Levy Library

General Surgery now in UpToDate

UpToDate has announced the addition of a new topic area: General Surgery. UpToDate, the popular provider of clinical topic reviews and evidence-based recommendations, now contains 19 specialties.

UpToDate's newest section covers all areas of General Surgery including abdominal wall and hernia, bariatric and metabolic, breast, burn, colorectal, endocrine, head and neck, pancreatic and hepatobiliary, plastic and reconstructive, skin and soft tissue, thoracic, trauma, upper GI, and vascular surgery. Also included are sections on minimally invasive surgery, as well as anesthesia and analgesia, general surgical principles and surgical quality and safety.

UpToDate claims that: "Beta testing by surgeons has shown that UpToDate answers 94% of general surgeons’ clinical questions and 87% of their surgery-specific questions."

UpToDate is licensed for on-campus use only.

Archives Document of the Week: United Ostomy Association programs from the Albert S. Lyons Papers

Dr. Albert S. Lyons was a gastric surgeon at Mount Sinai with a deep interest in patient-centered care. Committed to helping colostomy and ileostomy patients educate themselves and manage their conditions, in 1951 he established the first hospital clinic for ostomates in this country.  From this grew a club formed by the patients to share information and support amongst themselves.  Dr. Lyons and George Schreiber, MD were the medical advisors to this pioneering patient self-help group.  Lyons later served for many years as the medical advisor to the United Ostomy Association (UOA), an umbrella organization that formed to bring together the many local ostomy societies from throughout North America that were modelled on the original New York club.

Dr. Lyon's papers, now in the Mount Sinai Archives, document his extensive activities on behalf of ostomy patients. They include a large file of publications from ostomy societies across the globe and the official publications and internal correspondence of the UOA. During the UOA’s 43 years of existence, it held conventions in a number of major cities at which ostomy patients could meet to discuss their experiences, hear lectures from eminent surgeons and examine the latest ostomy-related medical hardware.

         

Above Left: Program of the 13th Annual United Ostomy Association conference, Toronto, Canada.
Above Right: Flyer for the 16th Annual United Ostomy Association conference, Dallas, Texas.

A lifelong member of the Mount Sinai community, in 1942 Dr. Lyons was one of the first two graduates from the Hospital’s newly established Department of Surgery residency program. He served as president of the Mount Sinai Alumni in 1969-1970 and received its Jacobi Medallion in 1974.  In addition to his work as a practicing surgeon Dr. Lyons was passionately interested in the history of medicine. He spearheaded the creation of the Mount Sinai Archives and was named the first Hospital Archivist in 1966. After his retirement he continued to pursue his historical research, publishing Medicine: An Illustrated History in 1978 and directing the History of Medicine program at Mount Sinai School of Medicine. He died in 2006.

-Nicholas Webb, Assistant Archivist

From the Archives: Document of the Week - Bad Signs

This entry starts a new series for the Mount Sinai Archives.  Each week (we hope!) we will post some individual item that we have come across that strikes us as historical, interesting, historically interesting, or in this case, weirdly fascinating.  It will be called Document of the Week, using the broadest definition of the word "document": something tangible that records communications or facts.  For our purposes, photographs are documents because they serve to, well, 'document' an instance in time. 

 
 

The photograph above shows two signs found in one of the scrub areas in a Mount Sinai Hospital operating room suite. The photo is not dated, but seems to be from the 1970s or 80s. The sign on top provides important information.  The sign below it strikes us as something that should, perhaps, go without saying....

Rounds on a Gastrointestinal Ward in 1951

 

Rounds are a tradition in medical education: junior doctors present cases and senior doctors expound on them in such a way as to be instructive.  The residents learn, and hopefully the patient benefits by this meeting of the minds. 

The image above shows a combined Department of Medicine and Surgery rounds on a gastrointestinal ward of The Mount Sinai Hospital in 1951.  Such an event would never happen today, primarily for logistical reasons.  And what an event it was, with GI pioneers from both medicine and surgery scattered around the room! 

The man standing in the center in the gray suit with his back to us is Surgeon Ralph Colp. Medicine’s Albert Cornell is the man in the dark suit to Colp’s left.  The man left of center with his hand on his chin is Dr. Burrill B. Crohn, who in 1932 described Crohn’s disease with two surgical colleagues.  Standing next to Crohn in the lab coat is Franklin Hollander, Ph.D., a researcher hired by the Dept. of Surgery to help in basic research in GI disease.  The doctors are grouped around the light box holding the x-rays (with the house staff in short, white coats) and the nurses on the left.  Note that all the Attendings here were on the voluntary staff.  There were very few full-time physicians at Mount Sinai at this time.  The woman in the darker coat on the left is probably a social worker.  The woman in a white coat and no cap may be a dietician.

This is just one of thousands of images in the Mount Sinai Archives.  To see more, search the Image Database found on the Archives' website:  http://mssm-archives.mssm.edu/dbtw-wpd/MtS/

 

 

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!

Access Surgery Now Available

The library now provides AccessSurgery, a comprehensive resource for surgical education.  The counterpart to AccessMedicine, AccessSurgery contains videos of surgical procedures and operations, surgery board review materials, a differential diagnosis tool, searchable core surgery textbooks like Schwartz's Principles of Surgery, Current Surgical Diagnosis & Treatment, Maingot's Abdominal Operations, Zollinger's Atlas of Surgical Operations, Current Consult Surgery, Skandalakis' Surgical Anatomy and more.  To use AccessSurgery, select it from the library's databases page.