In 1999, Dr. Cynthia Wichelman, an associate professor of emergency medicine at Washington University in St. Louis, launched the Mini-Medical School with the goal of educating the community by sharing the expertise of the medical faculty. Over the past 20 years, it has become so popular that it has expanded to include three different series [Read more]
Fifty years ago today the Stonewall uprising began in the early morning hours of June 28, 1969, at the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village. In the 1960s, as in preceding decades, police commonly raided bars that catered to gay and lesbian clientele on the pretext of liquor license violations. This was the case at Stonewall [Read more]
Becker Library recently received a small collection of papers from the estate of Teresa J. Vietti (1927-2010), emeritus professor of pediatrics at Washington University School of Medicine and pioneering scientist in the field of pediatric oncology. Vietti completed her residency training at St. Louis Children’s Hospital before spending two years as a hematology/oncology fellow in [Read more]
“…Lily was admitted to 7East. The nurses assigned to Lily’s care were very special. What was so amazing to us was their ability to see each child with a fresh new set of eyes. It is incredible to think that despite their work load during their 12-hour shifts that they could convey care, nurturing, and [Read more]
The official project for which I was recently hired as the “project archivist” is to consolidate (and often create) metadata for our visual collections and make finding aids for them in our database. So I started with VC001 (i.e. “visual collection No. 1”) and have been going from there! Essentially, a lot of what I’ve [Read more]
Becker Library’s archives contain so much more than paper documents. Many of our collections comprise an amazing array of unique artifacts, including photographs and albums, clothing, plaques and medals, blueprints, historic currency, and maps. We also care for collections including materials that are incredible resources for the preservation of the history of medicine and its [Read more]
The Becker Library Rare Book Collections include approximately 23,000 volumes chronicling the history of medicine. The books and journals are organized within nine distinct collections that primarily document western medical history, and are typically written in Latin, German, French and English. There are, however, many medical texts among the rare book collections that are not [Read more]
Vaccination. The word, coined by Edward Jenner (1749 – 1823) as a combination of the Latin word for cow, “vacca,” and the Latin word for cowpox, “vaccinia,” has carried emotional weight from its inception as a scientific endeavor to control smallpox, an infectious disease. Today, the word “vaccine” likely provokes immediate, charged associations with other words [Read more]