Commonwealth Fund: Report by Wolff, et al, on "Medicine A" Clinic at NYH (RESTRICTED-PHI), 1946 -1948

The correspondence and subject files are undoubtedly the most interesting part of the collection. The General Correspondence, 1925 -1962 (2:11-3:4) contains letters from Dr. Wolff's scientific colleagues, students and patients; up until about 1950, however, this is a one-sided dialogue as few copies of Dr. Wolff's outgoing letters are preserved. In contrast to the voluminous General Correspondence, the Personal Correspondence is skimpy and usually limited to household matters. There seem to be no letters present from Dr. Wolff's wife, Isabel Bishop, or their son, Remsen. There is also no correspondence from his student days at Harvard Medical School. The practice and teaching of neurology at the Medical Center are welldocumented in the papers. There are annual reports of the Department of Neurology, 1933 -1960 (4:12 - 5:10), lecture outlines, student examination questions, and grades as well as various kinds of teaching materials and patient examination guides. Of particular interest, is the Department of Neurology correspondence, 1928 - l937, which contains letters among Drs. Wolff, G. Canby Robinson, and Eugene Dubois regarding the establishment of the department. It also includes Dr. Wolff's 1932 "Report on Undergraduate Neurological Education" in which he outlined his views on neurological instruction. Another important topic on which some light is shed by the collection is Dr. Wolff's relationship with the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology. Although the material included here does not reveal how much Dr. Wolff knew about the Society's backing by the Central Intelligence Agency, it does include annual reports, 1957 -1961, correspondence, and proposals for funding (6:15-16). Among the neurologists who corresponded with Dr. Wolff were Stanley Cobb and H.F. Forbes at Harvard, Wilder Penfield at McGill, Walter Alvarez and Maurice Levine, and J. Groen of Amsterdam and Jerusalem. Unfortunately since the correspondence is arranged chronologically, the researcher needs to do some digging to locate these letters. Separate folders of correspondence can, however, be found for Adolf Meyer, Dr. Wolff's Johns Hopkins mentor; Dean Clark, a research assistant in Dr. Wolff's lab in the late 1930s who after developing tuberculosis spent time at the Trudeau Clinic; and Stewart G. Wolf, a Wolff collaborator in the late 1930s and early 1940s, whose correspondence is largely from his years with the Ninth General Hospital in the South Pacific theater of the Second World War.