This year we’re discussing aspects of Mount Sinai’s history as a community by joining forces with the Institute for Equity and Justice in Health Sciences Education through a series of three Chats for Change programs. In this post I’ll provide some background about what Chats for Change is, how it came to be, the Institute team we’re working with this year, and what the Archives brought to table.
About Chats for Change
In 2015, Mount Sinai launched the Racism and Bias Initiative (RBI) to center underrepresented voices and experiences, recognize the historical underpinnings of racism and bias in medicine, and explicitly address and undo racism and bias in all functional areas of the medical school. Beginning in the fall of 2018, the Department of Medical Education launched “Chats for Change”—a series of dialogues centered on racism and bias in medicine.
Chats for Change was developed in response to medical education staff, faculty, and medical students who wanted dedicated time to engage in a dialogue as a community and deepen their understanding of and ability to address racism. These sessions were based on the notion that in order to respond to racism and to be anti-racist, we must engage in dialogue, learning, and action. Participants include staff, faculty, and students from across the School and Health System. There is also a National Chats for Change available to all medical schools in North America.
The Process
How does this work? The structure of Chats for Change remains the same regardless of the topic. Held over Zoom, facilitators provide some introductory background information and review the grounding assumptions for the dialogue about to take place. The grounding assumptions that I find change the power dynamics are “everyone here is all we need” and “refrain from expecting experts or others to know best.” In both education and healthcare, there is deeply ingrained respect for and deference to expertise. Asking participants to shift out of this mindset is a challenge and requires intentional interactions outside the traditional norms and hierarchy.
The facilitators review the process and hen there is a brief check-in to get everyone acquainted. The next portion is framing and defining that day’s topic with a brief presentation, about ten minutes long.
We then review norms for the breakout groups in which the participants are about to participate:
All of us are taught misinformation about our own group(s) and about members of other groups
We agree not to blame ourselves or others for the misinformation we have been taught, and to accept responsibility for not repeating misinformation after we have learned otherwise
The participants enter the breakout rooms with some questions to guide their discussion, keeping in mind that there will be a debrief with the whole group afterwards to share any themes, insights, similarities and/or differences (as shown on the slide here). Every session ends by asking “given today’s dialogue, what do you need to learn and unlearn?”, followed by a request for feedback and a preview of the next week’s topic.
2024 Spring/Summer Season
In planning the 2024 Chats for Change season, Leona Hess, PhD, MSW, Co-Director of the Institute, invited me (the Aufses Archives’ director) to join in on brainstorming topics for discussion.
For this year, we arrived at the following groupings:
Series on Understanding Islamophobia and Antisemitism
Given the horrific increase in hate crimes against Muslim and Jewish people, it’s imperative for us to commit to deeper understanding and reflection.
Antiracism Fellow Series
This year’s Institute for Equity and Justice in Health Sciences Education Antiracism Fellows will introduce new topics, challenging all of us to critically examine pressing contemporary issues and the role of medical students.
Mount Sinai History Series
Pulling from resources in the Aufses Archives, we will uncover how Mount Sinai’s past shows up in our present, how equitable treatment regardless of the ability to pay is a relatively new concept, and how our patient populations have been recorded and reported at different moments in our hospitals’ histories.
Rejuvenate and Restore (R&R) Series
With everything going on, we can still find time for joy, future dreaming, and collective care.
In addition to these series, there were one-off chats on decolonizing global health, cybersafety, the rural vs. urban divide, and much more.
Mount Sinai History Series
The first Mount Sinai History Series took place on April 23rd, exploring the question, How Does Our Past Show Up in Our Present? by reflecting on our hospitals’ and medical school’s founding charters, articles of incorporation, and mission statements.
At Mount Sinai we often cite our origin story, the opening of Jews’ Hospital in New York in 1855, as a core element of our identity: to treat those who were refused treatment elsewhere (at the time, people of Jewish faith, and accident victims). As a health system, we are now multiple hospitals and a medical school. Pulled from resources in the Aufses Archives, we considered how the histories of these institutions shape us today. To do this, I started with a quote from the Charter of the Jews’ Hospital (which became Mount Sinai Hospital in 1866).
New York State Charter of the Jews’ Hospital in New York
January 16, 1852
We have associated and hereby do associate ourselves into a benevolent, charitable and scientific Society… to be known… by the name of The Jews’ Hospital in New York… the particular business, purpose and object of such… will be the medical and surgical aid to persons of the Jewish persuasion.
Quote from the 1852 Charter
First Mission Statement of The Mount Sinai Medical Center
1979
The focus was on the mission statements and articles of incorporation that state the reasons why the hospitals were created and what they were intending to do. I have found that these statements do resonate with our values and mission today, so I wanted to see how others felt. We asked the Chats participants, “what parts of our legacies most resonate with you?” There was a good discussion.
The second session, Unified Care?, was about how patients have historically been segregated by ability to pay and other factors. This was co-hosted by Dr. David Muller, Director of the Institute for Equity and Justice in Health Sciences Education. We are working towards health equity, we want everyone to have the same care, but there has always been a way of dividing patients that persists today. Goal was to show past practices–the general open ward layout, transition to semi-private rooms, and entirely private care–that demonstrate how we evolved into the patient placements we see in today’s hospitals.
The final session, Who Sought Treatment, took place in August and covered how hospitals have tracked and reported demographics of the patients who sought treatment. Today we are familiar with tracking patient outcomes by identities, such as race or gender–but this has not always been the case. As New York’s demographics have changed through time, so too have the data recorded about people seeking medical care. We looked at hospital reporting to see how patient populations have been recorded and reported at different moments in our hospitals’ histories. We reflected on how our practices have evolved.
As Mount Sinai Hospital was established to care for immigrants, nativity was most frequently reported. The sex, occupation, age, and other categories were also typically tabulated.
Report on patients from Mount Sinai Hospital’s 1866 Annual Report, page 24
Listed: Number of admitted and refused in a single month (over the course of the year) and age.
Report on patients from the 1866 Annual Report, page 25
Listed: civil Condition, term of Residence in the U.S., nativity, and occupation.
Beth Israel Hospital Annual Report from 1903 stated, “the nativities of the patients reveal at once the broad spirit prevailing in the management of the Hospital. Beth Israel knows no difference in creed, class or color, when suffering humanity appeals to it for aid and relief?”
St. Luke’s Hospital Annual report, 1910
Listed nationality and religious denominations, and occupations of patients.
Mount Sinai is based in East Harlem, over half of the population are of Puerto Rican and Dominican ancestry. This document shows when the hospital first became cognizant of the growing population and demographic shifts in the late 1920s. The language is not current, and we say Latino instead of “‘Spanish’ nativity.”
I am so grateful to Leona, David, and the team (Jay especially), who were incredibly supportive partners. They have a the structure of Chats for Change in place, facilitate adeptly, handle the logistics seamlessly—piloting the Mount Sinai History series could not have happened without their partnership.
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.
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
As we wrap up our 2023 Digitization Project Grant, we are pleased to share a final batch of newly digitized materials – a selection of textual records from the Beth Israel Medical Center alphabetical files, including over 80 World War I letters.
The Beth Israel Medical Center alphabetical files represent a miscellaneous assortment of textual records from throughout the hospital’s history. Each file provides a small insight into one aspect of its organization, which taken together provide a rich material history of the institution. The selection chosen for digitization emphasized materials through the completion of the campus in 1969, and provides insight into the hospital’s management, campus planning, and newsworthy happenings.
Like the annual reports and Board of Trustees minutes, organizational and management records in this selection provide insight into the day-to-day decision-making at Beth Israel for things large and small. The digitized material includes the Rules and Regulations of the Beth Israel Dispensary (1907), excerpts of minutes from the Phillips School of Nursing (1905-1912), minutes from department head meetings (1931-1935), by-laws of the Beth Israel Hospital Association (1947-1960), and directories for the house staff and visiting staff (1950s-1960s).
Campus planning is also a major theme in these materials. From Dazian Pavilion (construction started 1922) to planning for the Linsky Pavilion (opened 1966) these materials closely track the progress, reasoning, and decision-making surrounding the evolution of Beth Israels footprint in the Lower East Side. Of note are a group of articles written by Louis J. Frank, Beth Israel Hospital Superintendent, which describe a range of his theories on hospital management at the time of the construction of the Dazian Pavilion. Topics range from medical humanitarianism to facility planning, from European hospital design to vegetarian hospital food services.
Newspaper clippings (bulk 1909-1933) and press releases (1967-1968) also make up a significant amount of material and would be helpful to anyone interested in events at Beth Israel during those years.
You can browse all the alphabetical files digitized as part of this project here. (Note that some clippings and articles by Frank are still under copyright. The materials will become available as soon as they reach public domain, largely on January 1, 2024.)
Left: Article by Frank titled “The Meatless Diet,” published in the journal The Modern Hospital, which argues that vegetarianism is a healthy, cost-effective way to keep a kosher kitchen in the hospital, 1921. Right: Published speech that Frank gave to the BIH BOT titled “What Price Humanitarianism?” which argued passionately for moral and spiritual obligations to care for the needy, even during times of financial precarity, 1926.
World War I letters
Included in the alphabetical files are three years’ worth of World War I letters (1917-1919) to and from Louis J. Frank. The correspondents are largely Beth Israel doctors deployed to military hospitals on the front lines in France.
This postcard from Captain Leo B. Meyer, head of the BIH Medical Board, to Louis J. Frank pictures Base Hospital No. 3 at the Asile de Vauclaire, a 14th-century monastery-turned-military hospital and home to the Mount Sinai Hospital unit. Meyer was stationed there for much of the war. The Archives have a number of materials on Base Hospital No. 3.
Major topics include daily life of those serving in the war, surgery during battle (particularly limb salvage and amputation), x-ray training for military doctors, and reactions to the Armistice. News of Beth Israel is also frequent, particularly medical and nursing staff shortages, the needs of future and current military patients, accounts of various Beth Israel doctors at home and abroad, and the status of the new Beth Israel hospital building (future Dazian Pavilion). The Influenza Epidemic of 1918 is mentioned throughout, and there are also several references to the Mount Sinai Hospital unit.
These letters are a valuable resource to anyone interested in the role of American doctors serving in World War I. You can browse the letters here.
