Tim Hayes, M.P.A, M.L.I.S. is the Circulation Supervisor at the Levy Library. As part of completing his Master of Library and Information Sciences degree earlier this year, he interned with the Aufses Archives and processed the Henry Dazian Estate and Dazian Foundation for Medical Research Records. In this post, Tim shares what he was able to find in that collection as it relates to the naming of the Dazian Pavilion. See this link for Part 1 of this blog post.
Coming into this project, I knew there was a question that hadn’t been answered yet (when was the Dazian Pavilion at Beth Israel Hospital named?), and a collection of materials corresponding to the presumed namesake (Henry Dazian Estate and Dazian Foundation for Medical Research records).
Henry Dazian set the majority of his estate, under the guidance of his executor, Emil Friedlander, to the establishment of Dazian Foundation for Medical Research. The foundation was established with a 25-year term with a primary mission of “the advancement of medical and allied scientific knowledge.” The estate stipulated it was to have a self-perpetuating board that consisted of five Doctors of Medicine and four laymen.
My first goal was to see if an eponymous building was a condition of Henry Dazian’s will. Looking through the multiple copies present in the Foundation records, I was able to determine two things. Firstly, Dazian had not set down any naming stipulations related to bequests in his will, and secondly, upon the dissolution of the Foundation, all remaining money in the estate was to be distributed to hospitals, sanitariums, and similar such institutions. No specific institutions were named.
The next breadcrumb was the minutes of a special meeting for the Directors of the Dazian Foundation of Medical Research. Held on November 9th, 1961, these minutes include a resolution “unanimously adopted” to distribute the foundation’s funds to various institutions, including: “$850,000 to Beth Israel Hospital for the Dazian Pavilion.” This is equivalent to about $8.7 million in 2024 dollars (based on Bureau of Labor Statistics information). The consensus among the Archives staff was that such a sum merited a named endowment at that time.
I also found a note in an auditor’s report, saying that “on May 14 of 1959, the Board of Trustees of the Foundation adopted a resolution to donate $100,000 to the Actor’s [sic] Fund of America, payable after May, 1962…Designated rooms, or a wing, are to be dedicated to the memory of Henry Dazian.”
It’s important to be careful about your own preconceived narratives as a researcher, and here mine got me derailed; I took that comment to mean the Foundation was seeking to memorialize Dazian before May of 1959, and started looking closely at the correspondence that predated that. Despite reading through a great deal of the correspondence leading up to that point, I found no other mentions of memorializing Dazian.
It was only after I started looking at the correspondence after that point that I noticed a 1960 letter from Arthur Fishberg, president of the Dazian Foundation for Medical Research from 1956 until its dissolution in 1962), to a Dr. Rachmilewitz at The Hebrew University in Israel. Attempting to clear up a miscommunication, Fishberg said that the board had planned three projects within New York “as the most suitable memorializations[sic] of Mr. Dazian in the city in which he passed his entire life.”
Realizing that I had been looking in the wrong direction, I decided to hunt more thoroughly for the minutes from that annual meeting in May of 1959. These showed a bit more of a story. In that meeting, Friedlander proposed a motion to give $100,000 to the Actors’ Fund. This must have been a somewhat contentious vote; the minutes make a note that two of the Foundation’s board members voted against the proposal, and records state how each member of the board voted – a rarity among the minutes, which may imply an unusual level of disagreement.
Additional meetings about the ultimate disposition of capital funds were held in both July and October of 1959, but no minutes of either meeting were included in the records we possess. Finally, on December 2, 1959, the board members of the Foundation were urged to attend a meeting “to discuss a matter of great importance.”
In the minutes of this meeting, Alfred M. Rose proposed a motion to allocate $800,000 to the Beth Israel Hospital. The motion was seconded by Emil Friedlander, and unanimously approved by the board. An allocation is also set aside for the Hospital for Joint Diseases, and each trustee of the foundation is given the right to allocate $25,000 to any institutions permitted by Henry Dazian in his will. Taken together, this finally satisfied our curiosities about the naming of the Dazian Pavilion.
The newly processed records provide a rich body of historical materials for interested researchers. Future avenues of investigation include studying the lives of those who lived in Dazian’s real estate holdings and the living conditions of New York City at that time. The notes of the Foundation members provide insight into their decision-making about what research was funded, which in turn, shaped the history of medicine. Dr. Arthur M. Fishberg, for instance, often included the notes and opinions of the board members showing how decisions were often made on the basis of age, race, and other characteristics of the applicants that would now be protected, and it was shocking to see such blatant discrimination.
Now fully open to research, with description to allow intellectual access, the Aufses Archives is eager to assist those who may also have a seemingly straightforward, or profoundly complicated, topic to investigate.
Sketch of Dazian Pavilion exterior, circa 1929. At the time it was built, Beth Israel believed it to be “the tallest hospital building in the world.” (The final building only stood at thirteen stories.)
In our “Familiar Names: A ‘Who’s Who’ of Beth Israel Buildings” post, you may have noticed that one building is conspicuously absent: the Dazian building. Dazian, the original building on the Petrie campus, was simply referred to as the Beth Israel Hospital for the first part of its history, given that it was the only Beth Israel Hospital building at the time it was opened (to much acclaim) in 1929. During the 1950s and 1960s, the hospital went through a building boom, likely necessitating building names, and campus maps show that the Dazian Pavilion was labeled as such by 1963. But who was Dazian? You might think Beth Israel’s institutional records would hold a clue, but, after receiving several requests to provide the backstory, a few of archivists at the Aufses Archives had approached this research from different angles, and never turned up anything directly mentioning the building’s naming. Sometimes the answers to seemingly straightforward questions are simply not well documented.
We strongly suspected that the building was named for Henry Dazian, a famed Broadway costumer from a prominent family. Henry Dazian was the third generation of his family to own the costuming business and had a history of philanthropy. He served as a trustee for the Actors’ Fund, which was established in 1882 to provide for the burial, retirement, and healthcare needs of those working in the theatrical professions, who were often denied access to services and charities during this period. He also donated to Beth Israel during his lifetime, particularly (and perhaps fittingly) in 1929 when the institution was fundraising to eliminate its debt following the construction of the building that would eventually carry the Dazian name some thirty years later.
We were hoping that the Henry Dazian Estate and Dazian Foundation for Medical Research records would hold clues for solving this mystery. In addition to its Beth Israel connection, the Foundation also worked with Mount Sinai doctors by, among other things, funding scholarships for refugee physicians during World War II. The collection was seeing increased interest from researchers, but it remained largely inaccessible because it was not completely processed. Processing became a priority, and when Tim Hayes, Levy Library Circulation Services Supervisor, joined the Archives for an internship, we were grateful that this collection received renewed attention. He processed this collection, which spans more than fourteen document boxes, and was able to keep an eye out for answers to some of our Dazian-related questions as he reviewed the material. Stay tuned for our next blog post, where Tim takes us on a deep dive of his research into this question.
This year, Nurses’ Week is May 6th through 12th, and the theme is “Nurses Make the Difference.” To recognize the invaluable contributions of nurses, here’s a brief overview of the evolution of nurses’ responsibilities and education.
In the early days of American nursing, nurses simply observed changes in the patient’s condition and reported to the attending physician. They were taught to change bandages, and feed and clean patients and were in charge over the ward. At this point, any woman could take the job and at times, some unsavory characters filled the position. There was no formal training or educational system in place.
Women’s Ward, St. Luke’s Hospital
By the mid-1800s, nurses were entrusted with taking vitals, preparing nourishing meals to meet specific patients needs, and administering medications on the instructions of the physicians. They also began to assist in operating theaters.
As medical and scientific breakthroughs were made, nursing benefited from better instruction on the ward, supplemented with weekly class lectures by medical staff. By the 1870s the first American nursing school opened. Instruction started on the wards, and the students covered the wards for the first few years.
The first of the Mount Sinai Health System Hospitals schools, The Mount Sinai Training School for Nurses, opened in 1881. Its history is chronicled in the book The Forty-Seven Hundred. The former St. Luke’s Hospital Training School for Nurses, now Mount Sinai Morningside, opened in 1888 and in 1896 the former Roosevelt Hospital, now Mount Sinai West, opened their training school. Read some of that history here. Lastly, The Beth Israel Hospital School of Nursing, now Mount Sinai Phillips School of Nursing, opened in 1902.
Roosevelt Hospital nursing instruction on ward by Alfred Eisenstaedt – The LIFE Picture Collection, Getty Images
As scientific break throughs were made, nursing benefited from better instruction on the ward, with weekly lectures by medical staff.
An example of the early curriculum for nurses, taken from the Roosevelt Hospital School for Nursing, included monthly focus on aspects of anatomy, physiology, materials medica (the sources, nature, properties, and preparation of drugs), gynecology, digestion, ophthalmology and otology, the practice of medicine, the ethics of private nursing, massage, nutrition and cooking, and surgery, including surgical diseases and emergencies. Over time, the curriculum expanded and as graduate nurses were hired to cover the floors, student nurses began to move from ward duty to attend classes full time.
Nursing students in class
By the 1960s, nursing associations were pressing for university-based bachelor degree programs for RNs, as opposed to hospital-based certificate programs. This was accomplished by the early 1970s as financial struggles added to the pressure to close hospital-based schools.
Today we honor our highly educated nursing staff, the back bone of health care.
In celebration of Women’s History Month, the Aufses Archives would like to highlight one of the outstanding physicians who practiced at the former St. Luke’s Hospital.
Virginia Kanick (1925-2017) was a radiologist at a time when a small percentage of physicians were women and fewer practiced in that particular area. She was born in Pennsylvania, but when she was about fourteen, the family moved to Richmond, Virginia to be closer to her older brother, who was already practicing medicine there. Kanick, however, never did become a ‘southern belle;’ she described herself as having an “aggressive” personality and loved to learn. She was the high school valedictorian and chose to return north to pursue college at Barnard College, where she graduated Summa Cum Laude and was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa, the oldest, and most prestigious, academic honor society in the United States.
Left: Dr. Virginia Kanick reviewing X-rays in 1971
At Barnard, she investigated many subject specialties, from anthropology to classical studies, archaeology to Russian history, before settling into science classes with the intention to pursue medicine. She earned her MD from the College of Physicians and Surgeons in 1951 and then interned at Case Western Reserve. She applied to a radiology residency program at Columbia, but their fall semester quota was full. Accepted into the program starting in January, the administrators suggested she spend a few months at St. Luke’s Hospital, an affiliated teaching hospital, before joining the Columbia program. However, she enjoyed the atmosphere and comradery of St. Luke’s so much that she completed the radiology residency there before receiving an appointment as an attending and spending her career at St. Luke’s.
Dr. Kanick was an enthusiastic teacher, especially when new equipment and technology was involved. She published over thirty articles in peer-reviewed journals. She became the first woman president of the St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital Center’s Medical Board in 1980-1981 and in fact, as far as she knew, she was the first president of the Medical Board who was not a surgeon or internist, and quite possibly, the first woman to be the president of a medical board in a major teaching hospital. She was very involved in the broader professional community by serving on the board of directors of the Medical Society of the State of New York, as the secretary and officer of the Medical Society of the County of New York, and as Director of the New York State Radiology Society, among a long list of other service commitments.
(Picture right, Medical Board meeting, r-l, Drs. Kanick, Beekman, Knox and unidentified.)
However, she felt that the most important role she was involved in was working on several committees for the Radiological Society of North America, and particularly, for serving as their representative to the Advisory Committee for Medical Devices at the Food and Drug Administration, reviewing new technologies including MRI, CT, and PET scans, for seven years.
Dr. Kanick circa 1989
However, Dr. Kanick was not all work and no play. Though she never married, she was the beloved “auntie” to her much older siblings’ four children, hosting them on vacations here and aboard. As they grew up and married, Kanick enjoyed their 11 grandnieces and nephews and 19 great-grandnieces and nephews. Upon her retirement in 1989, one of her St. Luke’s colleagues remarked, “In spite of her busy schedule, she has made it her business to know of our personal joys and to genuinely join us in celebrating, or giving us support, advice and true empathy in times of suffering.”
Virginia Kanick fell victim to Alzheimer’s disease and passed away in 2017. She is fondly remembered by hospital staff and the many residents who trained under her guidance.
Left: Dr. Kanick fellow volunteer, Michele Feldman, circa 2016
To learn more about Dr. Kanick’s life, in her own words, watch her interview with Dr. Norma Braun. here.
Reflecting on Beth Israel’s rich history, we want to honor the many namesakes of the 16th Street campus. This post provides brief biographies of some of the men and women whose contributions to Beth Israel’s legacy are more than name deep.
Charles H. Silver was a career public servant, including a term as the President of the New York City Board of Education. He joined the Beth Israel Board of Trustees in 1938 and was its President starting in 1947. He was also active in Jewish-Christian interfaith matters and was a staunch supporter of the Phillips School of Nursing. A highly influential man, the Archives has photographs of Charles Silver with leaders ranging from Vice President Alben Barkley (Truman administration) to Pope John Paul to the discoverer of penicillin, Sir Alexander Fleming. In 1952, the ground was broken for the Charles H. Silver Clinic at Beth Israel Hospital, named in his honor. We have several blog posts dedicated to his legacy, and his New York Times obituary provides a more complete biography.
The Linsky Pavilion is named for Belle and Jack Linsky. Belle Linsky was a Beth Israel Hospital Board of Trustees member, and her husband, Jack Linsky, was the founder of Swingline Staples. The couple was also known for their high-profile art collection, which was eventually donated to the Metropolitan Museum. The Archives catalog has a number of digitized materials about the Linsky Pavilion, which, described as an “ultramodern” and an “unusual circular building” first opened in 1966 and greatly increased Beth Israel’s number of beds.
The Karpas Pavilion, opened in 1966 as a patient care unit, was named for Irving D. Karpas. A childhood friend of Charles Silver, he was a clothing manufacturer and stockbroker. He joined the Beth Israel Hospital Board of Trustees in 1938 and remained on until his death in 1971. His New York Times obituary provides a more complete biography, and photographs of the Karpas Pavilion are online here.
Baird Hall initially opened in 1967 as “a 20-story, 144-unit staff apartment house.” It was named for David G. Baird, who was a stockbroker and philanthropist. His New York Times obituary is available here.
Finally, the 16th Street campus was named for Milton and Carroll Petrie in 1992 due to their more than $21 million in contributions to Beth Israel (according to the 1991 Annual Report) and included the largest single gift ($10 million) to Beth Israel at its time in 1986. Milton J. Petrie was a clothes retailer and Beth Israel Board of Trustees member. The Archives has digitized and undigitized materials about Petrie online here.
Authored by Stefana Breitwieser, Digital Archivist
