Ask a Librarian

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 […]

Read More…

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 […]

Read More…

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 […]

Read More…

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 […]

Read More…

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 […]

Read More…

Dr. Kenney's Surgical Suite

by Alethea Drexler, archives assistant mcgovern@exch.library.tmc.edu (Click on image for a larger version.) This image seems to have been a fairly recent acquisition for us: Phil’s predecessor got it on eBay, where it was described as a “patient’s room” at Dr. Kenney’s Sanitarium in San Antonio, from around 1920.  It’s obviously not a patient’s, room, […]

Read More…

Sunset Hospital

by Alethea Drexler, archives assistant One of the things that I find persistently frustrating is the speed, ease, and totality with which older hospitals disappear. Many, many, times I’ve received inquiries about such-and-such a hospital and started looking around for information, only to discover that, not only do we not have any material about it […]

Read More…