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Website: Philip S. Hench Walter Reed Yellow Fever Collection (Claude Moore Health Sciences Library, University of Virginia, Charlottesville) 

Press release forwarded on behalf of Joan Echtenkamp Klein.

Note that Joan will be talking about the trials, tribulations, and 
benefits of creating this massive website, at the Science, Technology 
and Health Care Roundtable session of the upcoming Society of American 
Archivistsannual meeting (Birmingham, Alabama: 19-25 August):
http://www.neurosciencearchives.org/sthc/sth02020.htm

RJ


--- Begin Forwarded Message ---

April 10, 2002

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contact Joan Echtenkamp Klein at (434) 924-0052 or jre@virginia.edu

THE UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA CLAUDE MOORE HEALTH SCIENCES LIBRARY OPENS
THE PHILIP S. HENCH WALTER REED YELLOW FEVER COLLECTION WEBSITE

http://yellowfever.lib.virginia.edu

Charlottesville, VA -- The opening of The Philip S. Hench Walter Reed
Yellow Fever Collection Website marks the completion of a two-year
project at the University of Virginia Claude Moore Health Sciences 
Library funded in part by a $250,041 National Leadership Grant by the 
federal Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS).

The project identified, digitized, transcribed, preserved, created
enhanced searching options, and now provides worldwide access via the
Web to 5,500 original documents, photographs, and artifacts in the
Health Sciences Library's archive on Walter Reed and yellow fever.  The
library project team, led by Joan Echtenkamp Klein, worked closely with
David Seaman, Director of the Electronic Text Center at the University
of Virginia Library.  "Significant collaboration among all team members
was instrumental in the project's success," according to Linda Watson,
Health Sciences Library Director.

Like the contemporary AIDS epidemic, yellow fever was a deadly scourge
that had a devastating effect on lives and economies throughout the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.  In 1900, Walter Reed, M.D., and
his fellow members of the United States Army Yellow Fever Commission
made the discovery that a mosquito was responsible for the transmission
of yellow fever.  "The prayer that has been mine for twenty or more
years that I might be permitted in some way or sometime to do
something to alleviate human suffering has been answered," wrote Walter
Reed, an 1869 graduate of the University of Virginia School of Medicine,
to his wife Emilie on December 31, 1900.  The Yellow Fever Commission's
experiments in Cuba were a great breakthrough in medicine for which
Walter Reed was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor and elevated 
to the status of American medical hero.

Philip S. Hench, M.D., awarded the Nobel Prize for his discovery of
cortisone, was fascinated by the story of Walter Reed and the Yellow
Fever Commission and made it
his life's work to collect everything available relevant to this public
health story.  He met and befriended all the people associated with the
story or their relatives, most of whom gave him original family
documents and photographs.  The extensive archive that Hench compiled
was given to the University of Virginia after his untimely death - he
did not live to write his definitive book on Walter Reed and yellow
fever -- and is the cornerstone collection in the Claude Moore Health
Sciences Library's archive.

Writing about the new Website, Paul Lombardo, Ph.D., J.D., Director of
the Program in Law and Medicine in the Center for Biomedical Ethics at
the University of Virginia School of Medicine, observed, "This is truly
an incredible piece of work... it is spectacular, and a model for making
documents available to scholars on the Web."  Luke Demaitre, Ph.D.,
Visiting Professor of Medical Education in the Humanities in Medicine
Program of the University of Virginia School of Medicine and former
Professor of History at Pace University, stated: "Congratulations with
the IMLS Walter Reed Site: magnificent!  I have just begun to explore
it, and my only reactions so far are awe and excitement."

Melvin Shaffer, a member of the University of Virginia's Eighth
Evacuation Hospital in  orld War II and a visitor to the newly opened
Web site wrote:  "What a pleasant surprise to have the materials from
the Reed web site.  I immediately called it up and have hardly taken my
eyes off.  Such a beautiful presentation.  Especially nice is the typed
"translation" of each letter."

The New York New Jersey Chapter of the Medical Library Association
awarded the new Website their highest rating for sites reviewed in their
newsletter.  Patricia E. Gallagher, the reviewer and a medical 
librarian at the New York Academy of Medicine Library, wrote, "The 
University of Virginia has mounted this magnificent web site about 
their Yellow Fever Collection.  More than just a list of their own 
resources, this beautiful web site details as well the people and 
events that contributed to the discovery of the cause of Yellow Fever."


Joan Echtenkamp Klein
Assistant Director for Historical Collections & Services and
Assistant Professor for Medical Education
University of Virginia Health System
The Claude Moore Health Sciences Library
P.O. Box 800722
1300 Jefferson Park Avenue
Charlottesville, VA 22908-0722
(434) 924-0052; Fax (434) 243-5873; jre@virginia.edu
http://www.med.virginia.edu/hs-library/historical/

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