History unboxed: Project collects, curates long-cloistered images
Published on Monday, December 16, 2024
By: Gary Pettus, gpettus@umc.edu
Lida Gibson calls the discoveries “pure gold.”
“It’s been like Christmas,” said Gibson, director of the Museum of Medical History at the University of Mississippi Medical Center.
But the “gifts” weren’t found in stockings or wrapped in glossy paper; they came instead in old boxes and more than 150 metal canisters, a trove of Medical Center history and long-hidden memories captured on old video formats and, most notably, 16mm film.
Through an archival project of the Rowland Medical Library at UMMC, the contents of this irreplaceable array have been digitized for viewing and they include the teaching films of one of the Medical Center’s most storied figures, Dr. James Hardy, who performed the world’s first human lung transplant and the world’s first heart transplant from animal to human.
“This may be a unique repository of 20th century surgical films,” said Dr. Ralph Didlake, a retired UMMC surgeon.
“Many of them have not been seen for years,” said Didlake, director of the Center for Bioethics and Medical Humanities, a co-recipient, with the medical library, of National Archives grants that are funding the effort.
“Many of these surgical procedures aren’t done anymore. For someone of my vintage, they are even nostalgic. These are techniques used by people who trained me,” said Didlake, a 1979 graduate of the UMMC School of Medicine.
The digitized films will be available in the library archives and an online repository, a Digital Commons site. They will be accessible to researchers and, in many cases, the general public as part of the project, “Mississippi Medical History Online: The UMMC Digital Collections Initiative.”
Among the recordings are oral histories of seminal Medical Center figures interviewed by another UMMC legend, the late Dr. Julius M. Cruse Jr. His subjects included the renowned physiologist, Dr. Arthur Guyton, who described how he synthesized the human circulatory system on his computer.
So far, the schools of medicine and nursing have contributed more historical materials for digitization and archiving. “The hope is that more schools will respond,” Didlake said, “and we’ll see what can be flushed out of closets.”
Those closets don’t necessarily have to belong to UMMC. One benefactor, for instance, is Jeanette Waits, UMMC professor emeritus of nursing, who retired in 1994 after a 33-year career.
“I was moving, so, I called the Medical Center,” she said. “I had a whole lot of stuff in my house and I really needed to clean it out, but I didn’t want it to get lost.”
Her items – contained in 40-plus, labeled boxes – include an antique “invalid” feeder, which predates IV’s; a Florence Nightingale bust; and a 1960’s recording, “Listen to the Love,” written by a nursing student and used as a recruiting tool.
All that, and much more, is potential exhibit material for the museum, which is set to open in early 2025.
As for the films, more than 450 have been digitized, said Misti Thornton, archive librarian and associate professor of academic information services; she came across a handful of momentous recordings at least a decade ago.
“I was just poking around in our archives and found four of Dr. Hardy’s 16mm films,” Thornton said. “One was of the heart transplant and another was of the lung transplant.”
The films were sent to a company in Hollywood, California, for digitization. But there were no more funds available to continue the work, even though subsequent searches turned out more discoveries in campus closets, crannies and nooks.
Then, in 2023, a grant of $1.09 million arrived from the National Archives; it was followed by another, three-year, $2.8 million award this year. Both are for preserving and making publicly available historical records or collections.
“A lot of the focus is digitizing UMMC history – videos, photos, as well as papers and so forth that have not been made available to the public yet,” said Elizabeth Hinton, director of the medical library, which is displaying some of the museum’s exhibit cases.
“Some of the films we’ve found were not well-preserved since their canisters had been stored in closets that were not climate-controlled. Now, they are in the climate-controlled archives of the library.”
It was the march of progress, perhaps, that had trampled them into decades-long obscurity; they became outdated – in content and format. But their current caretakers are giving them new life.
An audio and film preservation company whose clients include the Library of Congress was tasked with digitizing the historical films: George Blood, LP, located in Fort Washington, Pennsylvania.
“They came out beautifully,” Hinton said. “It was an amazing job.”
At one point, Gibson visited the company’s facilities and met its founder, she said. “George Blood excused himself when some surgical films were being screened. He said, ‘I can’t handle blood.’”
Fortunately, Hardy could.
The surgeon used his own filmmaker to record his procedures in color. “Color photography says more about the anatomy than black-and-white ever could,” Didlake said.
Hardy used the images to teach his residents and to show at medical conferences around the world.
“The quality of the filmmaking was ahead of its time compared to other teaching hospitals,” said Gibson, whose background is in filmmaking and multimedia production. “Some films included synched audio or narration, and even graphics.
“I’m so impressed with the pacing, the writing. But, because new video formats came along and made 16mm film obsolete, there are some images that nobody had looked at, probably since the late 1980’s.”
Obsolete, maybe, but not irrelevant, Didlake said. “They’re useful for the documentation of surgical history; also, I can’t see how young trainees wouldn’t benefit by seeing surgery performed this way – to see the anatomy displayed in another way.
“The hope also is to produce a digital transcript for the digitized films, which will make them highly valuable to historians in the future.”
Especially valuable are the ones of Hardy’s history-making transplants, the ones Thornton unearthed years ago. Those are in the Hardy collection, which includes napkins, church bulletins and other scraps of paper he took notes on and a letter he wrote to his mother proudly announcing his acceptance as a resident to the University of Pennsylvania.
“All of this material is fascinating,” Thornton said. “It can also be intimidating.”
Also moving, Didlake said. Especially some of the images recorded long ago.
“I saw on film people I hadn’t seen in a long time,” he said. “I saw contemporaries of mine who are no longer with us. But there they are, in living color.
“Clearly, it’s going to be emotional for a lot of people, seeing old colleagues and friends who have passed away.”
To inquire about donating materials to the library archives or the museum, contact Elizabeth Hinton at ehinton@umc.edu, or Misti Thornton at mthornton@umc.edu.