Duke Medical Center Library & Archives

David Coston Sabiston, Jr., MD

This exhibit highlights Dr. David C. Sabiston's career and contributions to medicine. Dr. Sabiston's teaching skills were legendary and he had a profound effect on surgical education. He was a gifted clinical surgeon and made major contributions to the understanding of coronary artery blood flow.

Demystify Our Images

Duke Medical Center Library & Archives and the Duke Medical Alumni Association are asking you to help enrich our understanding of people, places, and events in the history of the School of Medicine, School of Nursing, and Duke University Hospital. The Archives' collections include a number of photographs which do not have all of the people, events, or dates identified. Accurate documentation will enable us to fill in historical gaps regarding Duke Medicine and to more fully assist researchers who rely upon the Archives for images and information about Duke Medicine's past.

Duke Poison Control Center: A Retrospective Exhibit

This exhibit highlights the Duke Poison Control Center, an official entity from 1954-1995. The leaders in the Duke Poison Control Center have had a profound impact on their field locally and nationally. From the design of the safety cap to community outreach and education, the Duke center has always been at the forefront of poison prevention and safety issues.

Improving Patient Care by Capturing Computerized data

This online exhibit documents the Duke Databank for Cardiovascular Disease. The databank itself was created through the vision of Dr. Eugene Stead, chair of the Duke Department of Medicine from 1946 to 1967. When the Department of Medicine received a MIRU [myocardial infarction research unit] grant to place a computer on the CCU [cardiac care unit] to monitor cardiology patients, it soon became clear that the nurses on the CCU were more valuable to the project than the computer. Dr. Stead, however, still saw the worth of computers in medicine, and foresaw that they could become an intricate part of patient care. His vision was that the computer be used hospital-wide as a "computerized textbook of medicine," replacing a doctor's fallible memory of how to treat a condition or disease with a computer's infallible memory of each patient treated in the hospital.

Rescue and Recovery of the USS Squalus

This exhibit documents the rescue and recovery attempts undertaken after the sinking of the USS Squalus on May 23, 1939. Items digitized in this exhibition are taken from materials donated to the Duke Medical Center Library & Archives by the family of Dr. Charles W. Shilling. The items are divided into 3 sections: I. Images used by Dr. Shilling during his numerous talks and speeches regarding the rescue and recovery of the USS Squalus, II. Firsthand narrative of the rescue of the 33 survivors provided by Dr. Shilling, and III. Images documenting the recovery of the USS Squalus prior to towing to the Portsmouth Navy Yard.

Women in Duke Medicine: An oral history exhibit

This is an exhibit highlighting women in Duke Medicine. The purpose of the exhibit is both to look at the stories of individual women and to also go deeper into the context in which those stories took place. This exhibit includes women from multiple fields at Duke Medicine. Many of these women were pioneers or in some way firsts in those disciplines, so each has a unique historical perspective.