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Thingamajig

by Alethea Drexler, archives assistant mcgovern@exch.library.tmc.edu We haven’t had a Thingamajig in awhile but, luckily, we just got a new donation, and new donations often mean new mystery objects.  We can thank the estates of Drs. Robert G. McCorkle, junior and senior, for the following: There are two of them, left and right.  They’re about […]

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Thingamajig – The mystery returns

by Alethea Drexler, archives assistant mcgovern@exch.library.tmc.edu Well, to borrow a sound bite from “Car Talk“, this chump is stumped[2]. The problem with identifying unidentified objects is that it’s very difficult to research them if you don’t know what they are.  It’s a little bit like asking how a word is spelled and being told to […]

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Thingamajig

by Alethea Drexler, archives assistant mcgovern@exch.library.tmc.edu Thingamajigs often make for short posts because I don’t want to give too much away.  This one will be an especially short post because, in all honesty, I have no idea what it is.  (I guess that solves the “give too much away” problem, doesn’t it?  I can’t give […]

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Outfitting a hospital, 1925

Alethea Drexler, archives assistant mcgovern@exch.library.tmc.edu Why, oh, why, didn’t I think to save last week’s post on Piltdown Man for April Fool’s Day?  Oh, well. *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   * Moving on from poor blog timing . . . this week takes us back into […]

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Stereoscopes, Hominids, and Hoaxes

by Alethea Drexler, archives assistant mcgovern@exch.library.tmc.edu I hope you’re sitting down, because this post is gonna be a wild ride. Archivist Philip Montgomery brought me a stereoscope image a few days ago and asked me to find out whether the fact that the card on which the photographs were mounted was curved was normal, or […]

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Pigeon Hole Parking, 1953

by Alethea Drexler, archives assistant mcgovern@exch.library.tmc.edu The following letter and brochure come from the Hermann Hospital estate collection, which is immense and has not yet been processed.  I had the project of transferring it into clean archival folders and boxes a few years ago, and I know there are some interesting things hiding among the […]

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Thingamajig

by Alethea Drexler, archives assistant We’re back with the answer to last week’s Thingamajig! Here it is, to refresh your memory: We got several suggestions about what this might be, including a snail race track (complete with “escargot”–car go–pun), a snake warmer, and, more seriously, a giant electrophoresis apparatus. Actually, the snake warmer guess wasn’t […]

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Thingamjig

by Alethea Drexler, archives assistant mcgovern@exch.library.tmc.edu We’ve gotten some new donations, which have included new Thingamajig fodder. The following came from the estate of Thomas Matney, M.D. (1928-2010). It’s almost three feet long and, although it’s made of aluminum, it’s pretty much cast solid and probably weighs fifty or sixty pounds. Phil commented that it […]

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Pneumothorax apparatus

by Alethea Drexler, archives assistant mcgovern@exch.library.tmc.edu We got a visitor on Monday who brought us a new gadget. Meet the pneumothorax apparatus:   (double-click on image for a larger version) This machine, which is a little over a foot tall and has a cylinder about six inches in diameter, was used to induce artificial pneumothoraces […]

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Spoonful of sugar, stat!

by Alethea Drexler archives assistant We received an inquiry a few weeks ago that involved a question about nineteenth century medications, and it turned into a rather interesting fact-search.  While I have it on my mind, I thought we could take a look at one of our antique medicine cases. We have several doctors’ bags […]

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