Archives and Rare Books

“A fact of life – not a crime”

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]

Archives and Rare Books

Acquisitions Highlight: Teresa J. Vietti Papers

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]

Archives and Rare Books

‘Stereoscopic Studies of Anatomy’ on display in FLTC

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]

Archives and Rare Books

Historic Pharmaceuticals: Lessons for an archivist

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]

Archives and Rare Books

Part Medical Text, Part Work of Art

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]

Archives and Rare Books

The Anti-vaccination Movement: History, satire, and body politics

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]