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]
A new exhibit titled “That Was Then: An Architectural History of the Washington University Medical Center” is on display through Aug. 16 on the seventh floor of Bernard Becker Medical Library. Through a series of before-and-after photographs, the exhibit shows how the medical campus has changed over the past 100 years. One building in particular [Read more]
The weather is finally starting to warm up as we move into summer, which means it’s also time to switch from winter to summer clothes. This probably means cotton and short sleeves instead of wool and sweaters, but one item that will almost certainly not appear in anyone’s wardrobe, regardless of the season, is the [Read more]
Martin Kamen is not a household name today, but his synthesis of Carbon 14 in February 1940 was the first of many achievements in his long career as a chemist. In 1944, Kamen, a chemist in the new field of radiochemistry, worked for the Manhattan Project at Berkeley Radiation Laberatory and Oak Ridge, Tennessee. The [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]
What do you do when you come down with a cold or an upset stomach? Most of us probably go to the nearest pharmacy to pick up an assortment of pills, syrups or sprays; or if it’s a mild case, we might just make tea with plenty of honey. But no matter what route we [Read more]
Margaret Gladys Smith, MD, was the first woman to head a department at Washington University School of Medicine, serving as the de facto chair of the Department of Pathology after the sudden death of Howard A. McCordock, MD, in November 1938. Until the appointment of a new chair in July 1939, Smith led the department [Read more]
Becker Library is pleased to announce a partnership with the University of California San Francisco’s Industry Documents Library to provide online access to the Robert E. Shank Papers. Over 100,000 pages from Becker Library Archives’ Robert E. Shank Papers were digitized for this project. The files are included as part of the Food Industry Documents [Read more]
March is Women’s History Month! To celebrate, we’re taking a look at one of the most celebrated female authors in our collection: Mary Wollstonecraft. Wollstonecraft’s literary career began in 1787, when she arrived in London following failed ventures as a governess and schoolmistress. She quickly became friends with the liberal publisher Joseph Johnson, a relationship [Read more]
The 19th amendment to the constitution gave women the right to vote. Suffragists had cause to rejoice when it passed both houses of Congress in May and June 1919. Carol Skinner Cole (1888-1932) and Aphrodite Maria Jannopoulo (1896-1976) must have been on top of the world. They were the first women admitted as medical students at [Read more]