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New Gift: José Manuel Rodríguez Delgado papers

March 22, 2024 - 3:48pm by Melissa Grafe

The Medical Historical Library is pleased to announce a new gift of the José Manuel Rodríguez Delgado papers. His papers are a gift of Caroline Stoddard Delgado, wife of Dr. José M. R. Delgado, and children José Carlos and Linda Delgado, 2024. José Manuel Rodríguez Delgado (1915-2011) was a Spanish physician, researcher, and professor who specialized in neurophysiology of the brain. He captured the world’s attention in the 1960s with his experiments using electrical stimulation of the brain to control the actions of mammals, primates, and human subjects. Delgado earned his medical degree and a doctorate in physiology from the Universidad Central in Madrid. He came to Yale in 1946 as a fellow in the laboratory of John Fulton, a neurophysiologist, chair of the Department of Physiology, and one of the Medical Library’s founders. By 1953 Delgado was an assistant professor and became director of research following Fulton’s death in 1960.  He returned to Spain in 1974 to organize a new medical school. In 2004, Delgado returned to the United States, settling in California. Delgado published hundreds of articles throughout his career, in multiple languages, several books, and was an inventor, pioneering methods for the implantation of electrodes to treat neurological disorders. The items in the gift document Delgado's professional life and include correspondence, manuscript and published writings, lectures, research, interviews, photographs and photographic slides, audio visual materials, original drawings for scientific publications by Santiago Ramón y Cajal (1852-1934), scrapbooks, clippings, and neural stimulation equipment built by Delgado. For access to the collection, please contact the Medical Historical Library at historical.library@yale.edu.

"Data as Art" Exhibition: Call for Submissions

March 14, 2024 - 2:18pm by Sofia Fertuzinhos

Data as Art" Exhibition: Call for Submissions     “Every story is complicated until it finds the right storyteller.” – Anonymous   As we celebrate 10 years of the Bioinformatics Support Hub at the Cushing/Whitney Medical Library, we invite you to share your visual responses to the prompt “Data as Art." Though data representations hold specific scientific meaning, some datasets and data visualizations also possess inherent artistic sensibility on their own. Cultivating an appreciation for data as art can reframe our conception of data as orderly, objective evidence into iterative, multifaceted artifacts produced in the non-linear search for new knowledge. We invite you to submit "data as art" in conversation with this idea. All selected entries will be on display in the rotunda of the Cushing/Whitney Medical Library from late August 2024 to January 2025. Inclusion Criteria:  Quantitative Data Representation. Your work should visually depict quantitative data.  Digital Works. We're seeking digital files   Yale affiliates Exclusion Criteria:  Human Identified Data. Please refrain from using identifiable human data.  Raw Data. Submit a representation of data (visualizations and aggregations of the data), not the raw data (e.g. data files such as .fastq, scripts, etc).  Three-Dimensional Objects. We're focusing on bi-dimensional representations for this call.  Submission Details:   Digital file: .pdf, .jpeg, .tiff  Image resolution: at least 300 DPI  Image size: at least 1 MB, max 1GB  Image description: Include a title and a brief explanation of the data and the methodology used.  Limit 3 submissions per person  Please acknowledge the use of artificial intelligence and what program  Deadline:  Please submit your entry by May 17, 2024 If you have a YNHH email, please contact us directly to submit your entry: bioinfo.cwml@yale.edu More Information: Data as art refers to representations of data (visualizations and aggregations of the data) with an aesthetic. Any data representation -- as long as it does not contain personally identifying information -- is eligible if the submitter believes the work is artistic or conveys meaning beyond the information encoded in the data itself. Consider submitting a data representation born from a mistake but that led to something aesthetically beautiful.  If you're passionate about merging science and art, this call is for you! Let's transform data into art and showcase the beauty beyond the numbers together.  Questions: Please contact bioinfo.cwml@yale.edu

Love Data Week 2024 Recap

February 28, 2024 - 11:50am by Kaitlin Throgmorton

This past February, the Cushing/Whitney Medical Library, together with the Digital Humanities Lab and other campus partners, celebrated Love Data Week, an international event dedicated to data enthusiasm and education. This year's theme was "My Kind of Data." Nearly two hundred participants — faculty, researchers, students, staff, and community members among them — attended one or more of the seven sessions offered.One highlight was the keynote, "That's My Kind of Data," where we were joined by a trio of expert researchers — Allison Jauré (nee Tong), Jessa Lingel, and Raesetje Sefala — who work in the fields of chronic disease, digital culture, and computer science. In an engaging, informative, and wide-ranging discussion, the panelists shared their affinity for and experience with various types of data, including qualitative and geospatial data. At various training events, participants learned about working with data in Python and R (as an alternative to Excel), plus data standardization, data collection, and data management in REDCap. To round out the week, attendees could also attend a mindful journaling and data management event as well as a wellness event focused on managing motivation and increasing mindfulness in data work.  Many participants shared excitement and gratitude for the slate of events offered, saying they learned a lot and enjoyed the content. We'd like to thank the following campus partners who presented or assisted with event organization for Love Data Week: Digital Humanities Lab, REDCap @ Yale, and Yale School of Medicine Student Mental Health and Wellness Program. In addition to our keynote speakers noted above, we'd also like to thank the following individuals: Sundari Birdsall, Hannah Clark, Kayla Del Biondo, Sofia Fertuzinhos, Mary Geda, Dana Haugh, Lisa Ho, Gavi Levy Haskell, Vermetha Polite, Kayla Shipp, Sui Tsang. Download the Love Data Week 2024 event flyer for more information about the week's activities.

Free Trials - Scopus AI, Neurosurgical Atlas, Sage Business Cases

February 23, 2024 - 1:21pm by Elizabeth Jenkins

The Cushing/Whiney Medical Library and Yale Library have begun a free trials of the following resources. Please let us know what you think of these resources here: Trial Feedback Form. Did you know you can suggest resource trials? Simply fill out this form.  Neurosurgical Atlas Trial through March 23, 2024 Interactive neuroanatomy tools Original illustrations 3D models Case series Grand round lectures Videos of neurosurgical techniques and procedures Scopus AI Trial through March 29, 2024 Scopus AI is a search tool within the Scopus database. Powered by generative AI, this tool allows for natural language searching and quickly synthesizes the abstracts of relevant articles to produce a research summary with references. More information about the Scopus AI can be found here.   Sage Business Cases Trial through March 16, 2024 This resource provides access to 6,150 interdisciplinary cases from 120 countries, on topics related to entrepreneurship, accounting, healthcare management, leadership, and social enterprise.   

Mindscapes: Stories of Mental Health through Yale Collections

February 20, 2024 - 11:03am by Melissa Grafe

On view in the hallway and rotunda from February 19th – August 16th, 2024 Curated by Melissa Grafe, Ph.D. and Laura Phillips, Ph.D. Mindscapes tells a story about mental health—its visibility, classification, and treatment—through the archival and visual art collections of the Medical Historical Library. Instead of a sweeping grand narrative of medical progress, Mindscapes presents a constellation of short stories that illuminate shifting cultural attitudes and scientific approaches to mental health over time. At stake in these stories are challenging, contested topics around mental health that intersect with Yale School of Medicine’s own histories. Two additional cases in the Historical Library, curated by Erin Sommers (History of Science, Medicine and Public Health Major, class of 2025) and Krupa Hegde (History of Science, Medicine and Public Health Major, class of 2025) as part of Marco Ramos’s fall 2023 course, Race and Mental Health in New Haven, discuss the Connecticut Mental Health Center’s connections to community and care. All items on display are from scrapbooks in the newly cataloged Connecticut Mental Health Center records, part of the Manuscripts and Archives Repository.   This exhibition is part of a multi-institutional effort to highlight mental health through collections and communities. It stands in dialogue with the exhibition, Munch and Kirchner: Anxiety and Expression at the Yale University Art Gallery (February 16  –  June 23, 2024), and the Yale School of Medicine (YSM) community art exhibition, Mindful: Exploring Mental Health Through Art (foyer of the Medical Library, February 21st – August 2024), which is sponsored by the YSM Program for Art in Public Spaces. Image: Depression, 1935, lithograph  Blanche Mary Grambs, also “Miller Grambs” (1916–2010), printed by George C. Miller (1894–1965)

Stata MP Now Available

January 16, 2024 - 1:20pm by Dana Haugh

Stata MP is now available for all faculty, staff, and students. Stata is a statistical software package that is widely used across many disciplines for data analysis. To download Stata MP, sign in to the Yale Software Library and select Yale Licensed Software from the top navigation. Next, choose StataCorp. Anyone currently using the SE or BE edition of Stata can upgrade to MP. The campus-wide license also includes other editions, such as SE or BE, but MP is the fastest and can analyze much larger datasets.   Upcoming Stata workshops: First Steps with Stata - January 26, 1:30-3:30 pm Second Steps with Stata – February 2, 1:30 – 3:30 pm For any questions, please direct them to dissc@yale.edu.    

Work in Medicine—as Context, Disease, and Cure

January 5, 2024 - 3:48pm by Melissa Grafe

Written by Jiemin Tina Wei, Ferenc Gyorgyey/Stanley Simbonis YSM’57 Research Travel Grant recipient, 2023-2024 December 29, 2023 What is the relationship between work and medicine? It may seem obvious, especially amidst this year’s wave of unionization of medical residents, that medicine is a form of work. But just as medicine can be work, work can be (and has been, in certain historical moments) medicine. My dissertation and book in progress, “Ameliorating Fatigue at Work: Workplace-Management, Mind-Body Medicine, and Self-Help for Industrial Fatigue in the U.S., 1900-1950,” investigates the history of attempts to ameliorate workplace fatigue in the first half of the twentieth century. It traces how scientists from industrial medicine, occupational health, physiology, ergonomics, industrial psychology, psychiatry, psychoanalysis, and economics struggled to and succeeded in making work and workers into objects of scientific study. For the scientists I study, labor dynamics gave context to their discoveries—providing the backdrop, for instance, to their gendered division of labor, as well as their differential compensation and recognition of work done by women. Focusing on the labor dynamics implicit in the production of science resonates with recent calls by scholars to study “a labor history of science.” A group of historical subjects that I study, clustered around the social networks of physician E.E. Southard, first Director of the Boston Psychopathic Hospital prior to his death in 1920, was interested in this problem in its inverse—looking not at how labor can yield insights into science, but how at how science can yield insights into labor. These psychiatrists and psychiatric social workers collected data and biological material from their mental hospital patients to study the neurological and psychopathic roots of myriad workplace dysfunction, such as refusal to work and tendency to unionize. Oriented, as many of them were, around the eugenics movement, they aimed to socially rehabilitate patients they classified variously as feebleminded, insane, nervous, and psychopathic. Refitting as many individuals as possible to productive work, they sought to resolve the growing social problem of their time, militant labor uprisings. In their medical practice, work was part of disease and cure. Through the generous support of the Ferenc Gyorgyey/Stanley Simbonis YSM’57 Research Travel Grant, my dissertation took me to the Medical Historical Library in the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University. My visit focused on the collections of the esteemed neurosurgeon Harvey Cushing, a namesake of the Library. Cushing and his colleague and assistant, pathologist Louise Eisenhardt, were collaborators of Southard and his colleague and assistant, pathologist M.M. Canavan. Due to limitations of surviving materials about Southard and Canavan, Cushing and Eisenhardt’s repositories provide a crucial point of contrast and help populate modern scholarship with details about the social-professional world of these physicians. The gems of this collection give material reality to this cohort’s medical work. Cushing, a draftsman in addition to a surgeon, littered his Harvard Medical School lecture notebooks with drawings, leaving behind a kind of illustrated textbook of early-twentieth-century medical education. See for instance, his sketches for a lecture on the kidney.­ Left: Harvey Williams Cushing Papers, Histology and Embryology, 1891-92, H.M.S., pp 13a-b. The Robert Bogdan Disability Collection also held striking visual material documenting the life of workers and patients at state mental hospitals and related institutions. Among the collection’s fifteen enormous three-ringed photo albums, Book 6 features postcards and other images from "Institutions: Insane, Feeble minded, Epileptic, Deaf, Blind, ca. 1900-1930." At the State Hospital in Gowanda, N.Y., for instance, postcards show the kitchen, laundry, operating room, superintendent’s residence, staff house, and nurses house.   Above: Assorted photos from State Hospital, Gowanda, N.Y. From the Bogdan Disability Collection, Book 6. Other photos showed “Breaking of Ground for Assembly Building” at the New Jersey State Village for Epileptics at Skillman; Field Day at State Hospital in Willard, NY; and dining rooms in the Massachusetts Hospital in Palmer, MA, and at the State Hospital in North Warren, PA. Above: Assorted photos from the Bogdan Disability Collection, Book 6. Numerous images showed nurses in posed group photos and while recreating, such as at the Asylum in Middletown, NY, and the State Hospital in Gowanda, NY. Above: Front and back of postcard, Middletown, NY, Asylum Above: Assorted photos from the Bogdan Disability Collection, Book 6. The postcards even featured several institutions dedicated to vocational rehabilitation in the U.S. and abroad, such as the State Industrial School for Girls in Mitchellville, IA. These photos, one of which appears to be taken by “Richard the Druggist,” shows these so-called troubled girls gathering outdoors and in their orchestra. In collections such as these, the rich visual and print material at the Medical Historical Library captures the labor required to carry out medical research and care, as well as the correspondence networks of medical professionals using medicine to respond to crises of labor. Left: Jiemin Tina Wei is a PhD candidate in Harvard University’s Department of the History of Science. Her dissertation and book in progress, “Ameliorating Fatigue at Work: Workplace-Management, Mind-Body Medicine, and Self-Help for Industrial Fatigue in the U.S., 1900-1950,” investigates the history of attempts to ameliorate workplace fatigue in the first half of the twentieth century. This research has been generously supported by the Ferenc Gyorgyey/Stanley Simbonis YSM’57 Research Travel Grant, and by the wonderful staff at the Medical Historical Library in the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University, especially Melissa Grafe, Chris Zollo, Kathi Isham, and Christine Bailey.  

Access to the Cushing Center is Changing

December 19, 2023 - 1:46pm by John Gallagher

As part of a larger reimagining of the Cushing Center, we’d like to share our new mission statement: The mission of the Cushing Center is to inspire wonder about the human brain and its disorders, to educate visitors about the history of modern neurosurgery, and to respectfully steward the remains of patients contained within the Cushing Brain Tumor Registry. The Cushing Center will be closed January 8-9, 2024. Starting January 10, 2024 access will change:  Yale students, faculty, and staff may request swipe access to the Cushing Center by registering on this Qualtrics form. Please allow 2 business days for your request to be processed. YNHH employees must register on this Qualtrics form and pick up a pass at the circulation desk. Members of the public are invited to visit the Cushing Center by guided tour only. Tours are available Fridays at 10am and 2pm and by request.   During your visit, please demonstrate respect for the patients and the specimens on display. Photography is not permitted.

Patent Medicines, Medicine Shows, and The Secret Life of Blackface

October 12, 2023 - 3:04pm by Melissa Grafe

Written by Michael Ortiz-Castro, Harvard University Ferenc Gyorgyey/Stanley Simbonis YSM’57 Research Travel Grant recipient, 2023-2024 Medicine shows were grand spectacles—among some of the first large scale, public, and free theatrical venues in the United States. The spectacles were incredibly popular in the U.S., particularly in the South and the West, from the 1870s to about the 1930s, when they were displaced by films and moving images. These shoes were designed to sell patent medicines—tonics, tinctures, and creams akin to today’s “As Seen on TV” medicines. These medications were popular throughout this era, until increased regulation in the early 20th century led to the development of properly vetted medications. Medicine shows, in their attempts to sell to customers, borrowed theatrical elements from other genres such as vaudeville and, significantly, minstrel shows. While historians of medicine who write on the history of these spectacles have noted the show’s problematic usage of images of Native peoples, not many have talked about the usage of blackface elements.[1] The collections at the Medical Historical Library in the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library help historians further interrogate the usage of images of the Other in these shows, and, as I argue in my dissertation, help understand how medicine shows “performed” American identity through their linking of race, prosperity, and health. The 1930 film “The Medicine Man” tells the story of Dr. John Harvey, a traveling salesman who lands in a nameless American town and falls in love with young Mamie, who is abused, along with her siblings, by their domineering German father.  Harvey’s traveling circus attracts the attention of Young Mamie, and the film details their romance and his rescue of Mamie from her father’s plans to marry her off to a rich older German.[2] [3] The movie’s plot is lifted from the traveling show of the same name, which was used to market Pawnee Pepto—a patent medicine that promised to cure all kinds of ailments in its consumers. While the film spends more time on the romance between Dr. Harvey and young Mamie, an informed viewer will see vestiges of the original source within the film—a short scene of Harvey’s presentation in the town, and other characters’ acknowledgement of the impressive “Indian” traveling with him. Consider the film’s official movie poster, which features Jack Benny in the titular role front and center. He is flanked by a motley crew of characters—two women in Hawaiian inspired costume, a man dressed as the devil, and the “Indian”. The film poster, however, when juxtaposed with a shot of the live medicine show, reveals a critical occlusion: a blackface character, who flanks Dr. Harvey on the stage. From the scant archival record, it’s hard to say what role these characters played in the medicine show. Scholars who write on medicine shows have claimed that Native characters associated with patent medicines often served as “verification”—as symbols of unvarnished nature that could speak to the efficacy and “healthiness” of the medicine.[4] What role, then, might have the blackface character have played? Historians of the minstrel genre note that blackface characters allowed white Americans to both reinforce their racist perceptions while also allowing a comical outlet for anxieties and fears over difference and equality (given that minstrel shows became incredibly popular following the Civil War).[5] Positioned alongside the Native figure, the audience might have read the blackface character as “verifying” much like the Native chief. But what did this figure verify? Consider the context of the photo of the live show. The shot captures the climax moment—where Dr. Harvey convinces the young protagonist to run away with him. The characters flank him, like ghosts, reminding the viewer of all the medicine has given him: good health, good morality, and good prosperity. The selling point of the patent medicine was not just that it was good for you—but it could deliver proper health, proper morality, and wealth, the hallmarks of the American “good life”. Other ephemera from the Medical Historical Library’s collections allow us to see how blackface/minstrel characters figured into the cultural life of patent medicines. These advertisements for patent medicines used blackface characters to appeal to white customers’ ideas of domesticity and health. The first ad, for Beecham’s Pills, depicts a black domestic worker, jovially dancing as she holds a small tincture box. The ad’s caption—“What Am Good For De Missus Am Good For Me”—is the ad’s selling point: the black woman’s recognition of the medicine’s value, in her role as the caretaker of the home (the “Mammy” figure), is how the customer comes to understand the value and efficacy of the medicine. Though, as historians have noted, Native peoples were used as symbols of nature that could “verify” the medicine, the deployment of Black bodies as imagery here instead relies on the peculiar domestic relations developed in slavery. That is repeated in the ad on the right, where the prosperous consumer is quite literally “fed” the medicine (here, Sanford’s Ginger) by his stereotypically depicted black servant. The customer’s trust in the medicine comes from the relationship between the white character and his black servant –the servant’s duty and joviality ensure the viewer that the medicine is, indeed, reliable—like the enslaved. These images suggest that patent medicines, medicine shows, and their associated visual ephemera are best understood not merely as deceptive medical ads, but as cultural forms that, like minstrel shows and vaudeville shows, served to make clear certain cultural ideologies of difference and health operative in late 19th century U.S. Patent medicines were attractive as objects precisely because they spoke to some of the major anxieties at play: economic security, good health, and prosperity to come. Though medicine shows remain undertheorized among historians of medicine, these collections allow us to begin to uncover the genre’s relation to other problematic cultural productions active during the era. [1] Tomes, Nancy. 2005. “The Great American Medicine Show Revisited.” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 79 (4): 627-63. https://doi.org/10.1353/bhm.2005.0173.; Armitage, Kevin C. 2003. “Commercial Indians: Authenticity, Nature, and Industrial Capitalism in Advertising at the Turn of the Twentieth Century.” The Michigan Historical Review 29 (2): 70–95. https://doi.org/10.2307/20174034.; Price, Jason. 2011. “'The Best Remedy Ever Offered to the Public': Representation and Resistance in the American Medicine Show.” Popular Entertainment Studies 2 (2): 21–34. [2] The Medicine Man, Directed by Scott Pembroke (Tiffany Pictures, 1930). [3] While the record trail is scant on the medicine show from which the movie derived, historian Irina Podgorny’s “‘Please, Come In’: Being a Charlatan, or the Question of Trustworthy Knowledge” speaks of the show as separate from the film, which implies the existence of the show prior to the movie. [4] Armitage, “Commercial Indians”. [5]“Blackface: The Birth of an American Stereotype.” National Museum of African American History and Culture, November 22, 2017. https://nmaahc.si.edu/explore/stories/blackface-birth-american-stereotype.        

New Exhibition Celebrates 100 Years of Yale School of Nursing

August 24, 2023 - 9:57am by Janene Batten

Yale School of Nursing Centennial (1923 - 2023) On view in the Cushing Rotunda August 18, 2023 - January 14, 2024 Please join us for our newest exhibition celebrating 100 years of the Yale School of Nursing. The core mission of Yale School of Nursing (YSN) is “better health for all people.” As we celebrate YSN's 100th anniversary, we take this opportunity to explore and reflect on the school’s first century. Highlights of this exhibition include the assessment that helped found YSN as a completely new model of nursing education; the immense growth and change across the student population and faculty; the innovative methods of pedagogy and research inside and outside the classroom; a long tradition of community and global service; and a glimpse of the school today. Curated by Janene Batten, Ed.D., MLS; Courtney Brombosz, MLS; and Melissa Grafe, Ph.D. View the full schedule of centennial celebrations on the YSN website.
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