The famous actor and comedian Bob Hope raised money for St. Louis Children’s Hospital throughout his career. On numerous occasions throughout the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, he visited with patients, served as the host at Children’s Hospital fundraisers, and organized several celebrity golf tournaments in St. Louis — with all benefits going to the hospital. [Read more]
An extensive index to Washington University Medical Center publications is now available via the Becker Archives. This new resource consists of nearly 7,000 index headings for faculty, staff, departments, programs and events related to the School of Medicine and its affiliated hospitals. Collectively, the headings point to over 35,000 unique citations in medical center [Read more]
The Becker Archives has acquired the collected papers of Dr. Jerry Cox (1925-2023), who founded the Biomedical Computer Laboratory at the Washington University School of Medicine in 1964. This impressive acquisition comprehensively documents his four-decade career at the university, which included pioneering research and developments in biomedical computing, PET scanning, and computer technology applications in healthcare. [Read more]
Dr. Joseph Nash McDowell, featured in the portrait below, was born in Lexington, Kentucky in 1805 and he received a medical degree from Transylvania University in 1825. Prior to moving to St. Louis in 1839 with the intention of founding his own medical school, McDowell served as an anatomy professor at the Jefferson Medical College in [Read more]
The wonderfully weird Antikamnia calendars, published between 1897 and 1901 by the Antikamnia Chemical Company of St. Louis, feature colorful skeletons in humorous or whimsical scenes. This year, we are re-printing the 1898 calendar from Becker Library’s archival collections in the form of a 2022 calendar. The reproduction comes from the 1898 calendar because the [Read more]
The practice fell out of favor in the late 19th century before seeing a resurgence in the past few decades.
Beaumont’s relationship with his patient lead to momentous research on digestion, but was questionable at best.
The medical school had closed at the outset of the war, and its dean, a notorious grave robber, had fled the city to serve as the Surgeon General of the Confederate Army of the West.
As part of our ongoing effort to bring our collections to you virtually as we all practice social distancing, we’ve created a series of online puzzles featuring images from Becker Library’s archival and rare book collections. See the images and links to their puzzles below. Helpful tips: Select your puzzle from the options below – [Read more]
For more than a year now, Becker Library has hosted First Fridays @ Becker, a monthly Archives and Rare Books Division open house featuring items from its amazing collections. This has allowed our staff to do one of their favorite things – show people neat stuff. While in-person First Friday monthly events are canceled [Read more]