Prognosis Is Iffy for Group’s Quirky Medical Collection
Now that the Los Angeles County Medical Assn. is doing what a lot of Americans do -- downsizing and moving to smaller quarters -- it’s facing the same problem that individuals have: What to do with all this stuff?
In this case, the stuff includes a transparent, decalcified skull preserved in wintergreen oil that electrically lights up to show off the sinus, oral and ocular passages; medical instruments from the Roman Empire; shrunken heads from cannibal tribes in South America; a binocular microscope; even an old wooden business sign reading: “LA Brewer, Surgeon and Physician.”
These are among the objects collected by and donated to the medical association since its founding in 1871. The group, housed in the Pacific Mutual Building at 6th Street and Grand Avenue in downtown Los Angeles, is moving to the Aon Building at 707 Wilshire Blvd. -- where it will have about half as much space.
It’s all a matter of money.
“All of our files and more are at risk because of the cost of storing them versus destroying them,” said Karen Nikos, the association’s director of media relations.
Some of the choice parts of the collection, including scholarly medical journals and ledgers, will go to the Huntington Library in San Marino.
But no one knows what to do with the dozens of boxes filled with tattered newspaper clippings, medical degrees, citizenship papers, letters from victims of the fetus-deforming pill Thalidomide, memoirs, scrapbooks, photographs and membership files on Los Angeles physicians dating back nearly 134 years.
The files led to a pioneering realistic television show called “Medic,” which aired on NBC from 1954 to 1956. Directed by John Lucas and starring Richard Boone as Dr. Konrad Styner, the series was based on real case histories. But these files, too, seem destined for a landfill.
“We hate to get rid of them, but we don’t know what to do with them,” Nikos said.
The archives spell out in detail the early workings of the association, known to its 3,500 members as LACMA.
Never mind that the Los Angeles County Museum of Art has adopted that acronym too. The association, Nikos said, is “LACMA the elder, because the art museum wasn’t opened until the 1960s.”
The “elder” was founded when seven physicians got together to improve their knowledge and skills by talking about their cases and experiences.
The founding leader was Joseph P. Widney, an early president of USC. He contended that God spoke to him in the desert, and he counted among his patients the infamous bandit Tiburcio Vasquez, the “Mexican Robin Hood” who went on an extended crime spree before he was caught and hanged in 1875.
A co-founder of the association was William Francis Edgar, who served as an Army surgeon at Ft. Miller in Fresno County.
In 1853, Edgar was asked to preserve the head of bandit Joaquin Murietta and the deformed hand of Murietta’s cohort Three Finger Jack, so they could be sent to civil authorities to secure a reward for their deaths. Edgar pickled them in whiskey and arsenic.
Later, the items were displayed in various museums around the state; they are believed to have been destroyed in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire.
Leather-bound ledgers are filled with elegantly handwritten minutes from the association’s first meetings, which include comments about the “unsanitary conditions of the city.” There’s an entry about the successful removal of a 59-pound tumor and another about a physician who delivered an 18-pound baby in 1876.
The minutes also document the care and treatment of what doctors claimed to be the city’s first official mental patient, Charles Trapp, who died of “congestion of the brain” in a jail cell in 1878.
After the death, members of the medical association successfully petitioned county supervisors for a special room at the county hospital for psychiatric patients.
Members not only dispensed medicine but kept good records, taking note of Southland scourges such as smallpox, a typhoid outbreak in 1905 and the 1924-25 pneumonic plague, which killed 33 people in East Los Angeles. Despite that toll, officials tried to hush it up for fear of public hysteria.
“Every victim was brought to the County Hospital. But not a doctor, nurse or attendant caught the dreaded disease,” said County Hospital medical director Dr. Phoebus Berman in a 1956 Times interview.
The disease was transmitted as easily as the common cold, through coughing and sneezing. Dead rats with plague lesions were found under the floorboards of many victims’ homes.
In the 19th century, many considered medicine more an art than a science, and a female doctor could win grudging acceptance as a peer -- as long as she confined her practice to suitable patients: women and children.
That’s exactly what Dr. Rose Bullard did.
In 1903, her perseverance against an all-male medical establishment made her the association’s first female president.
No other woman filled that post for the next 90 years.
Bullard had set up a partnership with one of Southern California’s first female physicians, Dr. Elizabeth Follansbee, who was also the first female faculty member at USC’s School of Medicine and, in the 1880s, the medical association’s first female member.
In 1933, as membership increased to several hundred, the association built its first permanent home, at Westlake Avenue and Wilshire Boulevard.
The next year it added a library, housing 125,000 contemporary and antiquarian books of medical interest. It became a repository for physicians’ private collections too, and was open to the public for research.
In 1991, the association moved downtown and later sold its buildings. Most of its books went to the Huntington and UCLA libraries and the Southern California Medical Museum in San Bernardino.
Much of the association’s collection is from Los Angeles, but not all.
There seems to be no rhyme or reason why the organization became caretaker of a glass X-ray of Wisconsin Dr. T.D. Smith’s knee, shattered by a World War I combat injury. An accompanying newspaper clipping says he was the first American to be wounded in the war.
Other curious items include:
* A 1922 leather-bound medical diary, complete with lecture notes, diagrams and treatment of patients, that belonged to a Dr. James N. O’Neill.
* Civil War photographs of Confederate soldiers wounded at Cold Harbor, Va., where Gen. Ulysses S. Grant’s Union forces suffered 7,000 casualties in less than 30 minutes.
* A stack of letters and postcards, mostly in French, to and from French-born Camille Treadwell, an American Red Cross nurse during World War I, who later worked in Arizona.
“We don’t know why we have all this stuff, except maybe their families lived in Los Angeles and didn’t know where else to send it,” said Lourdes Birba, a consultant who is helping decide what to keep. Still lining the association’s office walls are displays of ointment jars from the Mesopotamian era, along with medical instruments from the Civil War and Roman Empire, a heavy bronze mortar for grinding drugs, and a Daumier caricature of Louis Philippe, king of France from 1830 to ’48 -- whose only conceivable connection to medicine is that Indians honored him for unspecified medical services.
Also on display are three Tumi ceremonial knives used for “trephination,” perhaps one of humankind’s oldest medical procedures.
Migraines and even madness were believed to be caused by demons inside the head who were constantly hammering to get out.
The ancients made a hole in the victim’s head with such knives to let the demons escape. Thousands of skulls have been found with neat and not-so-neat holes in them.
