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THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS MEDICAL BRANCH
GALVESTON, TEXAS 77550
May 16, 1975
MEMORANDUM
TO: Dr. Edith M. Bonnet
FROM: James Polk Morris, Ph. D., Institute for the Medical Humanities
RE: Your Personal Papers
As a follow up to our conversations in your home on January 23 and March 29,
I would like to make some suggestions concerning the importance of your
personal papers . The records of the life and career of Edith Marguerite
Bonnet, M. D., UTMB graduate of 1926, should be preserved for future
generations. Therefore, I urge that arrangements be made for their transfer
to an appropriate historical repository which will take care of them forever.
I recommend that your family and your future heirs be made aware that all of
your papers and other documents should be collected together and sent to an
appropriate archives. Your books, letters, diary, notes, and all of the items
should be inventoried for potential historical value.
Let me explain why this is so important. Most people have not kept adequate
records about their professional and personal affairs. As a result, the
historian trying to do research on women doctors in Texas is severely limited
by the number and quality of the material available to them. Professional
historians are so tied to and limited by their sources that it is an overwhelming
problem which we must try to correct at every opportunity we have.
At present an adequate archives does not exist at the University of Texas
Medical Branch here in Galveston. However, we anticipate that within a couple
of years such a facility will be available on a permanent basis. Dr. Truman
Blocker, President Emeritus of UTMB, and Mr. Emil Frey, Librarian of the
Moody Medical Library here at UTMB, are taking steps to consolidate archival
arrangements for the future here in Galveston at UTMB.
In the meantime, because you are a graduate of the University of Texas at
Austin, I recommend that you be made aware that the Eugene Barker State
Historical Center is an absolutely first-class repository for Texas materials.
It is the indispensable focus of historians who do research on any topic in this
state. Therefore I think that you and your family have a personal choice to make
as to whether to send your materials to Austin or to Galveston. Obviously, we
would like to have them in Galveston and anticipate that we will have the facilities