Publications
APS Bulletin • Volume 9, Number 5, September/October 1999
History of Pain
Marcia Meldrum, PhD, Department Editor
The Cat Without the Grin: Preserving the History of 20th-Century Pain Science and Medicine
“All right,” said the Cat; and this time it vanished quite slowly, beginning with the end of the tail, and ending with the grin, which remained some time after the rest of it had gone. “Well! I’ve often seen a cat without a grin,” thought Alice, “but a grin without a cat! It’s the most curious thing I ever saw in my life!”
I sometimes think that when the historians of 2100 try to research the history of science in the late 20th century, what they will see will amount to the grin without the cat. The records will have vanished, and all that will be left will be a tantalizing hint, the bare outline of a fascinating story that was never successfully told. Science will suffer, as will history—in the past, a fresh look at an old, discarded idea often led to an important discovery or insight.
The history of science since the 1600s has been so well and richly documented that this scenario may seem as unreal as anything Alice saw in Wonderland. But, as a 20th-century historian, I can assure you that it is all too possible.
Who is responsible? We all are, of course, as the victims of our own technology and productivity. We no longer rely only on paper to communicate and record what we think and do. The thoughtful letters George Bishop and Donald Hebb wrote to each other in the early 1950s about the problem of pain would be e-mail messages if they were written today. Many of John Bonica’s important conversations about a multidisciplinary pain society took place over the telephone, and there is no trace of them in his personal papers.
Nowadays we keep careful and extensive records of our work and activities. We keep our records on paper or on disk until there is no longer any space in the file cabinet, or we upgrade our computers or move down the hall or across the world. Then we clean house—the papers go into the recycling bin, and the electronic records dissolve back into the circuitry. History vanishes slowly, page by page.
You have guessed by this point that I want to convince you to help preserve the record of the 20th-century pain field, but you don’t know what to save or how or where to save it. In answer, here are the Liebeskind History of Pain Collection’s frequently asked questions on 20th-century archiving:
1. What materials need to be saved?
The short answer is “almost anything.” In particular, we are now losing records of process: how an experiment was designed, how an organization was formed, how scientists and physicians talked about a problem before someone suggested a solution.
We need to save all of the following:
- Correspondence, including personal and professional letters and e-mails (John Liebeskind made print copies of many of the e-mail messages he sent or received; these are now part of his papers at UCLA.)
- Research files, including outlines, proposals, notes, raw data, laboratory notebooks, grant applications, and grant reports
- Drafts and manuscripts of articles, books, reviews, and unpublished papers (e.g., a paper presented at a conference that helped to crystallize the writer’s thinking but was considered a work in progress)
2. What about reprints?
If they appeared in established print journals, published papers are in much less danger of vanishing than are many other types of materials. Libraries preserve them, and since 1966 Medline has provided the quintessential index. Archives nonetheless like to own one full set of an author’s reprints to complement his or her unpublished papers.
3. What else should be saved?
- Instructional material: For the history of scientific education, we should be saving lecture notes, syllabi, exam questions, and course evaluations.
- Organizational material: Not all organizations keep good or consistent records! A professional group should preserve its history by saving agendas, minutes, programs, reports, and committee correspondence.
- Biographical material: curricula vitae and biobibliographies, personal memoirs, and diaries and appointment calendars
- Other types of material: audiotapes, videotapes, photographs, slides, and what used to be called ephemera (i.e., scrapbooks, memorabilia, collections)
4. Who wants to keep all this stuff?
The best choice is usually a scientist’s home institution. If it has an appropriate archive, that is where scholars will look for the scientist’s papers, which will become part of a collection that includes the institution’s own records, papers of colleagues, and other materials that help to paint a picture of the person’s working life.
If your institution has no archive, or if it lacks the resources to accept your materials, then we invite you to consult with us at the Liebeskind Collection. We cannot store everything at UCLA, but we can help to identify the best and most suitable repository for historical materials and to work out a transfer schedule so that materials can be donated when you no longer need them.
We can also set up on-line links between the Liebeskind Collection and other archives containing the papers of pain scientists and clinicians, so that scholars researching the history of the field can use our Web site to locate many of the resources they need.
5. What happens first to materials when they are donated to an archive?
Archival processing has three steps. The first is preservation. As you may know, most paper used since the 1860s contains acids, which degrade the paper over time. That is why the pages of old volumes of the Journal of the American Medical Association crumble when you open them. Archival papers are filed in acid-free boxes to preserve them as long as possible. The processors also remove other dangers to paper materials (e.g., rusty paper clips and staples, brittle rubber bands, gluey scotch tape). Particularly fragile items can be photocopied onto acid-free paper or kept in mylar sleeves.
6. Wouldn’t it be simpler just to scan everything?
At the moment, it would be prohibitively expensive to scan everything. And even if that were not so, we doubt the software of the 2100s will be able to read today’s scanned documents. However, some form of scanning technology probably will yield the long-term answer.
7. What are the second and third steps?
The second step in archival processing is organization: making sure that files and materials are in a logical, comprehensible order; labeling boxes and folders; dating items; correcting misfiles; and eliminating duplications. The processor’s goal is to recreate the order the scientist used in working with the records. If the files are organized in a clearly understandable manner, the archive probably will not do much reorganization. Descriptive file labels, correct dates, and identification of people and places in photographs are also helpful to archivists.
The third step is to prepare a finding guide that describes and lists the materials to facilitate researcher access. All Liebeskind Collection finding guides are available on its Web site as well as in print form. Within the next 10 years, the same will be true of most archival finding aids and indices.
8. What about confidential correspondence or patient data?
Any responsible archivist will discuss this problem with a donor and work to address his or her concerns. It is standard practice to restrict access to highly sensitive material for a period of years. The archive can also ask researchers to sign a form testifying to their legitimate use of the material. One benefit of working with an archive is that it has established procedures for allowing access to materials as appropriate over an extended time span, while ensuring their preservation in the interim. The donor’s written agreement with the archive, called the deed of gift, details such provisions; it also serves as the donor’s receipt for tax purposes.
Do you have more questions? Please don’t hesitate to ask me, the APS historian, or Russell Johnson, the Liebeskind Collection archivist. Our goals are to promote the study of the rich and fascinating history of pain and ensure that this history will be available to future generations.
Department editor’s note: Contact the Liebeskind Collection through e-mail at rjohnson@library.ucla.edu, or through its Web site, http://www.library.ucla.edu/libraries/biomed/his/.
Marcia Meldrum is a visiting research fellow in the department of palliative medicine at the University of Sheffield in Sheffield, England.