As an archivist, I am kind of schizophrenic about the web. I fight hard against the easy - and totally wrong - assumption that, "Everything is on the web." NO, it's not. And even though archivists are certainly working hard to put more and more of our primary resources online, at this point we are lucky to make overview descriptions of our collections available, let alone the documents themselves.
Still, there are a lot of neat things out there that are fun to look at. One I just played with is the complete run of LIFE Magazine, made available by Google Books. I did my usual Mount Sinai seach and found a few articles of interest. In the February 10, 1947 issue are photographs taken at Mount Sinai documenting a research project in gastroenterology. The article is called "Inside the Stomach." In the November 2, 1959 issue there is an interesting article on medical costs called "The Challenge of Mounting Expenses." (Very interesting reading to see what they were saying on health care costs 50 years ago.) In this article they use two images taken at Mount Sinai, one showing our new 25 million volt betatron used in treating tumors, and the other showing a man at work in our kitchen. The latter was used to demonstrate the rising cost of hospital personnel. The caption notes that the employee is a $42.50 a week helper, which comes out to $2,210/year if you do the math!
There are also two articles in LIFE Magazine centered around famous Mount Sinai physicians, Drs. Bela Schick (October 28, 1957 issue) and Samuel Rosen (July 27, 1962 issue). Dr. Schick was Director of Pediatrics from 1923-42. He helped establish the concept of allergy (and coined the term), and developed the Schick test that allowed doctors to test for immunity to diptheria. This was the focus of a massive public health campaign in the 1930s, with the tagline of, "Have You Been Schicked?" Dr. Rosen was an otolaryngologist who in 1952 re-discovered and popularized the procedure of mobilization of the stapes to cure deafness in otosclerosis. He also was well known for travelling around the world to study the impact of the sounds of modern society on hearing loss. The LIFE story discusses his trip to Africa to study the hearing of isolated tribes. Rosen also travelled to Georgia in Eastern Europe and was one of the first westerners into China in the early 1970s.
So, while not everything is on the web, thanks Google Books for adding another interesting piece to the puzzle.
