Feb 4, 2016
In honor of Valentine’s Day, the Mount Sinai Archives looks at Mount Sinai’s ties to one of the most romantic movies of all time, “Love Story.” Yes, that 1970 classic tear-jerker that made the phrase, “Love means never having to say you’re sorry” a cultural phenomenon. It was a meme before memes were a thing.
Filming “Love Story” outside of the Klingenstein Pavilion on 5th Avenue, c1969.
So, what role did Mount Sinai play in the movie? As you know (come on, the movie is 45 years old, there are no spoiler alerts), Jenny, played by Ali McGraw, meets and marries Oliver (Ryan O’Neal) while at Harvard and then falls ill and spends her final days – where else? – at The Mount Sinai Hospital Klingenstein Pavilion. There is a tense and touching scene at the end of the movie, after Oliver exits KP out onto 5th Avenue, between Ryan O’Neal and Ray Milland, who played his father.
Think this is old news? Just a few days ago, the Huffington Post ran a piece about how the two co-stars, McGraw and O’Neal, had put in an appearance at Harvard. Apparently, “Love Story” also means never having to say good-bye.
Jan 27, 2016
The Mount Sinai Archives has mounted its latest quarterly exhibit in the Annenberg elevator lobby. This season’s exhibit covers the history of the former Continuum Health Partners hospitals that are now part of the Mount Sinai Health System: Beth Israel Medical Center (now Mount Sinai Beth Israel), St. Luke’s Hospital (now Mount Sinai St. Luke’s), Roosevelt Hospital (now Mount Sinai West) and the New York Eye and Ear Infirmary (now the New York Eye and Ear Infirmary of Mount Sinai.)
The combined histories of the former Continuum hospitals cover a significant portion of the history of medicine in New York City. The New York Eye and Ear Infirmary, founded in 1820, is the oldest specialty hospital in the United States and the oldest institution in the present Mount Sinai Health System. St. Luke’s Hospital, which opened its doors to patients in 1858, was the creation of a prominent clergyman, and Roosevelt Hospital was founded in 1868 with a bequest from a member of the distinguished New York family that later produced two U.S. Presidents. The service areas of these two hospitals, which merged in 1979, together encompass much of Manhattan’s West Side. Beth Israel, established on the Lower East Side in 1889 to provide care to impoverished Jewish immigrants, has a long tradition of community-focused medical care, including the nation’s largest nonprofit methadone treatment program.
The exhibit will remain on display until the spring and contains numerous historic photographs and documents from the various hospitals, including an original nineteenth century minute book from the records of the Beth Israel Medical Center.
Pictured: Beth Israel Medical Center’s Linsky Pavilion as depicted in a 1964 anniversary volume.
Jan 20, 2016
In the first half of the 20th century, Mount Sinai was apparently full of song. The School of Nursing students sang every morning before classes and, of course, had an alma mater song for their school. The Mount Sinai Hospital had no medical school yet, but the active alumni association had festive annual meetings filled with songs and skits and inside jokes. While much of that material is not suitable for re-publication, the 1921 meeting of the Associated Alumni of The Mount Sinai Hospital did produce what they called an Alumni Song, with words written by Dr. L.M. Lyons and music by Dr. S. Samuels. This serious piece expressed their love of Mount Sinai and the many memories they formed during their training. Note that the song refers exclusively to the male alumni. This was because there were very few female alumnae. After a promising start in 1872, women house staff had been banned by the Trustees from 1911-1922. It was not until 1932 that women alumnae were first invited to the annual Alumni dinners.
Here is the Alumni Song from 1921:
Cover of Alumni Song showing the main entrance to the Hospital on 100th Street.
Years ago on Sinai’s mount great Moses stood in awe,
And from the hands of God himself received our word and law,
To commemorate this famous deed some noble men with vision
Have built a hospital to stand with just and wise provision.
Humble at birth it’s slowly grown to fair most in our land
It’s sons unite to sing it’s praise and tell its story grand.
Chorus: Oh, Sinai, Mount Sinai, we venerate your name,
As loyal sons we loudly boast and proudly spread your fame
We tell each deed with fulsome meed of honor and of praise
We’ll ne’er forget the princely debt we owe to Sinai days.
As passing days go piling up and year grows after year,
We’ll turn a page in mem’ry’s book to one we hold most dear,
Again we’ll see our old time friends, as we knew them long ago,
Once more we’ll walk thru Sinai’s wards with faces all aglow.
Time shall drop the heavy load he’s laid upon each heart
And once again our voices joined, the old song we shall start.
Chorus: Oh, Sinai, Mount Sinai, we venerate your name,
As loyal sons we loudly boast and proudly spread your fame
We tell each deed with fulsome meed of honor and of praise
We’ll ne’er forget the princely debt we owe to Sinai days.
Dec 31, 2015
Every New Year brings expectations of new beginnings: new projects, new historical resources, and new historical insights we never imagined. We are sure 2016 will be no different, so what might we expect?
In 2016, the Mount Sinai Archives will become the official repository of the historical collections documenting the long histories of St. Luke’s and Roosevelt Hospitals. These will be transferred to Mount Sinai in the spring, and work will begin to catalog and make the content known and available to the public.
As noted in a previous blog, in February or March we will roll out a new, much improved website. This will provide much better access to our archival material, including a page featuring our always expanding digital collections. One piece of that is our audio-visual collection, and that will grow again soon as we process another batch of recently digitized tapes.
In 2016 we also hope to begin a long anticipated project to make available some of the Mount Sinai oral history collection. This includes interviews with Mount Sinai personalities, primarily physicians, as well as taped events, meetings, grand rounds presentations, investitures, and history of medicine at Mount Sinai lectures. This is a complex project to make the sound available and link it to transcripts where they exist, but we hope that 2016 will be the year that this process begins.
So, Happy New Year to you, and our best wishes for a fun and productive 2016.
Dec 9, 2015
The staff of the Mount Sinai Archives is hard at work pulling together text and images for a new Archives website to replace our existing 1999 era, fully Y2K compliant web pages. This has meant reviewing the current content, editing it where needed and trying to find the perfect images that are wide and not tall, and that will get across the theme of each page. Should the pictures be old and classic looking to show that we care for historical material? Or should they be all modern and techie to show our efforts to move our collection to the digital age? And what about the information itself? Which sections deserve their own pages, and which can be handled in a drop-down box?
All of these are questions we are working through right now. We will submit our first draft to the Mount Sinai web team next week, and then it will be up to them to design it into a coherent, eye catching whole. Watch for our new website in February or early March of 2016. The one thing we are certain of: the new website will be a big improvement over our current site!
Hmm, would this make a good website photo?
