In honor of Hispanic Heritage Month, we are featuring an oral history from our collections with Dr. Alejandro Barbagelata.
Dr. Barbagelata is an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Medicine and Cardiology at Duke University and a member of the Duke University Cooperative Cardiovascular Society (DUCCS) Board of Directors. He was interviewed by Jessica Roseberry on March 26, 2007. In the oral history interview, Barbagelata discusses the Duke Cardiovascular Databank and subsequent variations at Favaloro Clinic in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
When describing the challenges of establishing the Latino version of the Duke Databank, he shares:
“The first one was the language. I mean, we’re Spanish-speakers. So we had to create a databank to implement in Buenos Aires in a Spanish-speaking institution. The second challenge was… my interaction with the computer people. So we are talking about ’92, ’93, when the Internet was there, but nobody used it, nobody was really—I mean, today it’s used daily. But at that time even in Argentina, it didn’t exist yet. But then we had to create computerized stuff. So I had to interact with the computer people, which is a different language, too. And statisticians.”
To read the full interview transcript, visit MedSpace. To learn more about other oral histories, please contact the Archives.