By Matt Richardson, Archivist and Special Collections Librarian.
The McGovern Historical Center invites you to #ColorOurCollections! This week the MHC joins other libraries, archives, and cultural heritage institutions sharing coloring pages created from our historical materials. This is the MHC’s first time joining this annual celebration, which is hosted by The New York Academy of Medicine.
When we learned about this initiative, we were already in the process of digitizing original artwork from the Heart Bulletin, so we knew just where to look for inspiration. While artwork might not be the first thing that comes to mind when you think of a medical archive, the MHC actually has quite a bit. And the magazine illustrations from the Heart Bulletin—as well as its sister publications the Cancer Bulletin and Psychiatric Bulletin—offer some of the most distinctive medical art in our collections.
Beginning in the late 1940s, Houston’s Medical Arts Publishing Foundation sought to create “highly readable pictorial magazine[s]” in order to make specialized medical knowledge more accessible to general practitioners. The publications also highlighted the history and development of their respective specialties. Dr. R. Lee Clark, president of MD Anderson Cancer Research Center (1946-1978), conceived of the enterprise. Joseph F. Schwarting was the Art Director and principal artist; other artists included Eva Marie Schubart, Imelda Schubart, Peter Spier, Jo Spier, George Shackelford, Mary Shackelford, and Joseph Doeve.
While the Heart Bulletin images aren’t online yet (aside from those available as coloring pages), there are several full issues of the Psychiatric Bulletin digitized and available on the MHC collections site.
This year’s coloring pages are taken from artwork that appeared in the Heart Bulletin between 1955 and 1961. On several of the sheets, you can see the publication markings that would have indicated how the image was to be prepared for printing in the magazine.
You can download and print the pages here. We hope you enjoy coloring our collections!
