Exhibit Opening: HIV: A Plague of Violence Against Women

Exhibit Reception: October 4th, 2017, 12 pm to 2 pm

Opening Remarks at 12 pm by Drs. Arthur J. Ammann and Paul Volberding, Larkin Callaghan, PhD

Location: UCSF Parnassus Library, 530 Parnassus Avenue, San Francisco, 1st Floor Lobby (take the elevator or the stairs to the ground floor), UCSF Shuttles & ParkingPublic Transportation

This event is free and open to the public. Light refreshments will be provided.
REGISTRATION REQUIRED: http://calendars.library.ucsf.edu/event/3527701

This exhibit will be on view at the UCSF Library from October 4th, 2017 through March 30th, 2018.

Dr. Ammann. No One Is Listening.
Montage: Jiří Cernicky, Schizophrenia. (1998)
Edvard Munch, Maiden and Death. (1894).
Edvard Munch, The Scream. (1893)
Edvard Munch, The Sun. (1912)
Out of the Void, Pacific Ocean
Liquidambar styraciflua (seed pods)

Join UCSF Archives & Special Collections for the exhibit opening and reception of “HIV: A Plague of Violence Against Women”. This exhibit features a collection of photo montages by Arthur J. Ammann, M.D., a pediatric immunologist and advocate known for his research on HIV transmission and his role in the development of the first successful vaccine to prevent pneumococcal infection in 1977.  Dr. Ammann is also the founder of Global Strategies (http://www.globalstrategies.org/) , a nonprofit organization that serves women and children in the most neglected areas of the world where he witnessed not one but two epidemics affecting women —sexual and physical violence and HIV.

Through his surrealist lens, Dr. Ammann’s photo montages document the suffering he witnessed during his time working with HIV infected women in Africa. The world of art has been a refuge for Dr. Ammann since his childhood. The creations of great artists spoke to him about the unrelenting violence against women, the struggle between good and evil, and the valley of the shadow of death. Paintings by Blake, Bosch, Giotto, Kahlo, Munch, Caravaggio, Titian, Dali, Freud, Nerdrum, and Picasso, resonated with what he felt from his experiences.

For over a decade he put the images together, took them apart, and put them together again. The title of each photo montage is accompanied by a quote or words, many derived from the stories women told. These images are a collective demand that “Violence against women must be stopped.”

Dr. Ammann with collagues

The exhibit is also a call to action for Dr. Ammann: “We must never accept violence and injustice nor ignore its enduring wounds. We can create new voices and images for advocacy. We can move to repair the physical, emotional, and spiritual scars that remain. We can provide inexpensive and easy to use medicines to prevent the complications of rape―HIV, other sexually transmitted infections, and unwanted pregnancy.”

We invite you to explore this visually arresting exhibit in support of Dr. Ammann’s efforts to end violence against women.

 

NEH awards leading San Francisco institutions $315,000 to digitize AIDS archives

 

The Archives and Special Collections department of the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) Library, in collaboration with the San Francisco Public Library (SFPL) and the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender (GLBT) Historical Society, has been awarded a $315,000 implementation grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The collaborating institutions will digitize about 127,000 pages from 49 archival collections related to the early days of the AIDS epidemic in the San Francisco Bay Area and make them widely accessible to the public online. In the process, collections whose components had been placed in different archives for various reasons will be digitally reunited, facilitating access for researchers outside the Bay Area.

The 24-month project, “The San Francisco Bay Area’s Response to the AIDS Epidemic:  Digitizing, Reuniting, and Providing Universal Access to Historical AIDS Records” will commence on July 1, 2017. The 127,000 pages from the three archives range from handwritten correspondence and notebooks to typed reports and agency records to printed magazines. Also included are photographic prints, negatives, transparencies, and posters. The materials will be digitized by the University of California, Merced Library’s Digital Assets Unit, which has established a reputation for digitizing information resources so that they can be made available to the world via the web. All items selected for digitization will be carefully examined to address any privacy concerns. The digital files generated by this project will be disseminated broadly through the California Digital Library, with the objects freely accessible to the public through both Calisphere, operated by the University of California, and the Digital Public Library of America, which will have an AIDS history primary sources set.

“A digital repository of 127,000 pages from 49 collections from these three institutions not only allows the collections to ‘speak’ to one another in novel ways, but makes them accessible to a broad array of audiences.  Within academia, historians of medicine and public health will be joined by sociologists and historians of gender, sexuality, and journalism, for starters.  They will be eager to make such remarkable primary source materials available to undergraduate, graduate, and medical students alike.  But such materials have a far wider potential audience,” said Scott H. Podolsky, M.D., Professor of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Director of the Center for the History of Medicine at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine.

Haipeng Li, University Librarian, University of California, Merced Library stated that “the UC Merced Library is very pleased to be partnering on this project, which builds upon our long-standing collaboration with UCSF Library to digitize rare and unique materials in the health sciences. Our students and researchers, especially those involved in UC Merced’s growing public health program, will benefit from wider access to the AIDS history materials and I am sure the experience and expertise of our staff will enable them to contribute significantly to the success of the project.”

The AIDS epidemic became one of the most significant public-health events of the late-twentieth century, continuing into the twenty-first. San Francisco was particularly hard hit by AIDS, in part because, by the early 1980s, it had become a welcoming place for gay men who moved from throughout the country and around the world to experience a flourishing community. This same diaspora also fueled, early on in the crisis, the development of unique community-based organizations (CBOs) to care for the sick and dying. At the same time, the AIDS crisis engendered unprecedented modes of political activism. Desperate people with HIV/AIDS and their allies hoping for a cure, held protests and sit-ins at medical conferences and became respected colleagues in the search for effective treatments while demanding early access to therapies, shaking up the staid world of medical research. Art and literature, too, most notably the AIDS Quilt, were created out of the grief and loss caused by the epidemic.  Beginning in the mid-1980s, San Francisco witnessed the development of a highly effective collaborative network of city and state agencies, hospitals, health care providers, and CBOs that, through a goal of putting patients first, became known as the “San Francisco model” of compassionate AIDS care.

“The early years of the AIDS epidemic are just over the historical horizon for many who will themselves be forced to wrestle with issues of disease stigmatization and the blurred domains between medicine and society.  These are our future patients, clinicians, politicians, and policymakers alike.  It is thus important that such collections – documenting a central, if difficult, part of our nation’s history – be exposed to as wide a public as possible,” said Podolsky.

In the late 1980s, UCSF initiated, with the GLBT Historical Society and other Bay Area archives, the AIDS History Project, addressing the need to forge relationships between historians and the AIDS community to document and preserve the lessons and experience of the AIDS epidemic. Today UCSF, the GLBT Historical Society, and SFPL archivists have selected collections from each archive that will contribute to an understanding of the medical, social, and political processes that merged to develop effective means of treating those with AIDS, educate the public about HIV, create social support organizations for those who were often shunned by family, and advocate for a community that was dying at an alarming rate.

Terry Beswick, Executive Director of the GLBT Historical Society explained, “We were founded in 1985 in San Francisco, at a time when it was becoming increasingly apparent that AIDS was threatening the historical memory of the LGBTQ community. In fact, we lost many of our founders and supporters to AIDS – and many are living with HIV today. That’s why this project is especially important to us. AIDS and, more importantly, the San Francisco Bay Area’s response to the epidemic, have been both the catalyst for our formation and one of our main historical influences.”

“The San Francisco Public Library houses both the City and County of San Francisco city archives and the James C. Hormel Gay and Lesbian Center, the first research center for GLBT collections in a public library in the country. In its role as the repository of the city archives, the library receives collections from politicians, including mayors, as well as from city departments, many addressing policy decisions and the creation of the “San Francisco model” in response to the devastation of the AIDS epidemic,” said Luis Herrera, San Francisco City Librarian. “Not only will the proposed collaborative project allow greater access to primary source materials that are located only in San Francisco, but it will ensure that these items are digitally preserved for long lasting use. We also welcome the opportunity to “reunite” collections that were given to multiple institutions in separate donations over time or from different donors.”

“Rarely in the history of human societies has there been an opportunity to capture information in real time about a new disease that became a pandemic. The story is multi-focal: the medical response, the cultural response, the political response, and the caregiving response”, said Victoria A. Harden, Founding Director Emerita, Office of NIH History.

Providing online access to the digital archival collections will benefit a diverse group of users, including scholars in disciplines such as history, literature, medicine, jurisprudence, journalism, and sociology; college and university students in an equally broad range of fields; media outlets; and members of the general public.

“It is wonderful to think that a future researcher could, at the click of a button, shift quickly from Shilts’s book to his handwritten interview notes, to Selma Dritz’s slides about venereal disease, to the diary pages of Daniel Turner or Bobbi Campbell, or to the administrative records of the institutions involved – records which are currently geographically distant, despite having been tightly connected thematically in the past,” said Richard A. McKay, D.Phil., a Wellcome Trust Research Fellow in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge.

The project team has established a five-member Advisory Board that will be available to consult with project team members as needed to asses and resolve issues related to sensitive materials in the collections. Members include:

  • Barbara A. Koenig, PhD, RN, Professor of Medical Anthropology & Bioethics in the Department of Social & Behavioral Sciences, Institute for Health & Aging and Head of UCSF Bioethics Program
  • Phoebe Evans Letocha, Collections Management Archivist at Alan Mason Chesney Medical Archives, Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions
  • Jeffrey Reznick, PhD, chief, History of Medicine division at National Library of Medicine
  • Paul Volberding, Professor of Medicine, UCSF; Director, AIDS Research Institute; Director, Global Health Sciences Research; Co-Director, UCSF-GIVI Center for AIDS Research
  • Elizabeth Watkins, PhD, UCSF Dean of the Graduate Division, Vice Chancellor – Student Academic Affairs, and Professor in the Department of Anthropology, History, and Social Medicine

“UCSF and affiliated faculty and staff including those at Zuckerberg San Francisco General, played a leading role in responding to the horrendous HIV epidemic. The experiences of that response and the lessons learned that can help guide future challenges demand we collect and preserve documents from those early days.” said Paul Volberding, Director, AIDS Research Institute; Director, Global Health Sciences Research; Co-Director, UCSF-GIVI Center for AIDS Research. “We are thrilled that the UCSF Archives along with our partners at the SF Public Library and the GLBT Historical Society has received grant funding to support this process. We are certain that this archive will be a powerful research tool for historians as they help us better understand our contributions. The UCSF AIDS Research Institute is eager to do all we can to help this vital resource.”

At the conclusion of the project, public access to the materials will be launched in a variety of ways. The availability on Calisphere and Digital Public Library of America will be promoted online, and the content of the collection will be explored through exhibits and public programs at each of the collaborating institutions, including at UC Merced. Finally, to commemorate the thirtieth anniversary of the 1989 “AIDS and the Historian” conference, a national conference on the history of the response to the AIDS epidemic will be presented in San Francisco.

“NEH provides support for projects across America that preserve our heritage, promote scholarly discoveries, and make the best of America’s humanities ideas available to all Americans,” said NEH Chairman William D. Adams. “We are proud to announce this latest group of grantees who, through their projects and research, will bring valuable lessons of history and culture to Americans.”

About UCSF Archives & Special Collections (UCSF Library)
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. The UCSF AIDS History Project (AHP) began in 1987 as a joint effort of historians, archivists, AIDS activists, health care providers, scientists, and others to secure historically significant resources documenting the response to the AIDS crisis, its holdings currently include 42 collections and they continue to grow. www.library.ucsf.edu

About the San Francisco History Center (San Francisco Public Library)
The San Francisco History Center holds a comprehensive, non-circulating research collection covering all aspects of San Francisco history from the time of the area’s earliest habitation to the present day. The material sheds light on many aspects of the City’s history: its geography and architecture; its politics and government; the lives of citizens, both prominent and ordinary; and the contributions of ethnic, cultural and social groups in creating the City’s vibrant character. The Center also holds the official archives of the City and County of San Francisco. www.sfpl.org

About the GLBT Historical Society
As an internationally recognized leader in the field of LGBTQ public history, the GLBT Historical Society collects, preserves and interprets the history of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people and the communities that support them. Founded in 1985, the society maintains one of the world’s largest collections of LGBTQ historical materials at its archives and research center in San Francisco’s Mid-Market District, in addition to operating the GLBT History Museum in the Castro neighborhood since 2011. www.glbthistory.org

About UC Merced Library
The UC Merced Library opened its doors to the inaugural class of University of California, Merced students in August 2005. From the beginning, the library has been the hub of the campus and a center for innovation. As a center of expertise in the digitization, curation, publication, and preservation of information resources, the Digital Assets unit enables and assures long-term access to digital collections that support the research areas of the UC Merced intellectual community and beyond. library.ucmerced.edu

About the National Endowment for the Humanities
Created in 1965 as an independent federal agency, the National Endowment for the Humanities supports research and learning in history, literature, philosophy, and other areas of the humanities by funding selected, peer-reviewed proposals from around the nation. Additional information about the National Endowment for the Humanities and its grant programs is available at: www.neh.gov

New Accessions Spotlight (or My Cluttered Desk)

It’s been a busy start to spring here at UCSF A&SC: new events and exhibits coming up, lots of researchers, and of course many new collections. As is prone to happen during times like these, there is a pile of new materials sitting on my desk, just waiting for me to enter into our database and (eventually) our library catalog. Here are a few that I am particularly excited about:

Clark Sturges papers (MSS 2017-09)

Just in time for the 50th anniversary of the Summer of Love, we recently were given the papers of Clark Sturges that relate to his profile of Dr. David E. Smith. Smith founded the Haight Ashbury Free Medical Clinic in 1967 in response to the medical needs of many of the young people who came to San Francisco during the Summer of Love. Sturges completed the book in 1993, and the papers are composed mainly of taped interviews, research notes, and correspondence.

Steven Deeks papers (MSS 2017-10)

Another recent acquisition is the papers of Dr. Steven Deeks. The Deeks papers are primarily concerned with his involvement in the controversial baboon bone marrow transplant to an AIDS patient in 1995. While the transplant was not successful, it illustrates the sense of desperation of people with AIDS at that time–and also the highly innovative approaches that UCSF and SFGH doctors and researchers were taking at that time to combat the disease.

Mark Jacobson papers (MSS 2017-12)

Finally, another collection that recently found its way to my desk is the papers of Dr. Mark Jacobson. The Jacobson papers are a hodgepodge of different materials, including calendars, index cards with patient symptoms and medication, a multitude of electronic records (including his PalmPilot), and this Triomune 30 box, which he picked up on a trip overseas. Dr. Jacobson also gave us a substantial number of books for our burgeoning AIDS History collection, and recently wrote a novel based upon his experiences that mentions the patient index cards in its foreword.

NHPRC awarded a grant to UCSF Archives and Special Collections

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 Archives Lecture: The Forgotten Epidemic: HIV/AIDS in Women and Children

Join us on Thursday, February 26th as Arthur Ammann, M.D., gives a lecture in a series launched by UCSF Archives & Special Collections.

Date: Thursday, February 26th, 2015
Time: 4 pm-5:20 pm
Location: Lange Room, UCSF Library, 530 Parnassus, 5th floor
This lecture is free and open to the public. Light refreshments provided.
Please RSVP to reserve a seat

Collage of lab data on first patients in 1981, MMWR report and 1982 San Francisco Chronicle article on first blood transfusion AIDS

Collage of lab data on first patients in 1981, MMWR report and 1982 San Francisco Chronicle article on first blood transfusion AIDS

Beginning in 1981 researchers at UCSF defined some of the most important features of the emerging AIDS epidemic – the cause of AIDS, the clinical features of AIDS, populations at risk for HIV infection, methods to prevent and treat HIV, and discovery of HIV. Working closely with community activists, advocates, scientists and policy makers, UCSF distinguished itself as a model of successful collaboration. The first discovery of AIDS in infants and children and blood transfusion associated AIDS at UCSF were instrumental in defining the extent of the epidemic. The scientific advances in HIV/AIDS that occurred over the next two decades were remarkable resulting in the near eradication of HIV in infants in the US and transforming an acute and fatal infection in adults to a chronic and manageable one. But even as these advances occurred benefiting many millions of people worldwide, women and children were too often excluded, resulting in a global epidemic that is now composed of over 50% women and children and a secondary epidemic of AIDS-related orphans that numbers in the tens of millions.

Arthur J. Ammann, M.D.

Arthur J. Ammann, M.D.

Arthur J. Ammann, M.D., is a founder of Global Strategies, a nonprofit organization that serves women and children in the most neglected areas of the world and Clinical Professor of Pediatrics at UCSF.
From 1971 to 1985, Dr. Ammann was Director of Pediatric Immunology and Clinical Research Center at the UCSF Medical Center, San Francisco. In 1977, Dr. Ammann’s clinical trials of a pneumococcal vaccine resulted in the first FDA approval of a vaccine for bacterial pneumonia and meningitis in children and adults. In 1982 Dr. Ammann described two of the three ways that HIV is transmitted including the first cases of transmission of AIDS from mother to infant and the first blood transfusion associated AIDS patients.
Dr. Ammann has received honors from more than 60 national and international organizations including the United States Surgeon General Award for Research and Heroes in Medicine Award by the International Association of Physicians in AIDS Care.
Dr. Ammann has authored over 300 scientific papers which have appeared in major medical journals. He holds a Bachelor of Science degree in biology from Wheaton College (1958) and a doctor of medicine degree from New Jersey College of Medicine (1962).  He received residency training from the department of pediatrics at UCSF and fellowship training in immunology from the University of Minnesota Medical Center and the University of Wisconsin Medical Center.
Dr. Ammann’s oral history,“Pediatric AIDS Immunologist: Advocate for the Children” is accessible online and at the UCSF Library.

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.

Accessions & Additions

We’re always busy accepting new collections and pushing through our backlog to make as many collections available for research as possible. This long list of new catalog records includes materials relating to tobacco control, UCSF, neurology, nursing education, HIV/AIDS organizations, pharmacy, medical librarianship, pediatric diabetes, 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 use the calendar on the right to make an appointment to come in and use the collections!

Our catalog updates over the past six months:

World AIDS Day

AIDS Research License Plate Program application form.

AIDS Research License Plate Program application form, UCSF Center for AIDS Prevention Studies (CAPS) records

UCSF Archives continues to collect and preserve AIDS History materials. Here is a list of recently cataloged collections that can be viewed in the reading room:
AR 2005-15, UCSF Center for AIDS Prevention Studies (CAPS) records, 1984-2004
AR 2007-14, UCSF AIDS Health Project records, 1983-2003
MSS 2001-04, Sally Hughes AIDS research collection, 1981-1997
MSS 96-32, Brooks Linton ephemera collection, 1983-1995

UCSF Archives Lecture Series: Lessons at UCSF from the Early AIDS Epidemic, April 16, 2014

Join us on Wednesday, April 16th for a special program featuring prominent UCSF faculty. This is the second lecture in a series launched by UCSF Archives & Special Collections.

Learning from Our History: Lessons at UCSF from the Early AIDS Epidemic

UCSF played a leading role in the early response to the AIDS epidemic. UCSF faculty and staff helped create important models of care, made many key discoveries into the nature of the disease and its management, and faced the many emotional and ethical burdens at a time when personal safety could not be assured in patient care. This event will be less a lecture and more a conversation of those early days with four prominent UCSF faculty members, each of whom were present and active from the very first days of what would become a massive epidemic. They will offer their own perspectives on this history and engage with each other and the audience in this program.

Presenters: Drs. John Greenspan, Paul Volberding, Molly Cooke, Jay Levy (UCSF) Date: Wednesday, April 16, 2014
Time: 12:00 pm – 1:15 pm
Location: Lange Room, UCSF Library, 530 Parnassus, 5th floor

This lecture is free and open to the public. Information on how to sign up or donate to AIDS Walk San Francisco will be available before and after this event. AIDS Walk San Francisco benefits HIV/AIDS programs and services throughout the Bay Area, including some at UCSF.

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.

UCSF Archives Acquires Laurie Garrett Papers

Laurie Garrett, Pulitzer Prize-winning science journalist and researcher, recently donated her papers to the UCSF Archives and Special Collections. Ms. Garrett is the only writer to have been awarded all three of the Big “Ps” of journalism: the Peabody, the Polk, and the Pulitzer.

The-Coming-PlagueMs. Garrett is the best-selling author of The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance (1994) and Betrayal of Trust: The Collapse of Global Public Health (2000). Her latest book is I Heard the Sirens Scream: How Americans Responded to the 9/11 and Anthrax Attacks (2011). She graduated with honors in biology from the University of California, Santa Cruz, attended graduate school in the Department of Bacteriology and Immunology at the University of California, Berkeley, and did laboratory research at Stanford University with Dr. Leonard Herzenberg. During her PhD studies, Ms. Garrett started reporting on science news at KPFA, a local radio station. This hobby soon became far more interesting than graduate school, and she took a leave of absence to explore journalism. In 1980, she joined National Public Radio, working out of the network’s bureaus in San Francisco and, later, Los Angeles as a science correspondent. In 1988, Ms. Garrett left NPR to join the science writing staff of Newsday. Her Newsday reporting has earned several awards: Award of Excellence from the National Association of Black Journalists (for “AIDS in Africa,” 1989), First Place from the Society of Silurians (for “Breast Cancer,” 1994), and the Bob Considine Award of the Overseas Press Club of America (for “AIDS in India,” 1995). Since 2004, Laurie Garrett has been a senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. Ms. Garrett was awarded doctorates Honoris Causa by three universities: Illinois Wesleyan University, the University of Massachusetts Lowell, and Georgetown University.

The Laurie Garrett papers consist predominantly of the research files used by Ms. Garrett in the writing of her two books, The Coming Plague and Betrayal of Trust. They contain numerous drafts and published newspaper and magazine articles, including her Pulitzer Prize-winning 1996 series printed in Newsday, chronicling the Ebola virus outbreak in Zaire. Also included are a series of 25 articles, “Crumbled Empire, Shattered Health,” on the AIDS epidemic and public health crisis in the former Soviet Union that received the George Polk Award for Foreign Reporting in 1997. This collection encompasses a wealth of primary resources consisting of correspondence, interviews, photographs, and ephemera, including HIV/AIDS-related posters from around the world. A sizable part of the collection includes research materials, interviews and notebooks (that will be transferred to the archives at a later date) from the time when Laurie Garrett was a science correspondent for NPR, Newsday, and wrote for the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times, among many other publications.

These papers also contain secondary source materials such as complete publishing runs of AIDS Weekly, AIDS Newsletter, and AIDS Treatment News, scholarly papers, conference abstracts, reports, and promotional materials.

This sizable collection consisting of more than 150 linear feet spans from the mid-1970s to 2013. It documents a broad array of subjects related to global health, newly emerging and re-emerging diseases –primarily the HIV/AIDS epidemic, SARS, avian flu, Ebola, Anthrax, and influenza – and their effects on foreign policy, national security, and bio-terrorism.

LaurieGarrett_ucsf

Laurie Garrett gave a lecture at Toland Hall on UCSF campus on February 21, 2014

The Laurie Garrett papers are a major acquisition for the UCSF archives and it will enhance several existing areas of collecting, in particular history of HIV/AIDS epidemic, infectious and chronic diseases, and global and public health. UCSF is considered one of the preeminent repositories of AIDS-related materials and Ms. Garrett’s collection complements papers from the AIDS History project that began in 1987 as a joint effort of historians, archivists, AIDS activists, health care providers, and others to secure historically significant resources about the response to the AIDS crisis in San Francisco. For more than thirty years since Ms. Garrett started covering the outbreak in San Francisco (even before it became publicly known that a virus was responsible), she has been collecting materials on the evolution of the HIV pandemic. Her vast and comprehensive files contain information on many topics including the social origins and history of HIV/AIDS; HIV drugs; President Reagan’s and Clinton’s AIDS policies as well as detailed HIV/AIDS information on many different countries. Her extensive writings and files on the subject of public health mesh well with the materials from the Philip Randolph Lee and Harold S. Luft papers already preserved in the UCSF archives.

The availability of these materials for research will help advance the study and teaching of the health sciences, and allow further analysis of how medical discoveries were presented and described to a broader audience. The papers of Ms. Garrett, a gifted and internationally recognized author and investigative reporter, will serve as a source of inspiration for novice and experienced medical and science writers and journalists.

The Laurie Garrett papers were officially unveiled during the special presentation she gave at UCSF on February 21, 2014.

For more information, or if you have questions on how to access this collection, please contact Polina Ilieva: polina.ilieva@ucsf.edu.

New year, new collections!

We’re very pleased anytime we’re able to bring new collections out of dark corners and, you guessed it, into the light. The following newly cataloged collections cover a breadth of topics including tobacco control, AIDS history, nursing school in the 1920s, inventing the pap smear, surgery in the 19th century, and UCSF history:

  • MSS 2013-4 Grande Vista Sanatorium collection, 1922-1938: Collection includes various medical mailings that Dr. Hendrik Belgum, the founder of the sanatorium, received. The sanatorium was founded in 1914 in Richmond, CA where some of its ruins can still be found in the Wildcat Canyon Regional Park.
  • MSS 2013-9 Clara Edmonston papers, 1921-1924: Papers include Clara’s correspondence while she was a UCSF nursing student in the 1920s. Our holdings also include the papers of Clara’s friend, future sister-in-law, and co-nursing student: MSS 2011-14 Vivian Coats (Edmonston) papers, 1921-1935.
  • MSS 2012-30 Dr. George N. Papanicolaou collection, 1945-1990:  Research material put together by Dr. Robert Liner for a film documenting the story of the Pap smear development by Dr. George N. Papanicolaou. Dr. Liner was not able to produce the film. It includes two boxes with papers, photographs, and publications as well as a box of six audio cassettes with interviews of Mrs. Mary Papanicolaou, Mrs. Trout, Dr. Joseph Hinsey, and Constantine Railey.
  • MSS 2012-27 Carolyn B. Martin papers, 1988-2004:  Document Martin’s involvement with California tobacco control. She was a Lung Association volunteer and helped to lead the state campaign for Prop. 99 in 1988 and served as the first chairperson of the state advisory committee on program and expenditures. Martin participated in the negotiations for the implementation legislation for the proposition, numerous other tobacco related bills and lawsuits, and education efforts.
  • MSS 98-60 Villagomez manuscript, circa 19th century: A handwritten, unpublished manuscript in Spanish concerning surgery techniques from the 19th century.
  • AR 2013-08 UCSF School of Nursing – Primary Health Care Nurse Practitioner Program records, 1991-1995: Documents the grant application for the UCSF School of Nursing Primary Health Care Nurse Practitioner program.
  • MSS 96-32 Brooks Linton ephemera collection, 1983-1995: AIDS-related ephemera collected by Brooks Linton, a former San Francisco General Hospital AIDS Ward nurse, from approximately 1983-1995. Items include newspaper clippings, brochures, reports, magazine articles, announcements, and others.
  •  AR 2012-25 UCSF Division of Gastroenterology lab records, 1968-2012Collection contains electronic data files, spectrophotometer recordings, and gastroscopy records books that were kept by Dr. McDonagh in his lab. Other materials include, floppy disks, zip disks, CDs, DVDs, slides, and hard drives. Dr. McDonagh was a professor and researcher at UCSF from 1971-2012.
  • AR 2012-26 UCSF Medical Center Quality Improvement Department records, 1989-1999: Collection includes materials on the projects, reports, and initiatives of the Quality Improvement Department. The department aims to develop data-driven strategies to improve care and to lead the field by disseminating their experiences locally and nationally.

If these, or any, of our materials strike your fancy and you’d like a closer look, please head to our homepage and click on the calendar to the right to schedule an appointment. If you have any questions don’t hesitate to contact us!

Other additions in the latter part of 2013 included: