Ralph H. Major Photograph and Slide Collection

About the Collection

Ralph Major, a Professor of Medicine and History of Medicine at the University of Kansas School of Medicine, originally created these slides and photographs for use in his lectures on the history of medicine and for books and other publications. Many of them appear in his two-volume work A History of Medicine, Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas, 1954. These images eventually became part of the Clendening History of Medicine Library.

Processing the Collection

The collection was processed from September 1999 through April 2000 by Janice Lee, a library science student at the University of Missouri-Columbia. Processing consisted of the following steps:

1) Each image was researched to determine if it possessed an identifiable medical connection (some of the images are of cities and other non-medical subjects). The main sources used for this research were Major's slide notes (which roughly corresponded to the slide collection but did not cover all of the slides), his A History of Medicine, the Internet, and John H. Green's Medical History for Students.

2) Images that were deemed to have significant merit were removed from their original boxes and placed in archival storage containers.

Storage procedures consisted of the following:

a) Slides were removed from their original mountings, re-mounted onto Gepe slide mounts, and stored in slide boxes within a slide case.

b) Photos and negatives were placed in archival sleeves and placed in acid-free clamshell storage boxes. Each negative is stored immediately behind its corresponding photo within each box.

3) Images were sorted by the National Library of Medicine time-period categories of Ancient, Medieval, 1500s, 1600s, and so on.

4) Each image was assigned an inventory number, with slide labels attached to the top of the slide mounts, photo labels attached to the backs of the photos, and photo and negative labels attached to the upper right corner of photo and negative sleeves.

The numbering system consists of the following:

a) The first letter or number indicates the time period. For example, "A" refers to Ancient, "17" to 17th century, and so on.

b) The next number refers to the order in which the image was inventoried. An attempt was made to keep like images together, but this was not always possible.

c) The following letter denotes format: S for slide, P for photo, and N for negative.

d) Additional numbers indicate duplicate images. Two duplicate photos would be indicated as, for example, A-25-P-1 and A-25-P-2.

e) Additional letters denote different views of the same subject; for example, the same subject shot at different angles. The images are assigned the same basic inventory number, but with an additional letter to distinguish between the different views: 17-200-S-A, 17-200-S-B, and so on.

5) A final inventory sheet was created in a file called Inventory.doc. It contains the following information for each image:

a.) Box No. consists of a letter indicating P for photo box and/or S for slide box, followed by the number of that box.

b.) Image No. is the assigned inventory number for the image, as described under item 4 in this list. The format letters of P, N, and S are not included in the image number in this inventory (see the Photo, Neg., and Slide columns for format information).

c.) Description contains information about the subject of the image, which includes but is not limited to the following, in this order: subject, birth and death dates for individuals, a short description of subject, dates of object or event (if known), and source of information.

d) Photo, Neg. and Slide show the number of images in each of these formats.

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© 2000 University of Kansas Medical Center
Comments: clendening@kumc.edu
Revised: May 11, 2000