Today’s post is by Cody White, Archivist at the National Archives at Denver
Many of us are probably guilty of it. I certainly was; letting my mind drift during a cataloging course in library school and doodling palm trees amongst my class notes. It seems for Virgil Milo Pinkley, who graduated from the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine in 1908, it was no different – his 1906 notebook from Dr. Barr’s adnominal surgery course is rife with doodles. But what is different is that after he resigned the agency physician job at the rural Wind River Reservation in western Wyoming, he left his medical school notebooks behind. They were absorbed into the agency’s records and thus today are found in our holdings here at the National Archives at Denver.
According to his obituary, Virgil Milo Pinkley was born on May 25, 1884. He earned an undergraduate degree at the University of California Berkeley and then moved to Tennessee. In 1908 he graduated from the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine and embarked on an internship at a mission hospital in Guadalajara Mexico. According to his service record card held by the National Archives at St. Louis, Pinkley’s federal service started in June 1914 at the Shoshone Indian Agency, later renamed the Wind River Indian Agency in 1937. He only served there for seven months, leaving in January 1915 for the agency physician post at the San Xavier Indian Agency in Arizona. But as our holdings show today, he left behind some of his medical school notebooks.
Examples of doodles and illustrations as found within the medical notebooks.
The books are all of the same type, the topic or topics along with the professor written on the front, so we get a sort of college transcript for Pinkley. In 1906 Dr. Barr taught Abdominal surgery. Obstetrics was taught by Dr. Altman. Dermatology, general medicine; the topics run the gamut. Inside the font cover Pinkley wrote his name and Nashville address, and the notes are prodigious, filling page after page in his looping cursive. Along with his notes are cut and pasted pharmaceutical suggestions from various serials, which we see he does the exact same thing with drawings/photographs of flowers and recipes.
Examples of his handwritten recipes and cut/pasted ones as well. Several pages have flower images cut out and glued onto the pages, an example seen here on the left.
Pinkley left the San Xavier Agency in July 1916, transferring to the Siletz Agency in Oregon. On September 11, 1917, he transferred yet again, to the Pala Agency in southern California. Six days later he resigned from government service. According to his obituary, he moved north to San Bernardino with his family that same year where he embarked on a medical career. He retired in 1951 as superintendent of the San Bernardino County Hospital.
While his federal service was relatively short, his legacy lives on in the records he left behind. Last November we here at the National Archives at Denver hosted a potluck meal consisting solely of recipes found in our holdings, and naturally Dr. Pinkley’s large collection of recipes were mined.
For an appetizer we selected one of his hand written recipes, cucumber boats. Our verdict? Typical for recipes of the time, they were a little bland and could have benefited from both garlic and feta in the filling.
The volumes discussed in this blog all come from the series “Medical Notebooks of Dr. V. M. Pinkley, 1905–1911,” found at the National Archives at Denver. Biographical information not found in the records is courtesy of his obituary, found here.