The Becker Medical Library Archives & Rare Books staff has been particularly busy over the last several months producing some exciting avenues by which users can discover some of the hidden treasures in the collections.

Aerial view of the WUSM campus, 1916

Several new features have been added to the Archives and Rare Books section of the library’s website. The Digital and Gallery Exhibits page now boasts a series of small online exhibits, “Highlights from Archives & Rare Books.” The first entry is “The ‘New’ Medical Center,” which briefly tells the story of the reorganization of the School of Medicine in the early 1910s and includes photographs of the Medical Center. A second exhibit describes the silver “mess cup” that played a critical role in maintaining the morale of the officers of Base Hospital 21, the WWI army medical hospital unit associated with the Washington University School of Medicine and Barnes Hospital. Future “highlights” will include an exhibit about the oldest volume in any of our Rare Book collections – the first German pharmacopoeia, the 1477 Arzneibuch, by Ortolf von Bayrlandt.

Samuel B. Guze

Over the past few months, finding aids have been created for several of the archival collections and are now available online. The contents from the personal collections of prominent members of the WUSM community such as Samuel B. Guze, August Carl Schulenburg, Henry G. Schwartz, Alexander Sonnenwirth, Margaret Smith, and Valentina Suntzeff are now accessible through the web site and available for download as PDF files. Archivist Stephen Logsdon found Schulenburg’s collection fascinating, because “his papers and photographs afford a rare glimpse of medical education in the early 1900s from the perspective of a student and a young physician. Schulenburg’s diary and his letters to his cousin Frieda paint a vivid portrait of St. Louis and the medical school.”

Lastly, there is a new exhibit in the Glaser Gallery, located on the seventh floor of the library. “Making a Place: Women in Medical Education” spotlights the important contributions of the female faculty of the School of Medicine over the years. Featured prominently are anthropologist Mildred Trotter, Nobel Laureate Gerti Cori, pediatrician Helen Nash, and surgeon Jessie L. Ternberg. This exhibit is the first element in the promotion leading up to the arrival of the National Library of Medicine exhibit, “Changing the Face of Medicine.” Becker Medical Library is proud to be one of the 61 institutions across the country hosting this exciting and informative exhibit, which has been traveling the country for the past four years. “Changing the Face of Medicine” will be on display at Becker Medical Library from August 5 to September 18, 2009. Details about events planned around the exhibit will be available soon.