Join the Conversation: Maintaining Historical Records of Health Care in America

[smccormack]

In May I attended the annual meeting for the American Association for History of Medicine (AAHM) in Boston, Massachusetts. As a graduate student my research placed me solidly within the field of US foreign policy and I vividly remember my first Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR) meeting at Princeton University in 1999 where I had the great honor of meeting George Herring, the renowned Vietnam War-era historian. Many years later my interests began to shift. Since 2015 I’ve been spending whatever research time I have studying health care for women in the late 19th/early 20th centuries. 

The AAHM was my first professional conference in this field and I’m just beginning to learn more about the work that historians and scholars are doing in this area. I feel as though a whole new world has opened to me academically – one I’m excited to share with my students and the Macmillan Community. In upcoming blogs I will include discussion of some of the fantastic works-in-progress that I was exposed to, starting this week with the work of the Hogg Foundation for Mental Health at the University of Texas at Austin.

I was introduced to the Hogg Foundation’s work at a roundtable titled “HIPAA, Privacy, and Accessing Historical Medical Records” where Elizabeth Stauber invited participation in the Foundation’s “Dialogues on Mental Health Records” project, which seeks to bring together a wide range of historians, archivists, genealogists, psychiatrists, social workers, and former patients of mental health institutions. According to the project’s website, the goals include to “discuss what types of historical public mental health records should be preserved, how they should be shared, who should have access, and many other questions.” (Hogg Foundation)

Last week I participated in an online discussion with 30+ historians and scholars hosted by the Foundation. We shared the challenges we have faced in gaining access to historical medical records across the United States and talked about what kinds of changes we would like to see in the states where we are currently doing research. We were encouraged to review the Hogg Foundation’s “landscape analysis” on the challenges of historical research in the area of mental health, State School and Hospital Preservation: A Survey of the Field and to consider ways in which we can influence research and access to materials in our communities through our scholarship and teaching. 

The Hogg Foundation will host more upcoming virtual opportunities for scholars to connect. For more information click here to subscribe to their mailings and join the conversation!