Levy Library

Commencement: Endings and Beginnings

This week Mount Sinai School of Medicine holds its 43rd commencement ceremony. Think about it: we use the word commencement - which can mean the beginning of something - to mark the end of our academic training.   So, let's look back 40 years to the beginning of the School and the first time Mount Sinai graduated a group that had spent all four years of their training here. 

When the School first opened in 1968, the administration was honored to be able to recruit both a first year and a third year class. This was in recognition of the many years Mount Sinai faculty had spent teaching the medical students from other schools.  Thus the first commencement ceremony was held in 1970, two years after opening, and marked a milestone for the young school.

 

 

Happy parents after the 1972 commencement ceremony; the Class of 1972 reciting the Hippocratic Oath. [Click on the photo to see a larger image]
    


The 1972 graduation of the first ever first year class was also eagerly anticipated.  The students, faculty, and families gathered at the Hunter College Assembly Hall on June 4th. There were 47 students graduating. (Last year Mount Sinai awarded 249 Masters, Ph.D. and MD degrees.)  The ceremony was led by Hans Popper, MD, Ph.D., the Acting Dean and President who had stepped in when Dean George James had died suddenly in March 1972. Gustave L. Levy, the Chairman of the Boards of Trustees, spoke and also awarded the diplomas.  The commencement address was delivered by Thomas S. Szasz, MD, a well known psychiatrist who discussed the ethics involved in medicine and being a physician.  Jeffrey S. Flier spoke as the Student Representative. (Dr. Flier is today the Dean of Harvard's Medical Faculty.)  It was a momentous occasion for all involved and remains a powerful memory for those who were there.

In many ways, the 1972 commencement marked the end of the beginning for the young medical school, just as all commencements represent an ending and a new beginning for the students themselves. Congratulations to the Mount Sinai School of Medicine Class of 2012!

A Golden Anniversary for Patient Wrist Bands

    The hospital patient ID wrist band is one of those things that everyone recognizes. Show up at any event with one of these on and people immediately know that you have been to the hospital. (And if you are still wearing it out in public, you probably want to share the whole story!)   Although they have certainly evolved and become more high tech over the years, they remain a clearly identifiable object in our society.  But they have not always been a part of hospital life.

    The Mount Sinai Hospital began using the wrist identification on April 2, 1962 - 50 years ago this month. It was such an important change in policy that the Hospital newsletter contained a small blurb about it on the front page: 

Patient ID Bands

Since April 2, all patients admitted to the Hospital are given an identification band, which lists the patient's full name and unit number in the Hospital.  It is put on the patient's right wrist at admission, and assures the proper identication for such procedures as diagnosis, treatments, transportation and transfer.

So, happy birthday to all those plastic bands. Who would have ever guessed that 50 years later they would still be going strong?

Around the Web: The Newton and Einstein Archives

In addition to being a resource for the Mount Sinai community, the Mount Sinai Archives regularly hosts visitors from other institutions who use our extensive collections to do historical research. The records of the Medical Center and the papers of distinguished Mount Sinai physicians are of great interest to scholars, who have used them as primary source material to study a diverse range of topics in the history of science and medicine.

The Mount Sinai Archives, of course, are just one of many repositories holding valuable collections on these topics. A number of institutions are leading the way in making the papers of eminent scientists available on the Web.

The National Library of Israel recently completed a project to digitize a collection of manuscripts by Sir Isaac Newton, the pioneering mathematician and physicist. In addition to his scientific accomplishments, Newton was a serious student of religion. Although himself a Protestant, he became fluent in Hebrew so that he could study the history of ancient Israel from primary sources. His manuscripts on these topics were eventually acquired by Dr. Abraham Yehuda, the distinguished collector of Judaica, and are now housed at the National Library of Israel; as the National Library’s press release notes, “Newton’s diligence and precision is reflected in this research in the same manner it is reflected in his scientific work.”

These newly digitized documents will join a large number of previously scanned Newton manuscripts in being hosted by The Newton Project. This collaborative effort, the project of several institutions, is working towards making the entirety of Newton’s papers available through a single online portal. Since the papers of many major historical figures are scattered across multiple repositories, collaborative efforts such as this one are important part of the project to make the world’s archival heritage easily available to online readers.

Newton is not the only distinguished scientist whose papers are available online. The papers of physicist Albert Einstein, perhaps the twentieth century’s most well-known scientist, are also the subject of a collaborative digitization effort. At Cal Tech, whose library holds a significant collection of Einstein material, scholars have spent many years preparing a scholarly edition of Einstein’s papers. The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, meanwhile, has led the way in scanning material from their own collection of Einstein manuscripts. The recently opened Einstein Archives Online website is a product of the collaboration between these two institutions. Numerous Einstein manuscripts are available for browsing, and new material is regularly being added.

As Newton himself said, “If I have seen further, it is only by standing on the shoulders of giants.” In a world of fast-paced progress in both theoretical and applied science, resources such as these help memorialize the accomplishments of the pioneers whose work paved the way for today’s breakthroughs.

From the Archives: the 160th Anniversary of The Mount Sinai Hospital

 

Click on the image to make a larger version appear.

Free Emergency Care

 

Hospital costs and financing are popular topics these days. There is strong worry about
reduced reimbursements from the government.  Economy is the word of the day and wringing every ounce of revenue out of services is essential.  This makes the decision by The Mount Sinai Hospital Board of Trustees in 1924 to not charge for emergency care all the more astonishing to modern ears.  This quote from the Board minutes from March 2, 1924 lays out the Trustees' thinking:

After due consideration, it was found not feasible to charge for the general run of accident cases.  The matter of charges could not be left to the discretion of a constantly shifting body of nurses, pupil nurses, orderlies and junior interns, who are attendants of the accident wards.  If we want to charge, we will have to have at least two clerks and we do not believe the money received would pay for their salaries.  Besides that, a great many of the cases that are treated are not in a position to pay, a large number being children who hurt themselves while playing and come in unaccompanied.  While a few of the hospitals do make charges, as far as we can learn, the majority do not, and we think the free treatment of accident cases tends to build up a good will towards the hospital, whereas; if we charged a small amount it would not help us much financially and it would be difficult, and in many cases impossible to collect.  We charge for all accidents that are covered by Workmen's Compensation Insurance. 

Everything Old is New Again

On January 12, 2012 the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) issued a report called "Behavioral and Social Science Foundation for Future Physicians."  This states that: "Understanding how lifestyle, behavior, and economic status affect health, and applying this knowledge to medical practice is vital for future physicians."  As always, good ideas are not always new ideas. 

In 1965, Hans Popper, MD, Ph.D. (below) published a paper called "A New Curriculum."¹  This outlined the early plans for the nascent Mount Sinai School of Medicine, set to open in 1968.  Hans Popper was the Dean for Academic Affairs, Chairman of the Pathology Department, and one of the faculty most involved in the School's founding.  In this article he described – very accurately - the directions in which he felt medicine was moving and some goals that a new medical curriculum must pursue.  He noted a "tremendous explosion of information" and that the advance of science was blurring the lines between the basic sciences.  He discussed the rise of "quantitative biology in medicine" and how technology had come to predominate diagnosis and therapy.  He also saw the changing role of the hospital and how medical students needed to be trained in out-patient settings.  Popper also pointed out the importance of community medicine, "which deals not only with continuous or comprehensive family care, but also with the establishment of patterns of medical care by physicians and nonphysican health workers with various levels of training."

Finally, Popper also stated that: "Human studies including social sciences and humanities should broaden the outlook of the specialist who, with the threatened vanishing of the family physician, must be better attuned to the mental and psychological needs of the patient and his family and to the problems of a changing society.  Neither modern technological methods nor multiplication of specialists will replace the continued need of the patient for the consideration of his personal and his family problems."¹  Popper thought the best way to achieve this was to create a small Graduate School for Human Studies that would have departments of sociology, anthropology, economics and psychology.  There might also be small groups in law, art, history, or communications as well.²

Hans Popper's plans were never fully realized but there have been efforts over the years. The School did create a Department of Community Medicine under Kurt Deuschle, the first such department in an urban setting and today's Department of Preventive Medicine.  One of the original divisions of this department was Behavioral Sciences, led by Samuel Bloom, Ph.D., a pioneer medical sociologist.  A separate Human Studies graduate school was never created, but electives in many of these areas have been taught at various times.  Twenty-five years ago, Mount Sinai created the Humanities in Medicine admissions program that recognized the value of students who had been trained in the humanities. 

Perhaps the new AAMC report will induce another look at the value of the humanities in medical education, and the future as envisioned by Hans Popper almost 50 years ago.

 

¹Hans Popper. A New Curriculum. Annals of the NY Acad of Sci, Sept. 27, 1965: v.128, art. 2, p. 552-560. (This is available online to Mount Sinai faculty and staff.)

²Hans Popper. The Mount Sinai Concept.  Clinical Research, 1965: v. 13, p. 500-504.

Mount Sinai Archives joins the NLM Finding Aid Consortium

This past fall the Mount Sinai Archives became a participant in the National Library of Medicine’s Finding Aids Consortium. This resource provides a centralized search portal to the archival collections of major hospitals and medical schools throughout North America. Participants include Harvard, Yale and the University of Pennsylvania as well as Mount Sinai’s New York City peers such as Columbia University and the New York Presbyterian-Weill Cornell Medical Center.

The accessibility of these resources via a single website means that scholars can now search across multiple institutional collections, enabling the simple and efficient discovery of relevant research material. A researcher studying the career of Dr. Abraham Jacobi, for example, would previously have had to search the archives of each institution individually to determine the location of relevant holdings. Now a single search on the Consortium page for “Jacobi” will uncover a wide range of material, including not only the collection of Jacobi’s papers held at the National Library of Medicine but also the many items of correspondence held in collections at other institutions.

Our participation in this consortium will enable scholars throughout the world to more easily discover the valuable historical resources preserved in the Mount Sinai Archives. We expect our participation to attract new patrons to the Archives and enhance our mission of making Mount Sinai’s rich history accessible to scholars and the public.

This Devil's Cauldron of Genius

Every December I create a list of the important anniversaries will occur in the coming year of events that happened at Mount Sinai 25, 50, 100, or even 150 years ago.  These are usually building openings, new programs starting, or organizational changes in structure or leadership.  I also look at what milestone papers were published in those anniversary years to show how Mount Sinai has created new medical knowledge.

While often inspiring, I am always frustrated by how limited a view this is of the institution, especially when it comes to the intellectual activity that has long been part of the environment at Mount Sinai. But how do you get across to people the scientific milieu that led to the greater achievements? 

I realized this year that one of the ways to understand the intellectual environment here at Mount Sinai in the past is to look at a series of volumes that was created by the librarians of the Jacobi Library.  They gathered together the reprints of articles authored by Mount Sinai staff and bound them into thick books, starting with what they could find for 1874 and continuing to 1966.  Reading the list of articles that appears in the front of each volume transports you to a different time.  Some articles seem quaint – “A New and simple method of sterilizing catgut by boiling” (1901) – and others seems current:  “Dynamics and therapy of depressive states” (1937).

So thank you to the nameless librarians and staff that gathered these 12,913 reprints together and typed the lists of articles that allow us to search them.  If you would ever like to spend some time browsing this wonderful series, please contact the Archives about stopping in.  This resource is evidence for why Bernard Simon, MD, House Staff Class of 1942, would call Mount Sinai “this devil’s cauldron of genius, this witches brew of talent”.

Archives of the Oldest Scientific Journal Posted Online

Where did Ben Franklin publish information about his kite flying experiments with electricity?  In the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, of course.  Yesterday the Society announced that all issues from 1665-1945 - including Ben's letter - are now available free online. (You can get access to the newer issues from the Library's E-Journals page.)  The Royal Society is committed to open access and providing information to a broad audience and this is part of their strategy. The Transactions is the oldest scientific journal in the world and was the first peer-reviewed journal. In 1886, science had evolved to such an extent that it became necessary to divide the journal in two. Philosophical Transactions A covers the physical sciences and Transactions B deals with the life sciences. Some of the familiar names you can find here are Sir Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, and William Osler. With a nod to Halloween in a few days, a search of the word 'Monster' returns 55 articles.  Enjoy!

Uniquely Mount Sinai

The Mount Sinai Hospital had a nursing school from 1881-1971, known first as The Mount Sinai Hospital Training School for Nurses and then as The Mount Sinai Hospital School of Nursing.  It is a tradition that every nursing school has its own unique cap and pin.  This is a very old custom that lingers today.  Here you will find pictures of both Mount Sinai’s graduate cap and pin. A nurse was given these when she graduated from our school.  (Students wore a different, plain white cotton cap starched to cardboard-like stiffness.)  They were signs that you were a trained, professional nurse.  We also had a distinctive scotch blue plaid fabric from which our uniforms were made. (See the photo of our Class of 1904.)  The plaid was registered to our school and only we could use it.  We had supply problems in World War II, so we switched to a regular blue plaid after that.  And they say history is boring…..