Ensuring the Future of Preserving the Past
Robert M. Stein, MD ’68, FACC, FAHA Endows University Archivist Position
Robert M. Stein, MD ’68, FACC, FAHA
“The Writing Master,” an 1882 oil painting by American painter Thomas Eakins, depicts Eakins’ father, Benjamin, at a desk, fully absorbed in his calligraphy, with a quill in his hand and a sheet of parchment on his desk.
“If you look closely at the painting, you’ll notice that the document he is writing is a Jefferson diploma,” says Robert Stein, MD ’68.
The Escondido, California, cardiologist is as passionate about history as he is about medicine, particularly his alma mater’s history. He gives lectures on Eakins and the connection with Jefferson, he studies the ties among prominent families associated with the University, and can talk for hours on end, imparting little-known but fascinating facts about the 200-year-old institution.
Because he believes so strongly that history is the heart and soul of Jefferson, Stein has endowed the Robert M. Stein, MD ’68, FACC, FAHA Archivist position at Thomas Jefferson University. His goal in creating the position is to ensure that Jefferson will always have an historian and archivist to preserve its past and to educate and serve as an inspiration to future generations.
Jefferson is unique and fortunate to have a remarkable history, one that has been 200 years in the making.
“Jefferson is unique and fortunate to have a remarkable history, one that has been 200 years in the making,” Stein says, adding that while it’s important for the institution to keep moving forward, “the best way to know where it’s going is to know where it’s been.”
Jefferson has selected the current University Archivist and Head of Historic Collections and Teaching Associate F. Michael Angelo, MA, as the inaugural holder of the endowed archivist position.
Angelo, who has served in the position since 2001 and oversees the newly opened Marion J. Siegman, PhD, FAPS, Archives of Thomas Jefferson University, is the resident expert in all things Jefferson. He prepares historical exhibits; creates the content on the University Archives website; gives tours and lectures; runs educational programs; and oversees the efforts to acquire, preserve, and make available for research official University records, personal papers, memorabilia, and other materials of enduring historical value to Jefferson.
“Dead records, old photos, extinct reports, noncurrent literature ... How can we today connect to these expired things?” asks Angelo, who quickly answers his own question. “Sometimes they come to life when in the hands of an historian or genealogist.”
An avid history buff, Stein shares those sentiments and, during a tour of the new archives last year, decided to make sure the archivist position would be funded in perpetuity by establishing the position.
“It was a monumental gesture,” Angelo says. “And we’re just so grateful.”
A self-described “history nerd,” Angelo earned his MA in history at New York University and went on for a certificate in archival management and historical editing. He then embarked on a career that took him from the directorship of the Women in Medicine Archives at the Medical College of Pennsylvania to the archivist positions at the Chemical Heritage Foundation, the Independence Seaport Museum, and finally at Jefferson.
When Angelo arrived at Jefferson in 2001, he was determined to put the archives to work.
“Archives tend to be forgotten, and they get closed down because nobody knows what they provide,” he says. So, he set forth to raise the level of the archives — and raise awareness of the benefits they provide.
To that end, he and his team partnered with other departments, including Institutional Advancement, Alumni Relations, Communications, and various other clinical divisions, to provide important historical information about Jefferson.
That effort got a boost in 2023 when longtime Jefferson professor and researcher Marion J. Siegman, PhD, made a generous gift to lift the archives out of a cramped and dusty room in the Scott Memorial Library and create a spacious new facility on the fourth floor. It opened in April 2024.
The new space features an expanded storage vault with state-of-the-art environmental controls, a commercial-grade digitization station, an expanded exhibition gallery with display cases, and a dedicated lecture room, as well as a reception and exhibit area.
The Siegman Archives holds institutional records dating to its origins in 1824. It consists of 20,000 photographs, thousands of biographical files, museum artifacts, and 8,000 rare medical books. Much of the core collection has been digitized and available online.
The opening of the new facility coincided with Jefferson’s bicentennial celebration in 2024, and provided a wealth of information for various events. Today, it continues to collect important historic materials, preserve them, and make them available on the Jefferson Digital Commons.
“We have a community of scholars who are really interested in what we have because it’s so unique and so complete,” Angelo says. “We also have alums who are interested in learning institutional history.”
And it’s not just Jefferson alumni, students, faculty, and staff who use the archives. Because Jefferson’s medical history is such an important part of medical history overall, scholars from across the country and around the world have visited both in person and online.
Aside from giving tours to alumni and other museum organizations, Angelo has been able to expand the educational aspect of his work with more hands-on learning with students, who now have the opportunity to co-curate exhibits and participate in fun learning programs.
One of his favorite ongoing programs that he can now expand is “What’s in the Box?”
“We get some medical students to work as a team. I preselect objects from the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries and let the students discover what they are and what they were used for,” Angelo explains. “I then ask them to write a history of it and have them look to the future to see if they could adapt the technology to current technology.”
Angelo says it takes the students out of “black-and-white and yes-and-no zone and into creativity” by taking old artifacts and giving them a twist for the next century.
He says he loves seeing the “awe factor” when he shows students the artifacts — especially some of the 8,000 rare medical books, including one dating back to 1460.
“It’s remarkable because it’s a continuum from the 15th century to the present,” he says. “Anatomy hasn’t changed. Technology changes, but the human body doesn’t; it still has the same ills, and so it’s a way to connect the past, the present, and the future.”
Another way the archives connect the past with the present is through providing artifacts from the long-gone to the living.
“It can be remarkably moving to witness the descendant of a 19th-century alumnus see a photo of him for the first time, or an unknown letter that a Jeff doctor sent to his wife in World War II read by their now adult child,” Angelo says. “These human connections are what I value most about my job.”
For Stein, the value of history is priceless — and inspirational.
History can be remarkably inspiring. Knowing your past helps to influence the choices you make in the future.
“History can be remarkably inspiring,” he says, noting that “knowing your past helps to influence the choices you make in the future.” As an example, he cites the first successful open-heart surgery at Jefferson, performed by alumnus John H. Gibbon Jr., MD ’27, and the use of the heart-lung machine he invented.
“That’s very inspiring to a student considering a career in cardiology,” he says — a student, for instance, like himself.
A Philadelphia native, Stein graduated from Central High School and was in the first class of the Penn State-Jefferson combined class program in 1963. He went on to train in Boston and New York, finishing his cardiology fellowship at Columbia.
After serving in the U.S. Army, he settled in Escondido, California, joining the Palomar Medical Center in San Diego in 1976, where he served as chair of the department of medicine, medical director of cardiac services, and chief of staff. He is currently a consultant at the Graybill Medical Group’s Rehabilitation Institute and directs the Outpatient Cardiac Rehab Program.
Today, Stein, who has also endowed a scholarship fund at the Sidney Kimmel Medical College and a professorship in cardiovascular quality and safety, serves as a volunteer docent at the San Diego Museum of Art and a docent and board member of the San Diego Chinese Historical Museum.
In the future, Stein hopes to see more research into the artifacts in Jefferson’s collection, and he’d like to see the collection grow, because “it enriches the whole educational experience to have a piece of it as the history of the institution where you’re enrolled.”
He reminds us that history never ends. Today’s events are tomorrow’s history, and someone has to record them for posterity.
Angelo is happy to take on that great responsibility, because for him history is a living thing, something to pass on to future generations.
“Every day I’m in the archives, I discover something that probably nobody else knew,” he says. “It’s a really exciting place to be, where I can help scholars advance knowledge and help students understand the past.”
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Jefferson Hospital’s electric-powered ambulance in 1909
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SKMC alumnus Dr. Elliot J. Rayfield, Class of 1967 (left), and Jefferson Archivist Michael Angelo (right) examine rare books in the Marion J. Siegman Archives
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Jefferson Archivist Michael Angelo displays artifacts from the Siegman Archives.
12 Fun Facts from the Files of F. Michael Angelo
Everyone knows (well, every Jeffersonian, that is) that Jefferson was the first medical college in the country to establish a clinic; its William W. Keen, MD 1862, was the first to successfully remove a brain tumor; and Jonathan Letterman, MD 1849, created America’s first organized ambulance system. But there are so many other fascinating bits of information just waiting to be discovered in the Marion J. Siegman, PhD, FAPS, Archives of Thomas Jefferson University. Below are just a few fun facts about the University.
- Jay J. Jacoby, MD, appointed chair of Jefferson’s anesthesiology department in 1965, created the hospital “code blue” system, which alerts doctors to patients in respiratory distress. The system is used in hospitals across the country today.
- In 1826, Jefferson’s first professor of chemistry, Franklin Bache, MD, was the first in the U.S. to conduct studies in acupuncture therapy.
- Charles H. Klieman, MD ’67, developed the modern surgical stapler in 1982.
- In 1864, Jacob da Costa, MD, 1852, was the first to identify and describe what he called “soldier’s heart,” known today as post-traumatic stress disorder.
- In 2022, an electric-powered ambulance company claimed to have provided the first such vehicle in Philadelphia. Not true! Jefferson Hospital had the first in 1909, and we have the photo to prove it.
- Children’s Hospital of Pennsylvania, the first pediatric hospital in the U.S., was founded in 1855 by two Jefferson graduates, Francis West Lewis, MD 1846, and Thomas Hewson Bache, MD 1850.
- William T. Lemmon, MD 1921 introduced the world’s first continuous spinal epidural in 1939.
- Carlos Juan Finlay, MD 1855, was the discoverer of the vector for yellow fever—the mosquito—in 1881.
- The year of his graduation, Edward R Squibb, MD 1845, who would go on to create a pharmaceutical empire, invented a distiller for producing pure, safe ether. He refused to apply for patent rights to the innovation.
- Professor of surgery Thomas D. Mütter was the first in Philadelphia to demonstrate the use of sulphuric ether in surgery, on December 9, 1846, at a Jefferson clinic.
- The nation’s first hospital heliport for emergency cases opened in 1971 atop the Foerderer Pavillion, funded by the Jefferson Hospital Women’s Board.
- Dr. Sun Yat Sen, the revered first president of the Republic of China in 1912 after the fall of the Qing Dynasty, was a graduate of the College of Medicine for Chinese in Hong Kong. Sun’s main teacher was John Glasgow Kerr, MD, a graduate in the Jefferson class of 1847.
