Archival Practicum: Day 9

I've slowly been speeding up my processing time, and today I processed 79 files (my fastest day yet!). That's about 10 per hour, so I'm spending about 6 minutes per file.

Since I don't have much to mention today, I'll take the time to discuss something I've been keeping track of throughout this process. Occasionally, I'll notice a small headshot photo of the patient glued to their application file. At first, I started to track the names only so I could make note in the finding aid, but then I started to also note the dates they were in the home. Interestingly enough, I've found that these patients were admitted in 1940, so for whatever reason, the home decided to include photos of patients, but only in 1940. I plan to continue making note of files with patient photos for the finding aid.

As for the content of today's session, there were two interesting patient files. The first was incredibly sad, so as a content warning, you may want to skip to the next paragraph. As I'd mentioned before, some of the patients battled with mental health, which was likely due to incurable health problems. There was a patient who had apparently jumped to his death out of a window at the home sometime during the summer of 1930. The odd thing was that there was a surprising lack of information about this incident in the patient's file, maybe the home had tried to cover it up??

The other interesting thing I found today was a notecard titled "Tubercular man in hospital" with information about the patient being in a New York hospital. Now, it makes sense to be aware if a patient has contagious and active TB, but this was the first time I'd seen something like this in a file. Maybe it was a New York thing?

Stats:

• Files processed: COMFORT - DALY, 79 folders (435 total folders processed)

• Hours: 8hrs (72 total hrs)