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The University of Michigan's first professional school; the Medical School record group includes historical and administrative records related to the school and its faculty and administrators, 1850-2010.

The records of the Medical School span over 160 years, beginning in 1850 and continuing through 2010. They include 389.7 linear feet of material, 10 oversize volumes, 9 oversize folders of miscellaneous documents, and 3.3 GB of digital material stored online. The records include dean's correspondence and subject files, executive committee minutes, faculty minutes, annual reports of departments, school accreditation and review files, a variety of special reports and studies, and extensive files on the Replacement Hospital Project (Taubman Center). The record group also contains photo prints depicting faculty, students and facilities, including a remarkable series of photographs taken by J. Jefferson Gibson circa 1893.

The Medical School records have been organized into five subgroups: Dean's Records, Subordinate Administrative Officers, Faculty Records, Audio-Visual Materials, and Miscellaneous records. Within each subgroup there are a number of series and these series may be further subdivided to reflect the date span of the records received in each accession.

The Medical School records have been received in several accessions and the physical arrangement of the records (the number order of the boxes) reflects the various installments in which they were received. The accessions sometimes reflected the tenure of a particular dean or other administrator, but frequently appear to have been somewhat arbitrary transfers of files. Records from individual subgroups, series and subseries often continue across multiple accessions--sometimes with consecutive date ranges, but often with overlapping date spans.

In this finding aid the records are described in their intellectual order -- subgroups and series are brought together irrespective of the particular accession in which they were received. As a result, in the detailed contents listing the box number order will not always be consecutive.

Records of the School of Social Work (formerly the Institute of Social Work) include minutes, correspondence, curriculum records, and topical files, concerning the activities of the University's social work program under the direction of Robert Kelso, Arthur Dunham, Federle Fauri, Phillip Fellin, Harold R. Johnson, and Paula Allen-Meares.

The records document the founding and development of the School of Social Work from its inception as the Institute of Health and Social Sciences (later renamed as Institute of Public and Social Administration) in 1935, to its subsequent reorganization as the School of Social Work in 1951. The proposed merger with Wayne State University in 1950 is also well documented. The strength of this record group consists of 59 years of minutes (1935-1994), which include proceedings from executive, faculty, and curriculum committees.