For the past few weeks, I’ve been working my way through the more than 800 slides found in the Institute for Biomedical Computing Records (RG035). The collection includes materials related to the Institute for Biomedical Computing (IBC) and its predecessors, the Biomedical Computer Laboratory (BCL) and the Computer Systems Laboratory (CSL). Established in 1964, BCL [Read more]
May 1st, or May Day, has been a holiday associated with the arrival of summer for millennia. But dancing around maypoles is not the only way that you can celebrate the day—it can also be a good day for those suffering from scrofula to petition for divine assistance. Scrofula is a disease that we don’t [Read more]
Georg Bartisch’s Augendienst is one of the most famous books in the history of ophthalmology. While it is not the first ophthalmologic text to be printed in the vernacular German, it is perhaps the first text to grant the subject such elaborate treatment: Augendienst is no cheap pamphlet with basic illustrations, but a large folio [Read more]
Send your science-loving sweetie a valentine from Becker Archives and Rare Books!
If you stopped by the Annual Display of Rare Anatomical Books last week, you might have seen visitors hard at work on a scavenger hunt around the display. The fruit of their labors? The new tarot decks made with images from our rare book collections! Tarot cards are seen as divination tools and are thus [Read more]
The year was 1973, and Jerome “Jerry” Cox and his family were en route from Hawaii to St. Louis on American Airlines Flight 152. In the early morning hours of January 12—Cox guessed around 3:00am, St. Louis time—the pilot called their attention to a staged missile launch visible from the plane. Based on their flight [Read more]
The continued process of digitizing documents and materials in the Bernard Becker Medical Library Archives has made new scans of St. Louis Children’s Hospital publications available in the archives database. These documents shed light on past lives and of turmoil and injustices overcome with perseverance.
“How Did We Get Hear? Historic Hearing Devices 1800-2000” is a new digital exhibit from the Becker Archives that explores the long history of hearing devices, from mechanical conversation tubes to electronic transistor hearing aids. The exhibit features nearly 100 different hearing devices from Becker Archives’ Central Institute for the Deaf–Max A. Goldstein Historic Devices [Read more]
Chances are you’re familiar with the phrase “A picture is worth a thousand words.” While this maxim originated with an American advertising firm in the 1920s, it is certainly applicable to images produced in early modern Europe. Many of the illustrative elements in books were meant to convey meanings on multiple levels. Elaborate title pages [Read more]
The Becker Archives is pleased to announce that an index of the Max A. Goldstein Collection of Scientific Articles on Otorhinolaryngology is now available on the Becker Archives Database. This collection features more than ten thousand scientific articles on subjects related to the study and practice of ear, nose, and throat medicine. The articles were [Read more]