Levy Library

Mount Sinai in LIFE

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.

Clinical Skills Week Resources

Last week was clinical skills week, when we got to meet all of the medical students entering their third year and learning some of the skills they'll need for their clerkships. One of those skills is being able to find the information necessary for patient care, so reference librarians Polly and Laura shared some of their favorite resources. Here they are, with a word about each:

PubMed: What library workshop would be complete with mention of PubMed? (OK, so there are a few). Specifically, remember MeSH searching, Boolean operators and the Limits tab, and try the Clinical Queries tool (found in the blue bar on the left side of the PubMed homepage) when you are looking for research studies for specific question types - e.g., therapy, diagnosis, prognosis, etc.

AccessMedicine, MDConsult, and the E-books database are good sources for textbook-style background information and sometimes images, videos, guidelines and more.

UpToDate (on campus only), eMedicine and PIER are full of clinical topic reviews that combine the latest evidence with expert recommendations.

ACP Journal Club and the Cochrane Library are evidence-based medicine resources: ACP Journal Club provides structured reviews and commentary on selected high-quality articles from 100+ journals, while the Cochrane Library publishes systematic reviews and meta-analyses of highly relevant topics. Search them separately using the above links, or together using EBM Reviews.

And, as always, you can Ask a Librarian. Happy third year!

New: AAP Grand Rounds

Pediatrics types will be interested in our new online resource, AAP Grand Rounds. From the American Association of Pediatrics, AAP Grand Rounds pulls relevant, methodologically sound pediatrics articles from 75 journals. Physicians then summarize and comment on the articles to help you stay abreast of the latest developments in the field. The current issue covers a wide range of topics ranging from maternal influenza vaccination to MRSA in bath water to pediatric injuries from golfballs and inflatable backyard bouncers. Past issues are of course fully searchable. We think of this resource as a pediatrics version of ACP Journal Club, which is also definitely worth a look if you're not familiar with it yet.