Seated: Barbara J. Niss and Arthur H. Aufses, Jr., MD. Back row, from left: Carolyn Aufses Blashek, Harriet Aufses, and Arthur H. Aufses III.
The Mount Sinai Health System’s archives, housed in a simple suite of offices on the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai campus, belies the rich trove of historical documents belonging to seven storied hospitals that are preserved inside.
Filed in these archives is an article about medicine as a noble calling that was written in 1848 by Woman’s Hospital physician E. Randolph Peaslee, MD. (The Woman’s Hospital was later merged into Mount Sinai St. Luke’s.) There are also minutes from the first board meetings for St. Luke’s Hospital from 1850, and for The Jews’ Hospital in 1852 (renamed The Mount Sinai Hospital in 1866), and the minutes from Mount Sinai Beth Israel’s founding board meeting in 1889 that were written in Yiddish.
These documents and many others from Roosevelt Hospital—renamed Mount Sinai West in 2015—and a limited collection from New York Eye and Ear Infirmary of Mount Sinai, Mount Sinai Queens, and Mount Sinai Brooklyn, provide unique glimpses into New York City’s history and how the practice of medicine has evolved over the centuries.
“History is many stories. We try to bring these stories to people at Mount Sinai so they will know and appreciate them,” says Barbara J. Niss, Director, The Arthur H. Aufses, Jr. MD Archives and Mount Sinai Records Management Program, part of the Academic Informatics and Technology Department. “The more you know about a place, the more connected you feel to it.”
The women’s ward at Mount Sinai St. Luke’s circa 1900.
Upon request, Ms. Niss provides one-hour historical walking tours of The Mount Sinai Hospital (MSH). The Archives’ staff also creates quarterly displays in the Annenberg North Lobby on historical topics using the Archives’ records. The Mount Sinai archivist since 1986, Ms. Niss co-wrote the definitive history of MSH and its clinical and surgical accomplishments in the book
This House of Noble Deeds: The Mount Sinai Hospital, 1852-2002, with Arthur H. Aufses, Jr., MD, retired Chairman of the Department of Surgery. She and Dr. Aufses also wrote a history of Mount Sinai’s School of Medicine in 2004.
Over the years, Dr. Aufses and his wife, Harriet, have been strong supporters of Mount Sinai. They established the Aufses Family Scholarship, lectureships in the Departments of Surgery and Population Health Science and Policy, and prizes for surgical residents and students. Dr. Aufses’s Mount Sinai roots date back to 1921, when his father began his surgical training at MSH. He says he first visited the archives in the mid-1980s to look for early surgical cases. “It was an incredible experience to see the vast collection of historical material dating back to the 1850s. I became fascinated with the archives.”
Preserving, organizing, and digitizing the Health System’s archival documents is an ongoing project for the Archives staff, and content is added to the collection daily. (Mount Sinai’s Records Management Program is also based in the Archives.) The staff regularly receives requests for information about a particular medical subject, hospital within the Health System, or individual. Ms. Niss says there is ongoing interest in refugee physicians who arrived in New York after fleeing Nazi Germany, in the history of the Woman’s Hospital, and from the families of women who graduated from three of the hospitals’ former schools of nursing.
The Aufses Archives also provided significant support in establishing the Mount Sinai History Wall, an artistic timeline unveiled in December 2016 that showcases in words and pictures each hospital’s transformative contributions to medicine, science, and patient care over the past two centuries. The History Wall is located on the fourth floor of the Corporate Services Center at 150 East 42nd Street, outside the seminar room where new employees attend orientation on their first day of work at Mount Sinai.
