Pulse
Protecting the Past
The University of Minnesota’s Academic Health Center is making sure its history won’t be lost.
Eighty-two feet below ground, in a cavernous warehouse attached to the Elmer L. Andersen Library on the University of Minnesota campus, Erik Moore pauses next to one of the many rows of shelves stacked with boxes. He points out several labeled “Owen Wangensteen Correspondence,” then others filled with records from the department of surgery during Wangensteen’s nearly 40-year tenure as chair. Those same shelves hold materials from Theodore Olson, a faculty member in the School of Public Health and author of The Scientific Dictionary, a reference used by students from the 1950s through the 1970s, and the constitution, meeting minutes, and yearbooks of Alpha Epsilon Iota, a women’s medical fraternity that dissolved in the 1980s.
The materials are part of the University of Minnesota Archives, 16,000 linear feet of institutional and historical materials, and just a sampling of what Moore has gathered since he started working in 2006 as project director and archivist for the Academic Health Center (AHC) History Project, a collaborative effort of the AHC and the University Libraries. “There is so much about the university that people are unaware of,” Moore says. “Part of what we do here is preserve that history so others can discover it as well.”
Safeguarding the stories about events leading up to the creation of the AHC in 1970 and its evolution over the past 40 years is the aim of Frank Cerra, M.D., the university’s senior vice president of health sciences, who established the History Project with funds from his McKnight Presidential Leadership Chair award. “We have a very full and rich history, that is unfortunately, not very visible or connected to us in our daily lives,” he wrote in a 2007 letter to colleagues soon after the project was launched.
“Dr. Cerra came to the university in the 1980s. He obviously has gained a good understanding of how the university works, but he could see that other people around him didn’t have that sense of history,” Moore explains. “Also with people getting older and passing away, I think he realized that many institutional memories were in danger of being lost.” The ultimate goal of the project, he says, is to find, catalog, store, and make the materials available to historians, scholars, and the public.
Following the Paper Trail
Moore spent his first year on the job getting a sense of the AHC, which is made up of the schools and colleges of medicine, nursing, public health, dentistry, veterinary medicine, and pharmacy—and related programs, and figuring out what had trickled into the archives over the years, what people were using, what else they might find useful, and how accessible the materials were. The next challenge was getting out the word that he was looking for papers, records, minutes, photos—anything anyone thought might be of value to the collection.
Moore started a blog about six months into his work in which he describes some of the more interesting items he has found. Between Cerra’s announcement of the project and Moore’s blog, calls started coming from people who had stories to tell and materials to donate. Moore says one of the highlights so far was spending time with Neal Gault, M.D., who served as dean of the medical school from 1972 to 1984. Gault provided Moore with papers about
| To read Erik Moore’s blog about some of his discoveries, go to http://blog.lib.umn.edu/moore144/ahcarchives/ or follow ahcarchives on Twitter. If you have historical documents you would like to donate to the AHC History Project or stories to share, contact Moore at moore144@umn.edu or 612/625-4665 or Dominique Tobbell, Ph.D., at dtobbell@umn.edu or 612/626-5114. |
his administrative and professional activities including a report on his trip to China in 1979 as part of a delegation from the university, in which he shared his impressions of the country following the Cultural Revolution and its “kind and gracious” citizens. After Gault died in 2008, his family passed along more of his personal papers and writings.
Other memorable finds include a small box that came from Erwin Schaffer, D.D.S., a former School of Dentistry dean, that contained a full set of adult teeth; a locked box labeled “VPHS Search 1981-82” that included applicant information from the first open search for the vice president for health sciences position; and a box of eight-inch floppy discs whose content may be lost to history because the technology no longer exists to access it.
One of Moore’s most serendipitous discoveries was a set of 26 three-ring binders found in the basement of the Children’s Rehabilitation Center that contains the University Hospital and Clinics Board of Governors’ minutes from 1975 through 1997, the year the hospital was sold to Fairview. Six months later, he got another call about a filing cabinet in Diehl Hall, where the board met, that was filled with the hospital’s annual reports, the board’s correspondence, and other materials. “Two different people in two different locations led me to almost a full record of the board’s activities,” he says. “It’s fun to see how this stuff can be found.”
Today Moore splits his time between an office on the East Bank of the campus and a corner of a room in the Andersen Library on the West Bank answering reference questions, processing documents, and overseeing long-term projects such as the digitization of documents (they digitized 80,000 pages in the first year—far more than the 15,000 he initially thought they would do). But not long after the project began, he and Cerra realized the physical documents Moore was collecting told only part of the story.
The Stories Behind the Story
What was missing from the History Project was a sense of the people who made the AHC what it is. In late 2008, the university hired Dominique Tobbell, Ph.D., to capture the stories behind the papers. “The great thing about oral history is that you have this opportunity to fill in the gaps left by the documentary records. You get to personalize those historical narratives,” she says. “And in many cases, you discover new material that you otherwise wouldn’t have access to.”
Tobbell and Moore feed off each other, with Moore passing along names of people with stories to share and Tobbell talking to people who have documents to pass along. “By having her on the project, so many more bases are covered,” Moore says.
As of January, Tobbell had conducted interviews with 10 people who were affiliated with the dean’s office in the College of Medical Sciences in the 1960s, or were former medical school department heads or private practitioners who worked with the university during the 1950s and ’60s.
Their stories are adding depth and nuance to what is already known. For example, Ellis Benson, M.D., who joined the laboratory medicine and pathology department in the 1950s and was its head from the 1960s through the 1980s, told about their efforts to gather blood for the innovative cardiac surgeries being done by C. Walton Lillehei, M.D., and Richard Varco, M.D. “Surgeons used a lot of blood during these procedures, and a couple of times, the blood bank ran out of blood,” says Tobbell, who also is an assistant professor in the history of medicine program. “Dr. Benson told wonderful stories about how the surgeons would organize blood drives and hundreds of people would come to donate blood, backing up traffic around the university. It’s a side of Minnesota’s cardiac surgery program that isn’t well-known.”
Interviews with Robert Howard, M.D., who served as dean of the College of Medical Sciences at the time, gave insight into the challenges of establishing the AHC. “There was a lot we didn’t know about this transformation and why Dean Howard didn’t continue at the institution after the transformation took place,” Tobbell says. She learned from him and others that he tried to limit the amount of money clinical faculty could earn in private practice after concerns surfaced about faculty spending too much time practicing medicine and not enough teaching. “That raised the ire of many of the clinic faculty, especially those in the most lucrative specialties,” she says. “This stymied many of his other efforts to create change in the medical school.”
In addition to talking with leaders from the various schools, Tobbell plans to interview people who were involved in their day-to-day operations. “By doing an oral history, you get to talk to a lot of people who weren’t represented in the written record,” she says.
Moore says interest in the AHC’s historical collection has been growing. “Graduate students, writers, historians—people come from around the country to use it,” he says, adding that once the oral histories are added to the archives, they’ll draw even more interest. “Ultimately, our goal is to create a better institutional understanding of the Academic Health Center,” he says. “The university wouldn’t be the place it is without the health sciences.”—Kim Kiser