Guide to
The William H. Welch Collection

Acknowledgments

Several generations of dedicated processors have contributed to the production of this finding guide. Simon Flexner and his son James Thomas Flexner first organized the Welch papers in conjunction with research for their biography William Henry Welch and the Heroic Age of American Medicine (Viking Press, 1941). They produced an invaluable card index to the papers of Welch that they had collected. Over the years many more documents were found and added to the core collection assembled by the Flexners. In 1979 the staff of the Alan Chesney Medical Archives processed the expanded collection under the auspices of a grant from the National Library of Medicine and produced a folder inventory of the collection. During the next twenty years many more documents were acquired through donations and surveys of the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions. The incorporation of these new materials into the Welch Collection greatly enhanced its significance as a resource for the study of medicine and public health in the first quarter of the twentieth century.

In 1999 Catherine Neill, M.D. completed a project to reprocess the Welch Collection, adding the materials acquired since 1979, and prepared a more comprehensive finding guide to the collection. Dr. Neill, a volunteer on the Medical Archives staff, was careful to maintain as much of the original order of the collection as possible and to preserve the prior two finding guides. Deborah McClellan, Ph.D., Research Associate in Biomedical Information Sciences, edited the finding guide and made substantial editorial improvements. With a penchant for accuracy, Kay Berney, a consultant, made editing corrections and proof-read the final draft of the guide. Nicolas Maftei and colleagues at ArchProteus encoded the guide in HTML and SGML for the World Wide Web. Special gratitude goes to the ArchProteus team for their expert and exceptional services. Lisa A. Mix, processing coordinator, deserves great commendation for her overall direction of the project from processing and preparation of the finding guide to its final editing and encoding.

On behalf of the entire staff, I extend our very deep gratitude to Dr. Neill who has donated her expertise and many, many hours of her valuable time to process the Welch Collection and to produce the Guide to the William H. Welch Collection. She has worked with extraordinary enthusiasm, diligence, care, and attention to detail to make these two projects models of excellence. Her vast knowledge of the topics covered in the collection has informed and helped everyone working with her and has made her an especially strong asset to the reference staff.