Accessions & Additions – Summer Edition

We’re always busy accepting new collections and pushing through our backlog to make as many collections available for research as possible. This list of new records includes materials relating to tobacco control, UCSF, infectious disease, pediatrics, nursing education, HIV/AIDS Toland Hall murals, book collecting, medical education, and more. Click on the titles below to learn more the contents, subjects, and size of these collections.

Contact us if you have any questions or would like to learn more. And please don’t hesitate to make an appointment to come in and use the collections!

Our catalog updates over the past six months:

The following collections have inventories or finding aids on the Online Archive of California:

New Exhibit: The Radiologic Imaging Laboratory Archive

Visionary Bioengineering: The Radiologic Imaging Laboratory Archive                       UCSF Library, 530 Parnassus Avenue, 3rd floor, San Francisco, CA                             Now through May 2016                                                                                                   Free and open to the public during library hours

Image of MRI scan prepared for scientific publications and sales meetings, circa 1985, RIL records, MSS 2002-08

Image of MRI scan prepared for scientific publications and sales meetings, circa 1985, RIL records, MSS 2002-08

Come visit the UCSF Library and view our “sneak peek” exhibit on the history of the Radiologic Imaging Laboratory (RIL). The RIL was founded in the late 1970s by a team of UCSF scientists and engineers. The team’s 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 developed innovative MRI technology that transformed the way doctors diagnose and treat patients worldwide.

RIL graduate student researcher Tim Mills with imaging machine, 1986, Photograph collection

RIL graduate student researcher Tim Mills with imaging machine, 1986, Photograph collection

View images and original documents from the RIL records and learn how the lab combined entrepreneurship and biotechnology research. Join us again in the coming year for the full exhibit where we’ll further explore the RIL’s growth and technological discoveries.

Researchers and technicians Lawrence Crooks, Bob McCree, Ian Duff, and Roger Littlewood, circa 1981, Photograph collection

Researchers and technicians Lawrence Crooks, Bob McCree, Ian Duff, and Roger Littlewood in laboratory, circa 1981, Photograph collection

We’re excited to share this archive with the public. To learn more about using the RIL records (MSS 2002-08) for research, contact the UCSF Archives and Special Collections.

May Video Capsule at Bay Area Video Coalition

This is the second year we’ll be participating in this event to celebrate local audiovisual treasures. The breadth of last year’s showing was immense– so many facets of Bay Area history were represented. This year we’re contributing a couple of clips from the UCSF School of Pharmacy of the 1960s.

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Join Bay Area Video Coalition (BAVC) Preservation program staff for an evening of audiovisual preservation revelry. Anchored by recent selections from BAVC’s Preservation Access Program* (PAP), tonight’s program includes archivist favorites, unexpected gems, and rarely seen treats from artist-and arts organization-participants in PAP, as well as from other Bay Area preservation organizations— including Stanford Media Preservation Lab, Internet Archive, Oddball Films, UCSF Archives, the GLBT Historical Society and California Audiovisual Preservation Project. We look forward to sharing recent and prized preservation work for what is sure to be a congenial celebration of archival craft and our media legacy.

When: May 14, 2015 | 7PM |

Where: BAVC | 2727 Mariposa St., 2nd Flr. San Francisco, CA 94110

Admission: $10 suggested donation. Let us know you’re coming. RSVP here!

We hope to see you there! And if you’d like to see what we screened last year, click over to the Internet Archive to see UCSF’s moving memento films from the 1930s.

Professor of Prosthodontia photographs, early 1900s

William Fuller Sharp, DMD, DDS, was the first alumni of the Dental Department of the Affiliated Colleges of the University of California (later UCSF School of Dentistry) to be placed on the faculty– where he remained for over fifty years. Sharp joined the school as an instructor in 1894, later becoming Professor of Mechanical Dentistry in 1899, Professor of Prosthetic Dentistry, Professor of Clinical Prosthodontia, and Professor of Prosthodontia, Emeritus in 1921. Sharp served as Acting Dean from 1926-1927 while Guy S. Millberry was on leave.

WF Sharp, Photograph Collection

WF Sharp, Photograph collection, undated

Above, Sharp with dental prostheses, undated.

WF Sharp, Photograph collection, 1906

WF Sharp’s office, operating room, April 18, 1906.

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WF Sharp, Photograph collection, 1906

Sharp in his office, April 18, 1906.

Happy National Library Week!

In observance of this lovely celebratory week, we bring you a few images of UCSF Library staff and librarians in their natural habitat from the 1950s.

 

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Photograph collection, Medical Sciences Building – The Library

Above, the entrance way to the old UCSF Library, in the Medical Sciences building, in 1959. Check out our previous post that expands a bit on the history of that library.

 

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Photograph collection, Medical Sciences Building – The Library

Tidying the current periodicals section in the 1950s.

 

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Photograph collection, Medical Sciences Building – The Library

Librarians of the Catalog Department (note card catalogs in the background) in the fall of 1958.

 

Viewing Zakheim Murals at UCSF

As part of UCSF’s 150th anniversary celebration, the university has arranged special public viewing hours for the Zakheim murals through the spring:

Friday, March 13th:  4 – 7 p.m.
Friday, April 17th:  3 – 5 p.m.
Friday, May 22nd:  3 – 5 p.m.

Location:
Toland Hall on the UCSF Campus
533 Parnassus Ave., Room U-142
San Francisco, CA
Map of UCSF Parnassus Campus and Directions (printable PDF)

Recent article in San Francisco Chronicle highlights history of the Zakheim murals at UCSF.

Do you have questions or need additional information about public viewing?
Please contact UCSF Public Affairs: 415-476-2557

Archival Outlook

Have you seen the November/December 2014 issue of Archival Outlook?

Archival Outlook, November/December 2014

Archival Outlook, November/December 2014

The cover photo comes from our Photograph Collection! Remember when we told you about our new Twitter account, @ucsf_archives, and how we’d be participating in #AskAnArchivist Day last October? Well, the photo on the cover is one that we tweeted out in response to a question about our favorite collection items and it caught the eye of the folks over at the Society of American Archivists.

Posing with cadavers was commonplace in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Dissecting medical school cadavers was an intimate rite of passage for students. Such photographs weren’t viewed as inappropriate or offensive, as they most certainly would be today, but more as a kind of memorial to the experience. For more information on the ritual, check out Dissection: Photographs of a Rite of Passage in American Medicine 1880-1930.

Notice the writing on the blackboard says “University of California Medical Center, Jan-7-96.” It was taken at the Toland Medical Building on Stockton Street in San Francisco, pictured below, in 1896.

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Toland Medical Building, 1882-1885

 

The first-ever #AsAnArchivist Day was a great success, garnering over 2,000 participants who contributed more than 6,000 tweets. We had a lot of fun participating with curious patrons and other institutions. Follow us on twitter if you aren’t already and feel free to ask a question anytime!

Archival Outlook is published six times a year by the Society of American Archivists (SAA) which serves the education and information needs of its members and provides leadership to help ensure the identification, preservation, and use of the nation’s historical record.

Lecture now online: Karl F. Meyer: California’s Forgotten Microbe Hunter

The lecture Karl F. Meyer: California’s Forgotten Microbe Hunter given by Mark Honigsbaum, PhD at UCSF last month, on December 5th, is now available free online via the Internet Archive.

[iframe src=”https://archive.org/embed/CaliforniasForgottenMicrobeHunter” width=”640″ height=”480″ frameborder=”0″ webkitallowfullscreen=”true” mozallowfullscreen=”true” allowfullscreen]

 

In the 1930s California’s rapid population growth and the incursion of agricultural settlers into valleys and deserts teeming with exotic pathogens resulted in outbreaks of “new” infectious diseases. To divine the cause of these outbreaks and trace the epidemics to their source, health officials turned to San Francisco’s premier “microbe hunter,” Karl Friedrich Meyer.

Drawing on Meyer’s papers at the UCSF and Bancroft libraries, this talk reviews Meyer’s feats of microbial detection and his pioneering investigations of disease ecology. Dr. Honigsbaum views Meyer as an important bridge figure in mid-20th century medical research who sought to link microbial behavior to broader environmental and social factors that impact host-pathogen interactions and the mechanisms of disease control.

 

About the UCSF Archives & Special Collections Lecture Series: This lecture series was launched 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.

Find out more about upcoming lectures, past presentations, and links to more lecture videos here! And please, join us for the next one– coming soon in 2015!

UCSF Clock Tower

Millberry Union Clock Tower as it looks today.

Millberry Union Clock Tower, 2014

Have you ever noticed the large transparent clock on the exterior of Millberry Union? It looks like this:

I walk past it often without giving it a second thought, but the clock tower has quite an interesting history.

Often referred to now as the “Founders’ Clock,” it is also known as the “Toland Clock Tower” and “Seth Thomas Clock.” You may also have seen photographs of the Old Medical School building from time to time, with a large clock atop the center of the building– the same clock as Millberry’s clock.

One of our rotating banner images here on Brought to Light depicts the old Medical Building, including the Seth Thomas Clock, through the lens of well-known photographer Ansel Adams. It’s a slice of this photograph:

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Ansel Adams, Clock Tower of old Affiliated Colleges building, with new structures in fog, August 1964

The above building was the College of Medicine, and the first building to have been erected on the Parnassus campus in 1897. Seth Thomas was a well-known clockmaker in Connecticut in the early and mid 19th century. The clock was brought to San Francisco via ship that traveled around Cape Horn, South America to be a crown jewel in the Affiliated Colleges campus. The image, taken in 1964, shows the old College of Medicine building surrounded by the more modern campus buildings of today in the background and on the left. When the old College of Medicine building was torn down in 1967, a group of “friends of the clock”, led by Alison Saunders, MD and assisted by Meyer Schindler, MD ’38, formed to ensure it’s safekeeping until it could be moved to a new location on campus. “We have salvaged the granite pillars and blocks as well as the clock from the old building that was a landmark on Parnassus Heights . . . ,” Dr. Alison Saunders declared in 1969 as chair of the UCSF Campus Court Development Commission.

The process to find the famous clock a new home took 14 years. Finally, in 1982 the inner-workings of the clock were reinstalled on Millberry Union, 500 Parnassus Ave, where it lives today.

Founders Clock, Millberry Union, circa 1982

Founders Clock, Millberry Union, circa 1982

Next time you’re walking around the Parnassus campus, take a closer look at the historic clock. It is a work of art worthy of our attention.

The inscription reads: “Carried by ship around Cape Horn, this Seth Thomas Clock was installed on the Medical School of the Affiliated Colleges in 1897. Surviving the 1906 earthquake, it served the University and community for 70 years. Members of the UCSF family have made possible its restoration as a campus landmark.”

Check out this article that details the historical inspiration for a new clock, “Saunder’s Clock,” in the Mission Hall courtyard of the UCSF Mission Bay campus.

Lecture now online: Shimkin’s “Lost Colony” (1947-1953)

The lecture Shimkin’s “Lost Colony” (1947-1953): Early Interdisciplinary Cancer Research at UCSF presented by Michael Thaler, MD, MA last month on October 13th is now available online free via the Internet Archive.

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(It seems that Polina’s microphone wasn’t turned on; just be patient, the sound is fine for Dr. Thaler’s presentation.)

The Laboratory of Experimental Oncology (LEO) was the brain child of Michael B. Shimkin, a career U.S. Public Health Service physician and cancer research at the National Cancer Institute. LEO was established in 1947 at Laguna Honda Hospital at Laguna Honda Hospital, jointly administered by the NCI and UCSF. Speaker Michael Thaler, MD, MA explains how Shimkin created one of the first combined interdisciplinary clinical and basic science research units embedded in a medical school. In this setting, Shimkin introduced the patient release form and was instrumental in the establishment of universal guidelines for the ethical conduct of experiments with human subjects.

Dr. Thaler spoke as part of our ongoing UCSF Archives & Special Collections Lecture Series which serves to introduce a wider community to our holdings, provide an opportunity for researchers to discuss how they use this material, and celebrate clinicians, scientists, and health care professionals who have donated their papers to the archives.

Next, we will welcome Mark Honigsbaum, PhD to discuss Karl F. Meyer: California’s Forgotten Microbe Hunter on Friday, December 5th at noon in the Library’s Lange Room. Please join us!