Levy Library Blog

On May 26, 1974, Vice President Gerald R. Ford was the principal speaker at the dedication of Annenberg Building, the home of the then new Mount Sinai School of Medicine. This celebration marked the culmination of two decades of work by Mount Sinai trustees and staff to raise the $152 million necessary to hire the faculty, create the curriculum, build the needed facilities and then find students willing to come to a new school with new ideas on medical education. The building was named for the Annenberg family because the eight children of Mrs. Moses (Sadie) Annenberg were early supporters of the fund raising campaign that created the School. The building was built to house the School of Medicine, but ultimately also had important spaces for The Mount Sinai Hospital, as well.

When the Annenberg Building opened, it had all the latest in technology, including ‘playback equipment for taped teaching aids’ and overhead closed circuit televisions. The Hospital side boasted a “computerized drug profile” for each patient and an automated medical record retrieval system. The radiology equipment was the latest, including a new ultrasound machine capable of displaying the anatomy of heart valves.

In his address, Ford said (as quoted in the NY Times), “I believe that cooperation and compromise are the only means by which our form of government – in this field and others – can move ahead successfully.” He had “hope and belief” that a national health insurance program would be enacted later in 1974.

In less than three months, Gerald Ford became President of the United States when Richard Nixon resigned. He had not mentioned Nixon’s name in his speech at Mount Sinai.

A new service under the recently formed Instructional Technology Group (ITG) brings Academic Medical Illustration (AMI) to the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai community.  Myself and Courtney McKenna bring over twenty years of experience in medical illustration to ISMMS though the merger with Continuum Health Partners.

You might be asking at this point, “Exactly what is Academic Medical Illustration?” Academic Medical Illustration is a visual teaching tool for communicating medical and scientific concepts. The audience for academic medical illustration varies: from a medical student studying anatomy, to a surgeon discovering the latest technique, to a basic scientist researching molecular structures and processes. Academic medical illustrations enhance all manner of educational materials, including textbooks, journals, websites, in-person lectures and online courses.

Seen here are a couple examples of recent illustrations. For more information on enlisting the department’s services, please contact Jill Gregory, AMI manager, at jgregory@chpnet.org .We look forward to sitting down with you and hearing about your interesting project.

Jill Gregory
Manager, Academic Medical Illustration
Academic Informatics and Technology (AIT)
Instructional Technology Group (ITG)

This summer marks the centennial of the beginning of the First World War, sparked in June 1914 by the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand.

When the United States entered the war in 1917, the U.S. Army called on American hospitals to enlist their doctors and nurses to serve the war effort. Members of the Mount Sinai staff were organized as U.S. Army Base Hospital No. 3 and stationed at Vauclaire, a fourteenth-century monastery in southern France that had been converted to a hospital.

Two of the display cases highlight Mount Sinai’s Base Hospital No. 3. The third case features pages from a scrapbook created by Marion Moxham, RN, a graduate of the Mount Sinai Training School for Nurses. She started at Base Hospital No. 3 and was then transferred to units in Germany. Her scrapbook provides a fascinating look at life in the Army medical services during World War I.

A page from the Moxham scrapbook. Note the memo from the Chief Nurse top left: “Nurses are not allowed to dance outside of their own hospital”.

This exhibit of material from the Mount Sinai Archives demonstrates how the hospital responded to one of the twentieth century’s first major crises. Twenty-five years later, with the outbreak of the Second World War, the government would once again ask The Mount Sinai Hospital to form and support an Army unit.