We are open for on-site research for Duke affiliates by appointment only on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Please use our online request form or email to schedule an appointment or get remote reference help. You can learn more about our current services here: https://archives.mc.duke.edu/blog/archives-reading-room-now-open-appoint...
The Archives is pleased to spotlight our recently reprocessed Richard S. Lyman Papers. Dr. Richard S. Lyman was the founding chairman of Duke’s Department of Psychiatry in 1940, and his long career included widespread international research, projects with the United States Military, and service on the staff of North Carolina’s Highland Hospital. To learn more about Highland Hospital, visit the finding aid to the Highland Hospital Records. Materials in the collection date from 1927 to 1957.
Dr. Lyman began his medical career with an eye toward international research. Less than a decade after his 1921 graduation from Johns Hopkins...
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In honor of Black History Month, we are featuring Dr. Brenda Armstrong. From student activist to Senior Associate Dean for Student Diversity, Recruitment, and Retention, Dr. Armstrong left behind a legacy of almost half a century of service to Duke and the wider medical community.
Dr. Armstrong was born in Rocky Mount, NC on January 19, 1949. In high school she chose not to attend an exclusive New England private school and instead attended Rocky Mount’s segregated Booker T. Washington Senior High School. Despite the school board’s belief that none of their students would attend college, teachers at Booker T. Washington Senior High taught her and more than forty other students college readiness courses like calculus and trigonometry and ensured that they were prepared to take...
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This past spring, the Duke University Medical Center Archives (DUMCA) received a 2018 North Carolina Preservation Consortium (NCPC) Preservation Grant. This grant provided half the funds to purchase a Nilfisk Museum Vacuum Cleaner for collection care. The other half of the funds came from the DUMCA. The Nilfisk Museum Vacuum Cleaner is a HEPA vacuum. HEPA is an acronym for high-efficiency particulate air. A HEPA vacuum is a vacuum with a HEPA filter. This type of filter works by forcing air through a fine mesh that traps harmful particles caused by mold, dust, frass, and other fine debris.
All of the DUMCA’s collections were the focus of this grant. As an archival repository, the DUMCA regularly receives materials from the departments we serve, as well as individuals...
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The Medical Center Archives is happy to announce that the Shirley K. Osterhout Papers are processed and open for research. The collection contains educational materials related to Osterhout’s career at the Duke University Poison Control Center.
Osterhout received her MD from Duke University in 1957. Following graduation, she completed her residency in the Department of Pediatrics at Duke, working closely with Dr. Jay Arena on poison control issues. Arena founded the Duke Poison Control Center in 1953. It was the second such center in the United States. This collection complements the...
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This is the third blog post in a three part series about processing digital files. See the following links for Part 1 and Part 2.
Over the course of this past year, the Duke University Medical Center Archives (DUMCA) began addressing our digital files backlog by identifying and adding these digital files to the collections to which they belong. This process has uncovered materials current Archives staff were unaware of, introducing us to new stories about Duke and Duke Alumni.
When appraising digital files located in the backlog (for more...
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The Duke University Medical Center Archives is happy to announce that new additions to the Edward C. Halperin Papers are open for research. Halperin served on the Duke faculty for twenty-three years as a professor and chairperson of the Department of Radiation Oncology, vice dean of the School of Medicine, and associate vice chancellor. Types of materials in this collection include his correspondence, grant applications, a cassette tape, articles, and reports. The majority of these materials relate to Halperin’s extensive research and writings on ethics and the history of racial, religious, and gender discrimination in medicine and higher education. This collection includes research materials from 1961 and 1973, but...
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The Medical Center Archives is happy to announce an addition to the Department of Surgery Records. The collection documents the administrative functions of the Department of Surgery and includes records from the Department of Orthopaedic Surgery and the Division of Cardiothoracic Surgery. The new additions to the collection are group photographs of surgical staff from 1964 to 1994 and portraits of past students from 1930 to 2004. The majority of the portraits have handwritten inscriptions written by the students to department administrators and professors.
To learn more about these materials, visit the...
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This is the second blog post in a three part series about processing digital files. See the following link for Part 1 and Part 3.
The Duke University Medical Center Archives (DUMCA) recently began processing the files in our digital files backlog, which goes back to 2009. While the backlog was created in 2009, the files date from the mid-1990s to the present. These files are a mixture of born-digital (records created in a digital format) and digitized (records originally created on paper and converted into a digital format). The...
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The Medical Center Archives is happy to announce that the Charles and Peggy Hammond Papers are processed and open for research. Interested researchers should contact the Medical Center Archivist before use. The collection is organized into the following series: Conference Materials, 1976-2007; Correspondence, 1956-2006; Personal, 1985-2005; Photographic Materials, 1978-2005; Printed Materials, 1978-2008.
Charles Bessellieu Hammond was born on July 24, 1936 in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. He graduated from Duke with a BS in 1960 and a MD in 1961. Hammond joined the Duke faculty in 1968 and served as chairperson...
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As Archives Month comes to a close, we bring you the second part of our two part blog series answering questions asked by our two interns. Read part 1 here.
Caroline Waller: "I would like to know more about the history of the [Duke University Medical Center] archives, like when/why/where was it founded.”
The Archives was formally established in 1977 through the efforts of Elon H. Clark, Barnes Woodhall and G.S.T. Cavanagh, with support from the Mary Duke Biddle Foundation; however informal efforts to collect materials documenting the history of Duke Medicine existed well before this time. An October 1965 article published in the...
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Location: Medical Center Library & Archives, Level 2, Room 212E
Date: Wednesday, October 31, 11am – 2pm
In honor of Archives Month in October, the Duke University Medical Center Archives is hosting its fifth annual Halloween event at the Medical Center Library & Archives featuring a selection of eerie, fascinating, and rarely seen materials from their collections. Brave souls are invited to gaze upon spine-chilling artwork, stare into the faces of frightening death masks, behold macabre medical artifacts and instruments, and...
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Today is #AskAnArchivistDay! While the Duke University Medical Center Archives (DUMCA) doesn’t have a Twitter account, we do have a blog and two very curious archivists-in-training (interns). For this two part blog series, we asked each of our interns for a question.
McKenzie Long: This is super general, but when I first started in archives I wanted to know how we decide what to keep when we're looking at a new accession. Like how do we decide what's historically relevant/in the scope of the archives enough for us to add it to the archives?
It depends.
There are a lot of factors that are part of deciding whether items should be accepted or not at an archives, and, while most of this decision making is done before the materials are...
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McKenzie Long joined the Archives staff as an intern in July. She received degrees in English and History from the College of William and Mary. Currently, she is working towards a Masters of Library and Information Science from UNC-Chapel Hill and expects to be finished in 2020. After graduation, she hopes to continue working in Archives.
McKenzie developed an interest in archives as an undergraduate when she worked in Special Collections at the College of William and Mary. McKenzie is passionate about history, and working with materials from the past like photographs, maps, and letters allows her to constantly discover, explore, and learn. As the Archives Intern, working in an archives also gives her the opportunity to help preserve and make archival materials accessible to...
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While we always welcome visitors to our physical location, the Archives has a variety of online resources to help users learn about the collections and the Medical Center’s history. The resources listed below can all be found or linked to elsewhere on our website, but they are grouped here together for your convenience.
MEDSpace – If you’re looking for historic images, our digital repository, MEDSpace, is an excellent place to start. MEDSpace contains nearly 700 photographs documenting the history of Duke Medicine. You can also find early publications, medical illustrations and artwork, and medical artifacts.
Digitized Intercom – The Intercom, Duke Medicine...
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The Medical Center Archives is pleased to announce that the Durham-Orange County Medical Society Auxiliary Scrapbooks are open for research. The Durham-Orange County Medical Society Auxiliary was initially organized in 1930 to oversee the entertainment of the wives of the doctors attending that year’s North Carolina Medical Society meeting in Durham. After the meeting, the auxiliary was inactive until 1944, when 26 doctors’ wives from Durham and Orange Counties formally organized the group and expanded its mission. The objectives of the Auxiliary was to assist the Durham-Orange County Medical...
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