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Reflected Moments Images of the Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center, New York, N.Y., 1957-1991 A Selection of Photographs from the Elizabeth Wilcox Photographic Collection [ Foreword ] [ Acknowledgements ] [ Copyright Notice ] [ VIEW EXHIBIT ] (requires flash player) Introduction Elizabeth Wilcox, Photographer "My tendency was always to treat every situation as a 'story.' I took far too many shots and I would often find a story within a story: While following the girl with a hole in her heart I noticed a little boy who I found had spent the second and third years of his life in a hospital. He had been admitted after almost starving to death because he had no esophagus. Surgeons gradually built one from a piece of his intestine and he went home whole and well. He had learned to talk in the hospital and had never heard of a 'living room.' His siblings were only telephone voices. In another project, a four year old boy and the entire story of his tonsillectomy, leaving home, the three day stay and hospital good-byes was photographed with the idea of creating the booklet which was published to help prepare a child for admission to the hospital." EW Elizabeth "Libby" Wilcox served for over thirty years as the unofficial photographer of the Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in New York City. As the wife of Dr. Herbert "Bud" Wilcox, Jr., a graduate of Columbia's College of Physicians & Surgeons and a member of its faculty for many years, she was given unhindered access to the workings of the Medical Center. From 1957 to 1991, Libby's photographs illustrated every type of Medical Center publication. Her legacy is a remarkably comprehensive photographic record, over 100,000 images, of the people, places, activities and events of a major US academic medical center during a time of tremendous change in American health care. Elizabeth Wilcox was born in Baltimore in 1916, the daughter of Dr. Gordon and Elizabeth Elliott Wilson. She was graduated from the Bryn Mawr School but the early death of her father prevented her from going on to college. She began taking pictures when her husband presented her with a camera on their honeymoon in 1937. Over the next twenty years she had a successful career as a photographer of children. Her introduction to working at Columbia-Presbyterian came in 1957 when a pediatrician asked her to document the treatment of children with nephrosis, a kidney disease. She quickly became the Medical Center's unofficial chronicler, documenting both its daily routines and extraordinary moments into the 1990s. Besides her work at Columbia-Presbyterian, Libby had a significant career as a photojournalist. Her work appeared in Time, Newsweek and other national publications and she was an active member of the American Society of Media Photographers (ASMP). She died on May 6, 2000 at her home in Connecticut. In 1991, Libby and her husband, Herbert B. Wilcox, Jr. donated her collection to the Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center and deposited it in Archives and Special Collections at Columbia University's Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library. She then taught herself how to use a personal computer and compiled a catalog to the collection which can be consulted in Archives & Special Collections. The majority of the Wilcox Photographic Collection remains in negative form, but there are several hundred of Libby's original prints available. Stephen E. Novak Head, Archives & Special Collections Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library Columbia University Summer, 2004

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