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The Legacy Center Blog

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Equity and DiversityBehind the ScenesHistory of MedicineHomeopathyLearning and TeachingWomen in Medicine
Mary Walker, 1864 (The Legacy Center Archives and Special Collections)

Using stories to tell history

Dr. Mary Edwards Walker was the only woman physician to serve as a surgeon during the Civil War and the first woman to receive the Congressional Medal of Honor. The Legacy Center does not have a collection of her works, but instead holds the Lida Poynter papers, a collection of unpublished research on Dr. Walker. This collection was used for Playing with the Past, a digital toolkit for high school students.

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Pew grant advisory team (The Legacy Center Archives and Special Collections)

Playing with the Past: A Digital History Toolkit

The Legacy Center was awarded a $200,000 grant from the Heritage Philadelphia Program (HPP) of The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage to develop Playing with the Past: A Digital History Toolkit, a web resource intended to make the Legacy Center's rich Women in Medicine collection easily accessible to a new audience of high school students. This blog post details how the subject matter was to be used in the digital toolkit.

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Staff of the Institute for Women's Health and Leadership (The Legacy Center Archives and Special Collections)

Request for Proposals: Anniversary Project (oral histories and calendar)

To help commemorate the Drexel University College of Medicine Institute for Women's Health and Leadership's 20th anniversary, the Institute seeks proposals for a project to honor the history of the Institute through oral histories and a printed calendar.

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"Blackguardism," newspaper clipping from the Evening Bulletin, November 8, 1869 from Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania clipping scrapbook: Volume 1 (The Legacy Center Archives and Special Collections)

“Go tomorrow to the hospital to see the She Doctors!”

The Legacy Center presented a program to students from Springside Chestnut Hill Academy to assist in creating a newspaper based on “The Philadelphia You Never Knew.” The students were presented with "The Jeering Episode," an event that was followed by newspapers in Philadelphia and around the country regarding women medical students attending a medical lecture where the male medical students in attendance weren't so inviting. This blog post explains how the Legacy Center taught the Springside students the importance of bias and perspective and asking questions.

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Student with Dr. Mary Dratman and technicians in the endocrinology lab, 1951 (The Legacy Center Archives and Special Collections)

Mary B. Dratman papers

The Legacy Center received a second donation of papers from Dr. Mary Bagan Dratman, a 1945 graduate of Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania (WMCP). Dr. Dratman taught at WMCP and the University of Pennsylvania and is known for her research in endocrinology.

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Constantine Hering, circa 1850s (The Legacy Center Archives and Special Collections)

19th century homeopathic medicine journal now online

The Legacy Center digitized the Correspondenzblatt der Homoeopatischen Aerzte (Correspondence Paper of Homeopathic Physicians), the first journal published in the United States, where homeopathic practitioners submitted case notes, observations and questions about their patients. The issues were originally in German but have been translated into English; both versions can be found online.

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Matilda Evans, class photo

Two Women, Two Paths

Students at Constitution High School worked with the primary sources of Eliza Grier (Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania graduate of 1897) and Matilda Evans (Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania graduate of 1897) to compare and contrast the lives and careers of the two physicians and to discover how students respond to how history is taught. This blog post describes the different methods used in the lessons and how these methods changed students' responses to the same questions.

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"Any Questions?" - article in the The British Medical Journal (BMJ, Vol. 2, No. 4799, Dec. 27, 1952, pp. 1431-1432. (The Legacy Center Archives and Special Collections)

Schamberg's Well-Known Kissing Party: Mistletoe, syphilis, and other holiday hazards

Syphilis is a disease that can be transmitted through simple affectionate actions such as a kiss. This blog post elaborates on the popularity of this topic in the early 20th century by using student theses from the Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania and Jay F. Schamberg's 1911 article about the risks of holiday kissing.

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Archivist Alex Miller setting up the American Medical Women’s Association and American Women’s Hospital Service exhibit.(The Legacy Center Archives and Special Collections)

Open for Interpretation: Squeezing more use out of our collections

Interpretation, in the context of museum exhibits, refers to the way a museum staff uses artifacts and materials to relay and create a theme or story with an exhibit. This blog post explains why interpretation is so important and how it can be used by archives and museums alike to help people learn about collections. The blog post also announces several new exhibits at the Drexel University College of Medicine Legacy Center Archives.

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