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Re: Interesting Article in Washington Post Health Section



Danna,

Thank you for alerting the archival community about this article. Barron
Lerner (no relationship to me) is indeed a good friend of archives as a
researcher. He and I spoke at a meeting of the American Association for the
History of Medicine about the confidentiality of medical records and their
importance to epidemiologists and historians. On the same panel was a
lawyer who's views differed, as might be expected.
The Confidentiality Roundtable of SAA has also paid attention to the
problems of access to medical case records. My own archives has records
dating from 1808 through 1932, including sensitive mental health records.
      Adele




At 08:14 AM 2/17/2000 -0500, you wrote:
>Good morning,
>
>I thought that you would be interested in a story from the Washington
>Post Health section from 2/8/2000. The url is
><http://washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A21851-2000Feb7.html> It is
>about how a physician used the archival records found at the FDR
>archives to determine the truth about the death of Eleanor Roosevelt. It
>was originally thought that she died from aplastic anemia but many
>within the medical community heard that mistakes had been made in the
>diagnosis. It turns out she died from Miliary TB, something that was
>missed by doctors in previous diagnosis. However once the author reads
>over the medical records found in the archives, he finds that the story
>it much more complicated than originally anticipated. It was fascinating
>reading. The author (who is a doctor at Columbia-Presybterian hospital)
>also notes that he loves to travel to often remote archives and
>painstakingly review old, dusty papers that help him to solve mysteries
>(I'm paraphrasing a little but yes the old dusty part is an exact
>quote.) He also notes that the archivist at the Roosevelt archives was
>the one that started him on the quest for information about Eleanor
>Roosevelt's death by saying that copies of her medical records were
>available for review.
>
>Hope you enjoy the article.
>
>Danna Bell-Russel
>
>--
>Danna C. Bell-Russel
>National Digital Library Learning Center
>202-707-4159
>dbell@loc.gov
>
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Adele A. Lerner, Archivist
New York-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Archives
1300 York Avenue
New York, NY  10021-4896

Voice: 212-746-6072     FAX: 212-746-8279
email alerner@mail.med.cornell.edu
http://www.med.cornell.edu/centennial/

A posting from the Archives & Archivists LISTSERV List!

To subscribe or unsubscribe, send e-mail to listserv@listserv.muohio.edu
      In body of message:  SUB ARCHIVES firstname lastname
                    *or*:  UNSUB ARCHIVES
To post a message, send e-mail to archives@listserv.muohio.edu

Or to do *anything* (and enjoy doing it!), use the web interface at
     http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/archives.html

Problems?  Send e-mail to Robert F Schmidt <rschmidt@lib.muohio.edu>