Hugh DeHaven, PhD Papers

This collection is very important for the information it contains on the project that was the first to study crash injury and also for the material on the man who gave the initial impetus to this research, Hugh DeHaven. The papers are, however, more informative regarding the research than they are regarding the man. Glimpses of Hugh DeHaven are given most frequently in the comments that he attached to various items as he was sorting his papers in 1977*. Other insights into Dr. DeHaven can be found in the transcripts of two interviews that he did, one with Dr. William Haddon, Jr. of the Insurance Institute and the other with Erich Meyerhoff, the Head Librarian of the Wood Library, Cornell University Medical College (Box 6); the scrapbook that was created at the time of his retirement (Box 7); and the file of miscellaneous correspondence (Box 7). The diaries that Dr. DeHaven kept, usually a very personal and revealing record, are really research notes containing very few personal entries.

If a clear picture of Hugh DeHaven is to be found here, it will only be through the careful combing of the records relating to the Crash Injury Research Program that form the bulk of this collection, and even then only a limited view of the man can be seen. But while the man himself is not explicated in these files, his life's interest and work, Crash Injury Research, is.

In 1936, because of his interest in crash survivability that his 1917 air accident had created, Hugh DeHaven began studying freefall accidents so that he could learn more about how the body reacts to impact with various materials, e.g. pavement, car metal, soft earth, fencing, etc.. He retained an interest in this subject and collected clippings and reports about such accidents throughout his life (Box 5). His findings from these studies, and the implications they had in crash injury, were published in 1942 in an article in “War Medicine.” Crash Injury research had, in effect, arrived.

It was also in 1942 that the Crash Injury Research Project (CIR) began at Cornell University Medical College. (For a history of CIR see the finding aid for the Crash Injury Research Program Papers and also the chronology attached to this inventory.) The Project was headed by Hugh DeHaven from 1942 until his retirement in 1954. The files contained in this collection demonstrate what Crash Injury Research at Cornell was during the intervening years. The correspondence reveals not only the progress and problems of the research, but also the administrative side of the Project: budget and staffing difficulties (there was a chronic shortage of money for both, hence) fundraising efforts; laboratory space; grant and patent applications; insti¬tutional support and relations with Cornell University in Ithaca and its many groups working on aeronautics, especially Cornell Aeronautical Laboratories in Buffalo, and engineering projects.

*Because these comments were scotch-taped to some of the material in the collection, or, more usually, mounted with tape to sheets of paper, it was felt that they should be removed from the files so that the tape could not hurt other material around it. Photocopies have been made and put in place of the originals, which are retained in Box 5.

Also shown here is the interest of outside groups, civilian and military, in the results of the CIR projects and the developing networks for the gathering of the great amounts of data that was necessary for the CIR studies. The vitality of the Program participants and their missionary zeal in spreading the word of crash safety is evident in the many publications written and conferences attended and participated in. DeHaven et al., through the use of their research data and the safety equipment features they developed, began an interest in Crash Injury that spread not only to other researchers but also to the aviation industry and the government itself. The value of this work was recognized by the many awards presented to this group, from the 1940's to the Automotive Engineering Excellence Award given to Hugh DeHaven in 1979. (See Boxes 1 and 8) There can also be seen the dev¬eloping interest in automotive CIR that led in 1953 to a split in the Program into two divisions, AvCIR (aviation) and ACIR (automotive).

Non-Manuscript Material

This collection contains books and awards that belonged to Hugh DeHaven (Boxes 8-9). There were also some photographs contained in the files, and these have been placed in the Archives' Photograph Collection under Personal Collections-DeHaven. These photographs consisted of shots of experiments, air and car crashes and equipment. The cassette tapes from the interviews Dr. DeHaven did with Erich Meyerhoff and Dr. William Haddon, Jr. are in the Audio File of the Archives.