newsletter created by UCSF’s Black Caucus. Black Caucus records, MSS 85-38.

Following Burbridge’s death in 1972, the UCSF Black Caucus petitioned Chancellor Philip Lee to name a Chancellor’s Award in his honor. Today, Burbridge’s legacy continues to inspire the UCSF community through the Thomas N. Burbridge Chancellor’s Award for Public Service.

UCSF Archives & Special Collections houses the Thomas Nathaniel Burbridge Papers, 1959-1972 and other related collections. Please make an appointment if you would like to research the material.

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.

New items to be digitized from the Eric L. Berne papers

Posted on September 28, 2016 by David Krah

Thanks to fundraising and donations from the International Transactional Analysis Association, we are embarking on another round of digitization of papers from the Eric L. Berne collections.

The papers selected for digitization in this round will range from early fiction writings to publisher correspondence, photographs, writings foundational to TA theory, materials documenting ITAA history and other items that continue to round out our understanding of Berne’s life, personality, intellectual process, and legacy.

Eric Berne with Fritz Perls

You can expect to find these items online on Calisphere, alongside previously digitized items under their respective collection numbers. As always, guides to the collections are available on the Online Archive of California.

Forgotten Super Heroes of Science and Medicine: Choh Hao Li

Posted on September 15, 2016 by duhlich

The Society of American Archivists’ Science, Technology and Health Care roundtable recently launched a project to highlight “underrepresented and diverse persons and groups in collections of the history of science, technology and health care.” The section is calling this endeavor the “Forgotten Super Heroes of Science and Medicine.” UCSF Archives & Special Collections will be contributing to this project by periodically posting to the blog regarding these heroes. This is our first installment.

portrait_li3

Biochemist Choh Hao Li was among the first to synthesize the human growth hormone and later discovered beta-endorphin. Born in 1913 in Guangzhou, China, Li graduated from the University of Nanjing before moving to the US to attend graduate school at UC Berkeley in 1935. Upon earning his Ph. D. in Organic Chemistry in 1938, Li began working on the UC Berkeley campus at the Institute of Experimental Biology with Herbert McLean Evans. In 1950, Li became the first director of the newly created Hormone Research Laboratory. He moved with the laboratory to UCSF in 1967, where Li worked until his retirement in 1983. As an emeritus professor at UCSF, Li then established the Laboratory of Molecular Endocrinology, where he remained director until his death in 1987.

c-h-li

Dr. Li spent most of his career studying the functions of the pituitary gland, which is located at the base of the brain and controls many of the body’s functions. At the Institute of Experimental Biology, Li first began his attempts to isolate and identify the anterior pituitary hormones; he was eventually able to isolate and purify six of the eight known hormones secreted. It wasn’t until the early 1970s, when heading the Hormone Research Laboratory, that Li was able to actually synthesize human growth hormone. Later that decade, Li discovered beta-endorphin, a neuropeptide that acts as a pain killer. Before his retirement, Li was also able to synthesize insulin-like growth factor 1, a protein that mediates the effects of growth hormone. During his lifetime, Li published over 1100 scientific articles, was given many awards, including the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research, and was nominated at least twice for the Nobel Prize.

The Choh Hao Li papers are open for research at UCSF Archives & Special Collections: http://www.oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/tf738nb543/

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.

Ortho-Fusor for Modern Visual Training

Posted on August 29, 2016 by Kelsi Evans

We’ve been cataloging additions to our Historical Medical Artifact Collection recently. It’s always fun diving into the over 1,000 objects in the collection. This treasure is the Ortho-Fusor, a Bausch & Lomb product for “Modern Visual Training.”

Ortho-Fusor, 1941. Artifact Collection, item 1157.

The Ortho-Fusor, dated 1941, includes Polaroid 3D glasses, a reference manual, and a spiral-bound booklet with vectograph images and exercises. A vectograph is a type of stereoscopic image composed of two superimposed, polarized pictures that produce a 3D effect when viewed through polarizing spectacles. Think of it like going to a 3D movie, except you are viewing stills.

Ortho-Fusor booklet, 1941. Artifact Collection, item 1157.

Ortho-Fusor booklet, 1941. Artifact Collection, item 1157.

The Ortho-Fusor exercises, which involve refocusing your eyes on various points in the image, were designed for “re-educating and training visual skills” for the “modern need.” As noted in the reference manual, “the world of modern occupations has drawn many more thousands of us into factories, offices, libraries, schools, shops, and laboratories. Here for hours at a time we perform sustained and precise tasks with our eyes, frequently at very close distances…The precise teamwork of the eyes is a matter of coordination and habit.” The reference manual encourages 30 minutes of use a day, in five to ten minute intervals.

Ortho-Fusor Reference Manual, 1941. Artifact Collection, item 1157.

Ophthalmologists and optometrists, let us know what you think of these visual exercises and the Ortho-Fusor’s medical claims!

Digitized State Medical Journals: Searching “Alcohol” and “Prohibition”

Posted on August 17, 2016 by Kelsi Evans

This is a guest post by Sophia Lahey, UCSF Archives and Special Collections Intern.

Recently, as part of a larger UCSF Archives and Special Collections digitization project, over 200 medical journals from various state medical associations were digitized and added to the Internet Archive. In order to ensure scan quality, I sifted through thousands of pages to make sure everything was clear enough so that the search function would work properly. As long as the scans are clean, you can search for any word in the entire collection! For instance, I searched the words “alcohol” and “prohibition” and came up with some fascinating results.

The first items that struck me when I started to read through the journals were the ads. In addition to the articles, the ads serve as evidence for historians about how people lived, what was socially acceptable, and what they were interested in buying. In these journals, most of the ads were geared towards doctors, advertising things like medicine, medical instruments, insurance, and even computer management systems.

Connecticut State Medical Journal, March 1952, page 226.

This ad for Dentocain Teething Lotion is from the 1950s. The infant teething medication advertised is 70% alcohol and includes chloroform! By modern medical standards, this product would definitely raise some red flags. As I kept looking through more journals, I noticed that the older ones featured alcohol in many of the medicines advertised.

Colorado Medicine, 1927.

In this ad, though the ingredients aren’t listed, you can see on the bottle that the medicine contains 7 1/2% alcohol. The ad was published in 1927, during prohibition. So how could medicine contain alcohol when it was illegal? Well, alcohol could still be prescribed by a doctor. Like other medications, a doctor had to fill out a prescription in order for a patient to get items, like whiskey, for medicinal reasons.

Prescription form for one pint of medicinal whiskey, March 17, 1930. Robert Day Collection, MSS 2011-23.

Some doctors wrote prescriptions for liquor off record and for a profit. This created a controversy – government legislation vs. the rights of the practitioner to prescribe as much as he or she felt was needed. This lead to court cases as well as strongly worded opinion pieces about said court cases and ethics in the medical community. These opinion pieces as well as other news stories can be read in the medical journals in the UCSF collection.

Brought to Light

Stories from UCSF Archives & Special Collections