Over a hundred years ago, the Texas Medical Association’s 35th president Frank Paschal, MD, of San Antonio, had eyes on the future. In his 1904 presidential address, he told the House of Delegates, “The labors of this Association should always be conserved, and unless steps are taken, the past work will be lost forever.”
TMA took his advice to heart, and now stewards a robust archive of documents and artifacts. From decades’ worth of House of Delegates business to medical devices and a 1555 edition of Andreas Vesalius' De Humani Corporis Fabrica Libri Septem, the collection preserves the past to inform medicine’s future.
The archive is central to TMA’s History of Medicine activities, which include a gallery exhibit and traveling banner exhibits that showcase the collection’s artifacts as a way to illustrate medicine’s journey through time.
“The History of Medicine activities have always aligned with TMA’s goal: to help physicians care for Texans,” said Claire Duncan, TMA’s director of Information Services. “More than that, they tell the story of how physicians in Texas have taken care of their patients from the get-go. It really is a way for us to educate the public on the value of medicine and the value that physicians provide in keeping patients healthy and through history.”
The educational use of the collection takes many forms. For instance, neuroanatomy students at The University of Texas at Austin Dell Medical School benefit from seeing TMA’s Vesalius edition and other neuro-related artifacts; meanwhile, medical history researchers and genealogists can access the collection on appointment basis.
“[The collection] helps physicians who are interested in learning more about their family member who might have been a physician way back in the day, or researchers who are researching a physician, or a particular issue that TMA might have been championing,” Ms. Duncan said. “That history is really important for a variety of reasons, which is why we are open to historians and other researchers on an appointment basis.”
Besides its public-facing role, the archive also serves a vital role internally. As TMA boards, councils, and committees put together policy, learning from precedent is crucial, especially with the association’s 170-year history.
“Our archives serve as a resource to staff when they're developing policy or when they're updating policy, when they're working with their boards, councils, and committees and they need to find out how a policy has changed over the years,” Ms. Duncan said. In such a case, they can reference the decades of House of Delegates transactions stored in the archive.
Just as Dr. Paschal looked to the future, TMA understands the need to keep the collection flexible and accessible. The next step, which has already begun, is digitization, though the process is expensive and requires serious deliberations from TMA’s History of Medicine Committee.
“Once you digitize [paper records], you need to make sure that the technology stays up to date so it's still accessible – and then do you get rid of the paper or not? If you're all digital and something terrible happens, there goes all your history,” Ms. Duncan said. “Those are the things that we wrestle with.”
These decisions come at a pivotal time, as TMA’s headquarters at the Louis J. Goodman building in Austin are being refurbished. For Ms. Duncan, the timing is poetic.
“This is like bookends,” she said. “The committee was reformed in 1989 when we were building the new building. Now the History of Medicine Committee is helping us guide us into the new iteration of what the archives look like.”
Donations to support the TMA archive collection can be made to the Texas Medical Association Special Funds Foundation.