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Outdoor Sculpture in the Medical Center

by Alethea Drexler, archives assistant mcgovern@exch.library.tmc.edu It’s been a long week and–guess what?–I’m still going through slides.  I’ve learned more than I ever wanted to know about the ways in which plastic can deteriorate after a couple of decades.  Did you know that something can be sticky and greasy at the same time?  Go figure.  […]

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Gratuitous Use of the Slide Scanner

by Alethea Drexler, archives assistant mcgovern@exch.library.tmc.edu I’ll be honest: This post is just an excuse to play with a new toy. We recently acquired a new slide scanner: It’s pretty exciting.  The HRC has lots of slides and negatives squirreled away in various collections but they have been pretty much inaccessible until now: We would […]

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Public Health and Christmas Seals

by Alethea Drexler, archives assistant mcgovern@exch.library.tmc.edu You know I never pass up an opportunity to scan something. We received an image request early this week that sent me scurrying off to look into Institutional Collection 34, the San Jacinto Lung Association[1], a collection with which I had never before had occasion to work.  Oh, my.  […]

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Letterheads: Introduction

by Alethea Drexler, archives assistant mcgovern@exch.library.tmc.edu I’ve been suffering with computer-related ailments for the past week, but our tireless and good-humored IT department has me back up and running.  So, really, this week’s blog post is made possible by them.  Thanks, y’all! When I re-boxed some of the Hermann Hospital Estate papers five years ago, […]

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The Office, 1920's

by Alethea Drexler, archives assistant mcgovern@exch.library.tmc.edu Let’s take a look at office life, circa 1924. This is the building that housed the Hermann Hospital estate in the 1920’s.  The estate was responsible for the business and funding aspect of running the hospital. Here’s a closer view.  It seems that road construction was a favorite local […]

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Blair Sanitarium

by Alethea Drexler, archives assistant Marie Brannon, one of our volunteers, has been doing a great job sorting through some of our intimidating collection of photographs.  What is the first lesson learned by projects such as this?  Always document your pictures. I repeat: Always document your pictures. Few things are more frustrating than being confronted […]

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Candid Camera: George H. Hermann

by Alethea Drexler, archives assistant mcgovern@exch.library.tmc.edu Phil and I found a few boxes of photographs stashed within the Hermann Estate collection when I was looking for hospital-supply ephemera last week.  I had not seen these when I re-boxed the collection five years ago because they didn’t contain any business papers. One box consists mostly of […]

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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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