Digital image archive traces history from 1940s
A nurse comforting a girl bandaged from head to toe for extensive burns. Two Nobel Laureates posing with their mentors shortly after receiving their prizes. Medical students undergoing military inspection in the mid-1940s near “The Shacks,” prefabricated barracks that served as the first classrooms of UT Southwestern Medical School.
These photographs, along with hundreds more that chronicle UT Southwestern Medical Center’s history, can be viewed in a digitized collection recently assembled by UT Southwestern Library employees.
The collection, “UT Southwestern Images, 1943-Present,” can be found at utsouthwestern.edu/library/utswimages, or by clicking on a “Quick Link” on the campus website “Mission & History” page.
The online collection of about 600 images expands on a project the Library completed in early 2011 to digitize photos documenting the medical history of Dallas called “Dallas Medical Images, 1890-1975,” also located through a “Quick Link” from the “Mission & History” page.
The new collection, focusing specifically on UT Southwestern since its founding in 1943, includes images of people, events, buildings, and groups. Viewers of the collection can search for items of interest by key words or dates, print images, and download photos.
New photos will continue to be added to the digital collection to provide an ongoing pictorial history of UT Southwestern’s continued evolution.
“It’s a way of preserving these photos and making them more publicly accessible. It also illustrates the fascinating history of the campus,” said Bill Maina, UT Southwestern Archivist and History of Medicine Librarian, who led the project.