Website Review: University of Minnesota Academic Health Center Oral History Project

http://editions.lib.umn.edu/ahc-ohp/

I’m a staff nurse on [Owen] Wangensteen’s floor [in the early 1960s] . . . and all of a sudden, there’s that Wangensteen Suction. . . . We had so many infected wounds, it was just unbelievable, ward isolation up and down the corridor. . . . Patients with wound drainage on split mattresses to drain puerile material in basins under the bed. People suffering so much, and not having a minute, not even a second to look in on them even. . . . [Later, as assistant director] I did some really intensive studies of that floor, and I ended up dividing it in half [for better staff utilization], which nobody thought they could do, until I kind of drew out how we could change some of the way the space was being used and give everyone the support space they need. . . .

—Marie Manthey, MSN, oral history interview with Dominique Tobbell, October 12, 2010

This oral history site is full of such fascinating mini-stories to reward and instruct the researcher. The ninety-six oral history transcripts are indexed alphabetically and by organization (Academic Health Center, University Hospitals and Clinics, School of Medicine, School of Dentistry, School of Nursing, School of Public Health, College of Pharmacy, College of Veterinary Medicine); each is presented with an abstract of topics and a biographical sketch of the oral historian. The interviews are well conducted and edited by Dr. Tobbell and student interviewers working under her direction. As a group, they give context and enriching detail to the complex history of a major health sciences educational institution, the home of Wangensteen’s suction apparatus and Walton Lillehei’s work in open-heart surgery, and the site of the first Master’s in Hospital Administration program in the United States, among other innovations. The oral histories shed additional light on several issues with wide resonance, including the development of professional nursing, the issue of cost containment, and the ethical conflicts involved when a university develops a potentially profitable drug or technology, illustrated by the Anti-Lymphocyte Globulin case. The site also provides a timeline for each organizational entity and brief sections on doing oral history and teaching with oral histories.

This excellent website could be improved in two respects. First, its value would be much enhanced for research and teaching by a short essay or exhibit pointing the visitor to some of these historical highlights, even so briefly as in the preceding paragraph. The determined researcher, and the scholar whose main interest is in the University of Minnesota Health Center, will find the site a gold mine, but others will find it more difficult to mine the gold from the verbiage. Second—and this is a common fault of all oral history projects, including this reviewer’s—oral histories often require multiple layers of time-consuming review and editing before all errors and ambiguities can be corrected. In the short excerpt above, “puerile” is clearly not the right word, and the reader is unsure what Ms. Manthey meant to say. Such errors seem to be few in this collection, but they are unfortunately distracting.