The Records of the American Women's Hospitals contain several types of historical material, cover a wide geographical area, and extend over a sixty-five year period. In the earliest years of the AWH, 1917-1920, the major arenas of activity were France, Albania, Greece, and the Near East. AWH personnel continued to labor extensively in the last three areas during the 1920s and 1930s and added services to Serbia, Russia, Asia, and the rural United States. The outbreak of World War II returned their attention to Western Europe as projects of emergency medical relief were made necessary in war zones. In the post-war period, the AWH worked to shift administrative and professional duties to the home country in Greece and France, and financed the training and employment of native female personnel in China, Japan, Haiti, India, Southeast Asia, and the Philippines. The most recent AWH ventures have focused on Indians in North and South America, and rural residents of the southeastern United States, curtailing emergency medical services in favor of on-going prevention programs.

Ten categories of material cover the period from the founding of the AWH as the War Service Committee of MWNA in 1917, through its incorporation as an independent organization, to its merger once again with the American Medical Women's Association in 1982. The 10 categories are: Historical Materials; Esther Pohl Lovejoy Materials; Project Files; Miscellaneous Correspondence; Minutes; Financial Records; Published Materials; Scrapbooks and Exhibition Materials; Memorabilia and Artifacts; and Photographs. The largest quantity of material is contained in section III, Project Files (Boxes 4-17e). Within this section are materials on the early years of the AWH; reports of AWH fieldwork; honors and testimonials to AWH personnel; relations with the American Medical Association and the Medical Women's International Association; and reports and talks by Dr. Esther Pohl Lovejoy, AWH president from 1919 to 1967. The largest number of project files concern individual medical projects funded by AWH, identified by geographical region or by the personnel directing a particular project. The most extensive projects are covered by both geographical and personnel files; these two, often overlapping, types of files were kept distinct to reflect the original filing system of the AWH office in New York City. In addition, one file each is devoted to the American Red Cross and the Reserve Corps, a private group which provided financial support for AWH projects between 1944 and 1949.

Ten volumes of minute books and two folders of minutes and correspondence, cover the period June 9, 1917 to June 2, 1982. These provide a continuous history of the AWH which cannot be obtained from the project files. Eleven boxes of financial records are also included and consist of annual and semi-annual audits between 1918 and 1981 and five ledger books from 1968-1982. A variety of miscellaneous materials, such as fundraising pamphlets, and books and articles authored by AWH personnel, comprise the bulk of this section. Several envelopes of photographs, three picture albums, one box of copper plate images of AWH field workers, 28 project files (18 by region and 10 by individual personnel), a letter box of Lovejoy correspondence with AMWA, and a number of miscellaneous files complete the series.

The collection also houses 19 boxes of photographs and picture albums. While many of the photos are unidentified, they provide a graphic chronicle of the variety and forms of AWH fieldwork. These photos were constantly requested of field workers by AWH officers in New York City to be used in fundraising and publicity campaigns. This accounts for the frequency with which AWH insignia appear in the pictures. Another 3 boxes contain published materials including books, reprints, and medical journals which complement journal runs housed at the Archives and in the MCP College Library. Two significant types of information appear sporadically in the AWH records: financial and personnel. Most of this information is scattered throughout the project files with additional material contained in the minute books. The index points the researcher to those project files with the most significant data, but systematic recreation of employment information, especially, would be very difficult to achieve from the existing records.

Several AWH projects are documented in particularly rich detail. AWH work in France, the Near East, Greece, and Bolivia is described in project files, in the correspondence of AWH personnel, and in reports and articles, and is vividly depicted in photographs. The major emphases in these projects were emergency medical care, maternity and children's care, preventive care programs, and the coordination of social and economic with medical aid. The materials covering these projects illustrate the enormous range of AWH labors across time and place, the multiplicity of needs and services in a single location, and the broad definition of medical care employed by the AWH.

The research value of the AWH collection is as wide-ranging as the services provided by the organization itself. There were clear historical precedents for AWH work, reaching back at least to women's labors with the United States Sanitary Commission during the Civil War. The General Hospital of New York, established for the care of returning soldiers a year before AWH was founded, was nurtured by the same patriotic and professional concerns of the later organization. Yet as Inez Hayes Irwin noted, for the extensiveness and success of its efforts, "the 'American Women's Hospitals' service is . . . a 'Cullinan' gleaming amid the big diamonds of medical achievement . . . ."(1) It was "singularly adapted to meeting appeals for medical relief with speed and economy." Its flexibility, wide connections with doctors all over the world through the Medical Women's International Association and confidence in the knowledge and judgement of colleagues regarding . . . local medical needs" has allowed AWH to provide in the field of medicine what women have provided in so many other spheres of American life--"maximum work at minimum cost."(2)

The AWH records provide a rich reservoir for the examination of such efforts in the twentieth century. The collection contains the primary source material for a thorough institutional history of a major women's service organization that spans three-quarters of a century. Issues of professionalization, volunteerism, and social and occupational networks as they relate to women's professional and social careers are well-documented. In addition, the AWH worked with a wide variety of communities and often mediated between disadvantaged groups seeking medical attention and local and national governments trying to conserve resources. Women's historians have vigilantly traced the growing distinction between private (women's) and public (men's) domains that began in the United States in the late eighteenth century, the effects of that growing distinction on women, and women's efforts to reshape private and public roles in their own and society's interests. The AWH records provide the sources to examine a classic example of a woman's association that self-consciously bridged private and public domains, actively sought to bring the resources of public associations and the state to the aid of individuals in their own communities, and, in those countries which most severely relegated women to the private household, offered women access to a professional and public career. In these efforts, AWH personnel gained experience and expertise in public relations, political activism (including woman's suffrage in the United States), international diplomacy, and medicine.

The primary focus of the AWH was emergency medical care. AWH records bearing directly on such care are most valuable in two areas: 1) the role of women in particular in such care; and 2) the application of medical care in a variety of social, economic, and political situations. The planning, funding, and actual administration of emergency medical treatment, especially in European and Near Eastern theaters of war, is fully documented in these files. The inclusion in AWH files of personal correspondence and field reports highlights a number of issues and events that are unusual to find discussed in such an institutional collection. Daily operations, particularly in Greece, Serbia, and Bolivia, and including personnel and personality conflicts within and between projects, are detailed in correspondence from Drs. Ruth Parmelee, Elfie Graff, Mabel Elliott, Sarah Foulks, Etta Gray, and Ruth Tichauer. Debates and negotiations over the relations between U.S.-based and foreign-based services and between U.S.-based and foreign-based personnel are included in the correspondence and reports from numerous projects. Also included are detailed descriptions of transportation, supply, and language problems. These same files contain full evaluations of social, economic, and, less frequently, political conditions in many regions of the world.

The application of medical treatments and the development of medical programs in this variety of circumstances is described in a number of ways. Specific medical and surgical treatments are detailed in case histories of individual patients and in statistical summaries of cases in a particular project. The correspondence of directors and physicians contains evaluations of specific treatments, particularly in unusual circumstances such as the Macronissi Island quarantine. Photographs depict both a wide variety of illnesses and some forms of medical care. The files on Greece, Latin America, and the southeastern United States contain some of the most graphic descriptions in terms of ongoing medical programs while those on Greece and Great Britain include vivid images of both war-time conditions and the medical problems they create.

The availability at the Archives and Special Collections on Women in Medicine of other individual and institutional papers which complement the AWH papers greatly enhances the research potential of this collection. These include the MWIA records; the AMWA historical collection, which consists of the papers of a number of individual women physician's active in the organization; AMWA, Branch 25 (Philadelphia) records; Bertha Van Hoosen, M.D., papers; and the personal papers of a number of women physicians active in AWH, including the papers of Dr. Alma Dea Morani, who succeeded Dr. Esther Pohl Lovejoy as President of the organization in 1967. A guide to materials in the Archives and Special Collections on Women in Medicine can be found online at http://archives.drexelmed.edu and is available from the Archives.

1. Irwin quoted in Esther Pohl Lovejoy, Women Physicians and Surgeons, Natonal and International Organizations: Twenty Years with the American Women's Hospitals, A Review (Livingston, N.Y.: Livingston Press, 1939), 25.

2. Estelle Fraade, "American Women's Hospitals Service," World Medical Journal, 5 (1969), 116.