Archives and Rare Books

The Archives: A Gourmand’s Delight

If you ever stop by to visit the Becker Library archives – and as the archives are open to the public you’re more than welcome to do so – you’ll be asked to follow a few rules. Sign into our ledger book, only look at one folder of archival material at a time, and, please, no food or drinks near the historical documents. Despite this last policy, food often does show up in the archives – in the form of various menus, which are scattered throughout the archival collections.

Archives and Rare Books

Moratorium, 1969 and St. Louis Doctors for Peace

With “The Vietnam War: A film by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick” airing this week on PBS, it is a good time to examine the oral history of David Kennell, MD, and his archives on St. Louis Doctors for Peace. Kennell’s oral history and papers contain documentation of the 1969 Moratorium, an event to promote peace  [Read more]

Archives and Rare Books

Before There Was Copyright

Some of the most famous images in the history of medicine can be found in Andreas Vesalius’s “De humani corporis fabrica,” published in 1543 by Johannes Oporinus. Medical illustration prior to Vesalius tended to be rather crude and schematic, but the woodcuts that appeared in the Fabrica managed to capture an extraordinary amount of detail  [Read more]

Archives and Rare Books

Dr. Richard A. Chole Donates Rare Otolaryngology Book Collection

Becker Medical Library is pleased to announce that Richard A. Chole, MD, PhD, has generously donated over one hundred rare titles relating to otolaryngology to its rare book collections. Dr. Chole served as Lindburg Professor and Head of the Department of Otolaryngology at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis for 17 years before  [Read more]

Archives and Rare Books

James Moores Ball: St. Louis Ophthalmologist, Medical Historian and Bibliophile

The following is a guest post from Robert M. Feibel, MD, acting director of the Center for History Of Medicine and professor of clinical ophthalmology and visual sciences at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. His paper “James Moores Ball: Ophthalmologist, medical historian, bibliophile” was published in the Journal of Medical Biography in  [Read more]

Archives and Rare Books

A tradition of self-experimentation

As new and returning medical students come to Washington University in St. Louis to throw themselves into their studies, we remember that self-experimentation in medical research has a long tradition at the School of Medicine. One of the earliest examples involves two medical school students, Alfred Goldman, MD 1920, and Samuel B. Grant, MD 1920, and  [Read more]

Archives and Rare Books

Wu Comes to WU

Ying-Kai Wu (1910-2003), also known as Y. K. Wu, was born in the town of Xinmin in northeastern China. In 1933, he graduated from the Moukden Medical College, located in present-day Shenyang. Wu then trained in surgery at the prestigious Peking Union Medical College in Beijing. There, he served as chief resident in surgery in 1938 and  [Read more]

Archives and Rare Books

A Hospital Food Revolution

Marian Sizelove and Joyce Gibbons, dieticians at Barnes Hospital, wrote in 1949 that “One of the age old complaints of hospital patients is that the hot foods [they are served] are not hot and that the cold foods are not cold.” Frank Bradley, director of Barnes Hospital from 1939-1962, worked with the hospital dieticians to  [Read more]

Archives and Rare Books

In his own words: Philip M. Stimson, MD Assistant Resident at St. Louis Children’s Hospital, 1916-1917

This week, as we welcomed new residents to the Medical Center, we discovered a letter in the Archives and Rare Books Division that was written by a resident 101 years ago. The resident, Philip Moen Stimson, MD, went on to a distinguished career as a pediatrician renowned for his research in infectious disease. Becker Library has three  [Read more]

Archives and Rare Books

The Salernitan Regimen of Health

Medical knowledge has undergone, shall we say, significant changes since the medieval and early modern periods. Humorism – the idea that the bodily health depended on the proper balance of the four humors of blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile – has been thoroughly debunked. We understand germ theory. A broken bone is a  [Read more]

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