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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.

A division of the Department of Surgery of the University of Michigan Hospital, established the nation's first residency training program in thoracic surgery in 1928; documents development of the program at Michigan and advances in surgical procedures, includes correspondence, operation notes, case studies, and photographs and negatives of patients and surgical procedures.

The records of the Section of Thoracic Surgery document the growth and development of thoracic surgery at the University of Michigan from its origins as a clinic to its emergence as a specialized section within the Department of Surgery. The records, covering the period from 1927 to 1960, are comprised of correspondence, operation notes, case studies, and photographs and negatives of patients and surgical procedures. Together, these materials richly illustrate the development of thoracic surgery techniques during the 1930s and 1940s.

Because patient names appear throughout the record group as well as in the photographs and negatives, patient privacy is a major concern and researchers must comply with the access restrictions described elsewhere in this finding aid.