Wood Library Research Articles

The connection between Dr. Harold Griffith and Richard Gill: new insights into the history of curare use in anesthesia from previously unknown correspondence.

Dr. Harold R. Griffith and Richard C. Gill figure prominently in curare's storied history. In 1938, Gill returned from an Amazon expedition with over 11kg of curare. After scientists at E. R. Squibb & Sons identified a plant source (Chondrodendron tomentosum) and isolated a stable extract of uniform potency (marketed as Intocostrin), Griffith administered it in the operating room in 1942, showing its advantages and safety. In this article, we report correspondence between Griffith and Gill, heretofore not appreciated, after finding a letter from Gill to Griffith affixed to the inside back cover of a book contained in a private library.Following the serendipitous discovery of this previously unknown letter, we interrogated archived correspondence and material associated with Griffith and Gill in the Osler Library History of Medicine (McGill University, Montreal, QC, Canada), Arthur E. Guedel Memorial Anesthesia Center (University of California, San Francisco, CA, USA), the Wood Library Museum of Anesthesiology (Schaumburg, IL, USA), the Anaesthesia Heritage Centre (London, UK), and the Wellcome Collection (London, UK). Further, we searched for information on the historical background of curare via Google, Ovid MEDLINE, Adam Matthew Explorer, Project MUSE, and Latin American History databases.We found seven letters. The first is a letter to Gill dated 2 June 1943 (Wood Library) and an earlier draft dated 2 June 1943 (Osler Library). In this letter, Griffith praises Gill's success in procuring curare and informs him of its usefulness in anesthesia. The second letter is a letter from Gill to Griffith dated 10 July 1943 (found affixed to a book that was donated to the Osler Library). In this letter, Gill congratulates Griffith and claims he foresaw curare's use in the operating room and predicts its routine use to produce muscle relaxation during surgery. The third letter is a letter to Griffith dated 17 April 1945 (Osler Library). In this correspondence, Gill disputes Squibb's claim that curare derives solely from C. tomentosum and asks Griffith to retract published statements on this point. The fourth letter is a letter to Gill dated 25 April 1945 (Osler Library), in which Griffith declines to retract and emphasizes that Gill receive credit for making curare available to medicine. The fifth letter is a letter to Griffith dated 24 May 1945 (Osler Library), in which Gill accepts Griffith's retraction decision and indicates negotiations with another drug company. The sixth letter is a letter to Griffith dated 11 July 1945 (Osler Library), in which Gill requests anesthesia morbidity and mortality data and continues to remonstrate against Squibb's claim of curare's botanical source. The seventh and final letter is to Gill and dated 21 July 1945 (Osler Library). In this letter, Griffith indicates the lack of morbidity and mortality information, mentions a new Squibb curare product, and cites data suggesting curare may exert dose-dependent CNS effects.These seven letters between Dr. H. Griffith and R. Gill reveal a professional relationship heretofore not appreciated. We discuss and consider these letters in the context of curare's remarkable history.

Alternative identification of wood from natural fallen trees of the Lecythidaceae family in the Central Amazonian using FT-NIR spectroscopy

The scientific identification of natural fallen trees in tropical forests is complex due to the lack of fertile material in field collection. The study evaluated the use of near-infrared spectroscopy with Fourier-transform (FT-NIR) in the discrimination of wood from fallen trees of the Lecythidaceae family. Seven trees were collected in the Central Amazonian region (Brazil), from which 63 specimens were prepared from the wood, and NIR spectra were obtained on different wood surfaces (total 756 spectra). Chemometric models were developed with a spectral data set, and the Mahalanobis algorithm was applied. The discriminant model with 2nd derivative spectra improved the identification capacity, resulting in errors < 5% in the identification of genus Couratari (3 ssp.), Eschweilera (2 ssp.), Holopyxidium (1 sp.) and Lecythis (1 sp.). The comparison of the spectral signatures of samples of fallen trees and wood library revealed that even when wood was exposed to environmental weathering, around 50% of the original bands were preserved, favouring discrimination at the genus level. The accuracy of the chemometric models developed indicates the applicability of FT-NIR spectroscopy integrative in identifying fallen trees from the Lecythidaceae family in the tropical forests.

A decade of systematic reviews: an assessment of Weill Cornell Medicine's systematic review service.

The Weill Cornell Medicine, Samuel J. Wood Library's Systematic Review (SR) service began in 2011, with 2021 marking a decade of service. This paper will describe how the service policies have grown and will break down our service quantitatively over the past 11 years to examine SR timelines and trends. We evaluated 11 years (2011-2021) of SR request data from our in-house documentation. In the years assessed, there have been 319 SR requests from 20 clinical departments, leading to 101 publications with at least one librarian collaborator listed as co-author. The average review took 642 days to publication, with the longest at 1408 days, and the shortest at 94 days. On average, librarians spent 14.7 hours in total on each review. SR projects were most likely to be abandoned at the title/abstract screening phase. Several policies have been put into place over the years in order to accommodate workflows and demand for our service. The SR service has seen several changes since its inception in 2011. Based on the findings and emerging trends discussed here, our service will inevitably evolve further to adapt to these changes, such as machine learning-assisted technology.

Sustainable building design (SBD) with reclaimed wood library constructed in collaboration with 3D scanning technology in the UK

The increasing demand for social well-being and infrastructure development, along with the exploitation of physical resources and the depletion of natural ecological resources, have led to a series of environmental problems, such as global warming and climate change. As a result, the UN 2030 Sustainable Development Goals have called for the reduction in the impact of urban development on the environment and the creation of adaptive, inclusive and sustainable habitats. The circular economy (CE) is a new economic paradigm that contributes to sustainable socioeconomic development. It aims to lessen the extraction and acquisition of material resources through recycling and rationalise the allocation and reuse of social resources. For instance, recycling wood, a fundamental component of municipal waste, alleviates some pressure to extract raw materials and solves the dilemma of turning materials into waste. In this context, this study investigates five mills and logging sites around London as a source of material support. The findings highlight that wood recycling methods remain inadequate, with an excessive amount of wood being landfilled, downgraded and disposed without the possibility of reuse. The experiment completed the material collection of Waste, Under-use and Off-cut wood based on photogrammetry and laser scanning technology. According to the practical features found within the geometrical data, a material library was generated to wood select to the porosity requirements of the building. Results from the investigation illustrate how recycled wood components can be reintegrated into new construction as part of sustainable building design (SBD).

Supporting Consensus Statements: Considerations and Recommendations for a Systematic Review Service

Increasingly, a critical eye has been placed on the methodological quality of consensus statements. As expert systematic review (SR) methodologists, librarians are often called on to support consensus statement work. Using the Weill Cornell Medicine Samuel J. Wood Library’s SR Service experience as a guide, the aim of this paper is to answer three main questions regarding librarians supporting consensus statement work: (1) What is a consensus statement? (2) What is consensus statement methodology and how does this compare to practice guidelines? (3) What are important and practical points to consider when supporting this kind of request?

Lady Gwillim and the birds of Madras

In 1924 Casey Wood, founder of the Blacker Wood Library at McGill University in Montreal, acquired a large portfolio of paintings of Indian birds from an antiquarian dealer in London, England. In addition to 121 watercolours of birds, the portfolio contained a dozen botanical sketches and 31 watercolours of Indian fish. After further research, Wood concluded that the birds had been painted by Lady Elizabeth Gwillim (1763–1807), the wife of a Supreme Court justice in Madras (now Chennai), during the brief period from her arrival in 1801 until her death six years later. The bird paintings that so impressed Wood were created through the intersection of three different stories: the first, the work of a particularly focused Englishwoman who arrived in Madras prepared to paint its natural productions, especially its birds; the second, the story of the Indian bird catchers and the long history of fowling in India; and the third, the story of the birds themselves, their migrations, forced and otherwise, and their entrapments, which brought them into relationship with the bird catchers and the painter.

Community NY: Historic Sites Relating to Women's Suffrage in Central New York

Community NYHistoric Sites Relating to Women's Suffrage in Central New York Judith Wellman (bio) The movement for women's right to vote—totally nonviolent—formed one of the largest campaigns for human rights in U.S. history. Central New York was nationally important in this movement. We all know something about famous woman suffragists from this region—from Susan B. Anthony to Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Hester Jeffrey, Matilda Joslyn Gage, and Frederick Douglass. But what do we know about the hundreds of thousands of ordinary and not-so-ordinary people who joined these national leaders? These women and men from farms, villages, and cities reflected a wide variety of ethnic, racial, cultural, and economic backgrounds. Their numbers were astounding. Here are just three examples, from 1894, 1915, and 1917. In 1894, suffragists organized a statewide petition campaign "to strike the word 'male' from Article II, Section 1, of the constitution, and thus secure to the women of the State the right to vote on equal terms with men." The Grange, labor unions, and Women's Christian Temperance Union joined the New York State Woman Suffrage Association to collect almost 600,000 signatures from men and women, upstate and downstate (almost one-quarter of New York State's adult population in 1890), on these petitions. In 1915, about 40,000 marchers walked down Fifth Avenue in the largest suffrage parade ever organized. Suffragists printed 7,230,000 leaflets, 657,200 booklets, 149,533 posters, and a million suffrage buttons, urging New Yorkers to vote yes on women's suffrage in 1915. They lost. Two years later, in 1917, suffragists repeated their campaign with even more energy. More than a million New Yorkers (about 25 percent of the total adult population in 1920) signed a petition for woman suffrage in 1917. Suffragists held 9,000 meetings upstate and more than 11,000 in New York City. This time they were successful. Although upstate New [End Page 372] Click for larger view View full resolution Workshop participants, Wood Library, Canandaigua, October 2018. photo by author. York defeated the measure by 1,510 votes, New York City—buoyed by labor unions and immigrant districts—carried the amendment by 103,863 votes.1 Homes, churches, and meeting spaces that help tell the story of this immense movement still stand in neighborhoods all across New York State. In 2019, to help locate these historic sites, Preserve New York (a program of the New York State Council on the Arts and the Preservation League of New York State) funded a cultural resource survey focused on women's suffrage sites in central New York. The Ontario County Historical Society (with Ed Varno, director, and Wilma Townsend, curator) sponsored this survey and hired Judith Wellman, principal investigator, Historical New York Research Associates, to carry it out. Dana Teets, a student in the public history program at Nazareth College, was database manager. By limiting this first attempt to central New York, we hoped to (a) identify historic suffrage sites that could be nominated to the National Register of Historic Places; (b) create a model project that might be expanded to the rest of New York State; and (c) identify sites that could be added to the National Votes for Women Trail (www.nvwt.org) with markers supplied by the William G. Pomeroy Foundation (https://www.wgpfoundation.org/). We began with a workshop of local historians and other interested stakeholders from central New York. We ended with three main documents: (1). an historic context statement, outlining the development of the suffrage movement in central New York; (2). a database with names of 475 central New York suffragists, adding to Tom Dublin's suffrage biographies for Women and Social Movements (https://documents.alexanderstreet.com/VOTESforWOMEN); and (3). a database listing 209 women's suffrage sites in central New York. [End Page 373] These results are online at https://www.ochs.org/womens-suffrage/. Three major possibilities emerged from this project. First, New York State's Historic Preservation Office determined that many of these suffrage sites are eligible for the National Register of Historic Places. Our work might also form the basis of a Multiple Property Document Form, so that suffrage...

Developing a Library Bioinformatics Program Fully Integrated into a Medical Research Institution

Establishment of a new bioinformatics service at the Samuel J. Wood Library of Weill Cornell Medicine was successfully achieved through reference to existing programs and utilization of established success factors. Setting the vision, focusing on the essentials, designing for value, and implementing continuous improvement through feedback, helped to create a successful and integrated bioinformatics service for the medical research community.

Patient-Centered Rounding in an Inpatient Pediatric Setting

ABSTRACTClinical Medical Librarians at Weill Cornell Medicine (WCM), Samuel J. Wood Library provide unique health literacy services for patients, families, and caregivers on the Phyllis and David Komansky Center for Children’s Health pediatric floors of New York-Presbyterian Hospital (NYPH) by conducting twice weekly patient rounds and bringing consumer health information and services to bedsides. Although in its infancy, the Pediatric Consumer Librarian Service (PCLS) generates statements of appreciation from patients and parents, enthusiasm among stakeholders, and reports of increased job satisfaction by librarians. We report on experiences, methods, feedback from users, and plans for the future.

The Selbst Gewählter Plan

In the late eighteenth century, a lay naturalist in Hessen-Kassel created a library of books, each made out of a different species of tree. This essay looks at how the wood library addressed the gap between the materials of nature and the materials of nature’s explanation, which troubled efforts to know and manage the forest in this period.

Transcriptome Analysis of Reaction Wood in Gymnosperms by Next-Generation Sequencing

Special xylem tissue called “compression wood” is formed on the lower side of inclined stems when gymnosperms grow on a slope. We investigated the molecular mechanism of compression wood formation. Transcriptome analysis by next-generation sequencing (NGS) was applied to the xylem of Chamaecyparis obtusa to develop a catalog of general gene expression in differentiating xylem during compression and normal wood formation. The sequencing output generated 234,924,605 reads and 40,602 contigs (mean size = 529 bp). Based on a sequence similarity search with known proteins, 54.2% (22,005) of the contigs showed homology with sequences in the databases. Of these annotated contigs, 19,293 contigs were assigned to Gene Ontology categories. Differential gene expression between the compression and normal wood libraries was analyzed by mapping the reads from each library to the assembled contigs. In total, 2875 contigs were identified as differentially expressed, including 1207 that were up-regulated and 1668 that were down-regulated in compression wood. We selected 30 genes and compared the transcript abundance between compression and normal wood by quantitative polymerase chain reaction analysis to validate the NGS results. We found that 27 of the 30 genes showed the same expression patterns as the original NGS results.

IT POINT: A public library IT demonstrator project

IT POINT was a 21-month project that brought public access to information technology and networks within a public library. Chelmsley Wood Library, Solihull, West Midlands, hosted the project under the guidance of the Libraries and Arts Department of Solihull Metropolitan Borough Council. The British Library Research and Innovation Centre (formerly BLRDD) funded the project.
 This article presents the research methodology employed for the evaluation of the project both internally and externally. It will examine the preparatory research, the initial evaluation methodology, the work of the external Evaluation Team and their difficulties and successes and how the evaluation
 techniques might have been refined.

Room within a room: Louis I. Kahn and the Reference Library of the Yale Center for British Art

What does it mean to work in a Modernist masterpiece? How is a ‘humanist’ space used? The author’s personal perspective on the architectural elements of the Reference Library at the Yale Center for British Art illuminates the humanistic aspects of Louis I. Kahn’s design. He focusses specifically on the material surfaces of white oak, wool, formed concrete, and their interplay with natural light in the library. Architectural elements such as the wood library carrels, concrete pillars, and exterior and interior windows of the library are considered in relation both to Kahn’s perceptions of a library and to his use of these elements in the museum as a whole.

Charles Thomas Jackson, “The Head Behind the Hands.” Applying Science to Implement Discovery in Early Nineteenth Century America.

Charles Thomas Jackson, “The Head Behind the Hands.” Applying Science to Implement Discovery in Early Nineteenth Century America.

Patriots' Day Fire on April 19, 1950 at Children's Hospital Boston

Patriots' Day is a legal holiday in Massachusetts and Maine, celebrating the battle of Concord and Lexington on April 19, 1775. The event of April 19, 1950, was very unusual, because of the origin of a fire at Children's Hospital Boston. At that time, the hospital consisted of 2-story stucco pavilion buildings that housed patients of diverse ages. In addition, on the southwest side of the area, there was a routine laboratory facility adjacent to the clinical neurology unit. The surgical suite was also on the southwest side. In the midst of these buildings was Dr James Gamble's study research laboratory, with his magnificent cherry wood library that contained his personal collection of research journals. This conference room was used for chart reviews for patient and brief seminars. The personnel in the Gamble Division consisted of Dr Gamble, the director and professor; Dr William M. Wallace, his protege; and 4 postgraduate fellows, including the author who personally observed these events. Before 1945, clinical chemistry consisted of quantitative chemical analysis1,2; thus, sodium was determined after ashing at … Address correspondence to Robert Schwartz, 33 North Ave, Providence, RI 02906

Introduction of Sevoflurane, The Final Achievement of Burnell R. Brown MD, PhD, FFARCS (1933 - 1995)

Introduction In a videotaped interview for the Wood library Museum, Burnell R. Brown MD, PhD, FFARCS, reflected on his career filled with many significant achievements. He felt that he had done five things of significance to society: promoting the use of alpha blockers in pheochromocytoma, founding and nourishing the department at the University of Arizona, working out the pathophysiology of halothane hepatotoxicity, editing the Survey of Anesthesiology and the textbook General Anaesthesia, Fifth Edition, and introducing sevoflurane to the US market.** The purpose of this essay is to describe Dr. Brown’s role in the introduction of sevoflurane. This was his final achievement prior to his premature death at age 61 (August 8, 1995) from a highly anaplastic carcinoma of obscure origin. (Figure 1)

Copper Kettle Revisited

An increasing dissatisfaction with available equipment for the vaporization of liquid anesthetics led to a focused effort to design a new and improved vaporizer. Deficiencies in existing apparatus were identified as a lack of vernier control over small increments for gradually increasing the concentration of the vapor, and the lack of a steady reproducible vapor output due to the wide variation in temperature of the vaporizing liquid Therefore a new apparatus has been designed to provide reproducible conditions for effective vaporization and vernier control over small increments in concentration of vapor offered to the patient. The important modifications for attaining these desired conditions are in the circuit design, the liquid container, and the vaporizing surface. Since there are still many occasions for which liquid anesthetics are being used as the agent of choice, it seems desirable to have available a device that provides the physician with discrete control over the vapor volumes and concentrations of these agents.

Government Account for Relief in Occupied Area

Government Account for Relief in Occupied Area

Leroy D Vandam, MD: an anesthesia journey

Leroy D Vandam, MD was a remarkable man—an intricate amalgamation of an artist, scientist, and physician. He was a bastion of medical historical knowledge. Dr Vandam became a most influential anesthesiologist, some say, a giant. He was an example of someone who, with resolve, overcame adversity. His artwork is displayed in countless places, and several of his paintings form part of the Wood Library Museum Heritage Series. Dr Vandam was first a surgeon, but he abandoned surgery and pursued a career in anesthesiology under the leadership of Robert Dripps. He completed his residency training at the University of Pennsylvania and joined its staff in 1949. When he arrived at Brigham and Women's Hospital in the 1950s as director of anesthesia, he embarked on one of the most illustrious careers in American anesthesiology. Dr Vandam published more than 250 original articles, chapters, abstracts, and other reports on a wide variety of subjects including history, art, and pharmacology. His classic article on the complications of neuroaxial blocks is a seminal work in anesthesiology. This article describes how an anesthesiologist who shared an interest with Dr Vandam in the history of anesthesiology came to produce a movie based on his career, the evolution of anesthesia equipment, and the transformation of our specialty.

Assessing the Past and Shaping the Future of Anesthesiology

Assessing the Past and Shaping the Future of Anesthesiology