Duke Medical Center Library & Archives News Tag: archives

The Medical Center Archives is always happy to welcome researchers to view materials in our reading room, but we recognize that it is not always possible for everyone to visit our physical location! The Archives has a variety of online resources to help users learn about the collections and the Medical Center’s history. One particularly great resource that we would like to highlight is digitized issues of Intercom. 

Duke Medicine’s primary news publication from 1953 to 1986, the Intercom featured information about campus construction and events, faculty and staff news, facts and figures, and articles about medical research and innovations at Duke. The first 25 years of the publication were digitized by the…

Categories: Explore Tools

Tags: archives

Every October, the Society of North Carolina Archivists celebrates Archives Month! This year’s theme, What Puts You on the Map?, brings to mind Duke University Medical Center’s SEDO system, a wayfinding system rolled out in 1971 that left its mark on the hospital. 

On March 5, 1971, a special issue of Intercom, the hospital’s weekly bulletin, devoted three of its four pages to the implementation of the new System of Environmental Direction and Orientation, or SEDO. SEDO was a mid-century modern wayfinding system based on eight color zones and hanging…

Categories: Resource Updates

Tags: archives

It Came from the Archives! Halloween Highlights from the Duke Medical Center Archives

Location: Medical Center Library & Archives, Level 1

Date: Thursday, October 31, 11am – 2pm

Please join us for the Duke University Medical Center Archives’ annual Halloween event! This casual open house event will feature a selection of odd, intriguing, and significant materials from our collections. 

All are invited to drop in to view detailed medical illustrations, touch old medical instruments, explore forgotten stories from the history of Duke Health, and much more. 

Come by for a fun break to learn some history and…

Categories: Events

Tags: archives

September 15 to October 15 is National Hispanic American Heritage Month or Latinx Heritage Month. The theme of this year’s celebrations at Duke is “Our Roots, Our Future.” As custodians of institutional history, we particularly want to highlight the contributions of the Latinx community throughout the history of Duke Health. We invite you to check out some of the resources below from our Archives collections to learn more this month!

Alejandro Barbagelata Oral History Interview  
Dr.…

Categories: Resource Updates

Tags: archives, hispanic heritage month

Agents of Change: Portraits of Activism in the History of Duke Health is an oral history project documenting the work of activists and "change agents" throughout Duke Health’s history. This year-long project team was organized as part of the Bass Connections program and one of four teams connected to the Duke Centennial. Our team was led by Dr. Jeff Baker, Director of the Trent Center for Bioethics, Humanities & History of Medicine and Professor of Pediatrics and History and Rebecca Williams, Archives Librarian. Jonathan Pyka, Sara Spicer, and Lucy Zheng were the graduate team members. Gemma Holland, Ava Meigs,…

Categories: Exhibits

Tags: archives, duke history

Lucy Waldrop, Associate University Archivist, Medical Center Archives

The Duke University Medical Center Archives is happy to announce that the collection of papers of Dr. Onyekwere E. Akwari (1942-2019), a Nigerian-American and the first African-American surgeon on the faculty at Duke University, has been processed and is open for research.

The collection documents the professional career and personal activities of Akwari and includes but is not limited to; correspondence; printed materials; datebooks, memorabilia, scrapbooks, certificates, and other…

Categories: Resource Updates

Tags: archives

Calling all students!

As we approach the end of the academic year, we invite you to share your experiences and perspectives for preservation in the Duke Medical Center Archives. We want to collect documentation of students’ experiences before this history is lost to memory.

We have a short form that asks some reflective questions about your experiences as a health professional student during a worldwide pandemic. It also provides a place for you to upload photographs, videos, or audio recordings that document your year.

These questions are designed to be flexible and are all optional. Your answers will go directly to the Archives and not to school administrators or faculty. You may also choose…

Tags: archives, duke history, COVID-19

With the events of the past year, it has probably become clichéd to say that “we are living in historic times”. However, as we celebrate Black History Month this year, the reality of systemic racism and injustice is forefront in many of our minds. An important first step to addressing systemic racism is learning more about how race and racism is embedded in our history, including that of Duke Health.  The Duke University Medical Center Archives seeks to preserve materials that document the history of Duke Health and make them available for research and education. For example, we have been actively capturing and preserving the 2020 Moments to Movement programs… MORE

Categories: Exhibits

Tags: archives, black history month

Do you miss meeting and studying in the Medical Center Library? We sure do! Instead, we are all spending a lot of time on Zoom these days. Changing your background is a great feature to hide a messy house, block that roommate in profile in the background, or just to express your own creativity and personality.

We have created several free virtual background templates for you to download and use. They feature images from the Medical Center Library and surrounding campus areas from the very beginning of the hospital up until now. We hope you enjoy them!

You can click on any of the images below to enlarge and save to your computer or you can download them directly from this Box folder. …

Categories: Explore Tools, Resource Updates

Tags: Zoom, archives

COVID-19 has changed and disrupted our lives, at Duke and around the world. On campus, most students have returned home, classes are online, and all events are cancelled. Many staff are working from home; others that are deemed essential continue to work on campus. The hospital is preparing for an influx of people infected with COVID-19. Duke researchers are trying to find ways to fight the disease, from identifying treatments to creating better protective equipment.

And we all live with the fear of the physical impact of the virus, both for ourselves and our families.

The Duke University Archives and the Duke University Medical Center Archives have been hard at work to document this unique time in history. We have been capturing all of the news alerts, email updates…

Categories: Alerts, Events

Tags: COVID-19, archives, coronavirus

African American History at Duke Medicine, a guide produced by Medical Center Archives, aims to introduce researchers to materials documenting the history of African American faculty, students, and staff at Duke Medicine. Included are oral histories, archival collections, photographs, audiovisual materials, and publications, selected key dates and key figures, and links to recommended digital resources.

Categories: Explore Tools, Resource Updates

Tags: archives, black history month

This look back at DUMC history features Duke’s Licensed Practical Nursing (LPN) program. When it began in 1948, there were already several others in the state. Duke’s was unique, however, as it was the only one in North Carolina established exclusively for training African-American nurses.

The program, known as the Practical Nurse School at Hillside High School, was a collaborative effort between Duke University Hospital, the Durham City Schools, and the North Carolina Department of Vocational Education and was established to address the area’s shortage of professional nurses. The idea was that trained LPNs would be a means of improving bedside care, as they could take over the duties that might have been previously handled by a nurse’s…

Tags: archives, black history month

Duke Medicine’s primary news publication from 1953 to 1986, the Intercom, is available online. It features information about campus construction and events, faculty and staff news, facts and figures, and articles about medical research and innovations at Duke.

The Archives collaborated with the North Carolina Digital Heritage Center on this project, who digitized the first 25 years of the publication, making more than 500 issues available online. They can be accessed via MEDSpace, the Duke Medicine digital repository,…

Categories: Resource Updates

Tags: archives

While Duke Gardens is one of the most recognized destinations on campus, it’s less well known that the attraction’s origins can be traced back to the medical campus.

The gardens were the idea of Dr. Frederic Hanes (pictured right), a physician who joined Duke in 1930 and became chair of the Department of Medicine in 1933. His daily walks on campus often led him past a debris-filled ravine, the result of a stalled project to create a lake. An avid horticulturist, Hanes had thought that this would be a perfect site for a garden featuring his favorite flower, the iris.

In 1934 Hanes persuaded Sarah Pearson Angier Duke, widow of Benjamin Duke, one of the university’s founders, to donate $20,000 for the…

Tags: archives

A good mystery novel, at its core, consists of interesting characters, a compelling plot, and puzzle-solving.  In these respects, the job of an archivist mirrors that of a detective, as the archivist must reconstruct the pasts of people or objects from fragments of information.  While such mysteries come in a variety of forms, the most common is determining the history, or provenance, of an item or collection.  

Recently a series of paintings in the Medical Center Library’s Artwork Collection posed such a challenge.  The paintings, done in 1944 by Frank Beresford, depict scenes of the U.S. Army 65th General Hospital Unit at work during World War II in the Eastern Theater of Operations (E.T.O.).  Absent from the Library’s inventory…

Tags: archives