Grace Goldin collection, 1963-1990.

30 linear ft.

English

Mostly in English; some materials in other European languages.

Donated by David L. Goldin, Grace Goldin's son.

Organized into three series: I. Slides. II. Photographs and correspondence. III. Bound notebooks containing research material, photographs, and negatives.

Grace Goldin was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where her father was a businessman. She studied at Barnard College, and graduated with a bachelor's degree in English literature in 1937. She moved to Connecticut when her husband, Judah Goldin, accepted an appointment as Professor of Jewish Studies at Yale University in 1958. A few years after arriving in New Haven, in the early 1960s, she became involved in the history of hospitals while working as a research assistant to John D. Thompson, professor in the School of Epidemiology and Public Health at Yale, who was studying the characteristics of good nursing wards. The two collaborated on a history of hospital architecture, The Hospital: A Social and Architectural History, published by Yale University Press in 1975. From this work, Goldin cultivated an interest of her own in hospitals and hospices. She took photographs through much of Europe and in several cities in the United States, and spent a considerable amount of time visiting and corresponding with Cicely Saunders of St. Christopher's Hospice in London. These decades of work culminated in the publication of Work of Mercy: A Picture History of Hospitals (Erin, Ontario: The Boston Mills Press, 1994). Grace Goldin's work was not limited to the history of hospitals; in the years before and following that research she also proved herself to be an accomplished poet. She spent the last years of her life in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, where she died of a cerebral haemorrhage at the age of seventy-eight in July 1995.

Series 1 consists of seventeen ring binders containing slides taken by Grace Goldin from the 1960s through the 1980s of historic hospitals. The vast majority of the slides are of European institutions, St. Christopher's Hospice in London being the most photographed among those. Series 2 is comprised of four boxes of material. Most of the folders contain photographs, both of hospitals and of prints and paintings of hospitals. There are, in addition, a smaller number of folders containing correspondence and poems written by Goldin. Also included in this series are photographs by Dieter Jetter and four reels of microfilm. Series 3 represents Goldin's research material, which she organized by institution in spiral bound notebooks. These contain many original photographs, as well as copies of secondary sources and other research material. There are also annual reports of a select number of hospitals and hospices; the typescript diary of a patient at St. Christopher's Hospice in London; chapters from an early draft of Work of Mercy; and several binders containing negatives of Goldin's photographs.

September 16, 2003

Finding aid available.

Grace Goldin Collection. Cushing/Whitney Medical Library, Yale University.

Grace Goldin Collection. Cushing/Whitney Medical Library, Yale University.