Beth Israel Medical Center Board of Trustees records

• 8 boxes (211 inches)
• 58 bound volumes

This collection consists primarily of the minutes of the Board of Directors/Trustees of the Beth Israel Hospital and its successor institution the Beth Israel Medical Center. The minutes are complete from 1889 to 2004 with the exception of the years 1892-1896, 1903-1913, and 1925-1926. (The years up to 1989 are in bound volumes; minutes from 1990 on are in folders.) The years 1925-1936 are also covered by an incomplete second set (mostly dated 1928 and 1934-1936) of loose minute pages. Some of these pages include annotations/corrections in what is likely the hand of Hospital Superintendent Louis J. Frank.

The Board initially kept its minutes in Yiddish, but at some point between 1891 and 1897 they switched to English as the language of record. During the preparations for Beth Israel's 1989 centenary, an English translation of the 1889-1891 Yiddish minute book was created. The translation exists in two versions, a 208-page typescript and a 166-page typescript.

The collection also includes an extensive file of routine Board records for the years 1906-1907, including correspondence, memoranda, and committee reports. (See the Processing Note below for more detail on these items.) These records are organized chronologically by month. There is also a small file of routine Board records from the years 1925-1936.

Finally, the collection contains the 1905-1912 minutes of the Board subcommittee responsible for the administration of the Beth Israel Hospital Training School for Nurses.

As received by the Mount Sinai Archives in 2015, the historical records of the Beth Israel Medical Center were in severe disorder. The present collection was assembled by reuniting Board of Directors/Trustees records that were scattered throughout the disorganized collection.

In particular, the Board material dated 1906-1907 was dispersed in a disorderly manner across numerous containers and existed in (at least) three versions: original typescripts on highly acidic paper; a set of photocopies on high-quality acid-free paper; and a second set of photocopies made from the first.

Judging by the presence of glue marks and damaged paper margins, it appears that the original 1906-1907 records had been collected in a scrapbook that was later disbound. At some point these pages were dispersed among manila folders that were assigned serial numbers but not organized in any way, possibly in an attempt to maintain the literal "original order" of the papers as received. A photocopy matching this arrangement of the documents seems to have been created at this time before becoming dispersed across multiple containers. At some point an incomplete attempt was made (presumably by a later staff member) to organize some of these photocopies in folders labeled with their contents.

During the processing of the Beth Israel records, the processing archivist reunited this scattered material and arranged it in chronological order.

These records may be closed for a minimum of 25 years from creation, depending on their content. Please contact the Archives (MSArchives@mssm.edu) for additional information.

• English
• Yiddish

The materials are primarily in English with the exception of the 1889-1891 minutes, which are in Yiddish. A typescript translation into English is available in the collection.

This is an artificial collection containing the records of the Board of Trustees of the Beth Israel Medical Center. It was created during the processing of a large shipment of material that had previously been in the custody of the Continuum Health Partners legal department and was received by the Aufses Archives in April 2015. For a complete discussion of these records' provenance, please refer to the Beth Israel Medical Center Records finding aid.

In September 2016, 54 additional bound volumes of minutes, comprising the complete run of minutes for the years 1929-1986, were discovered in an offsite storage account and accessioned by the Aufses Archives as an addition to this collection.

The other Beth Israel Medical Center collections that were formed out of the initial April 2015 shipment of records, particularly the Annual Reports and the primary Records collection, include materials that cover the same time span and subject matter as the extant Board of Trustees records. Please contact the Aufses Archives for more information.

The correspondence of Seymour J. Phillips, whose grandfather had been a founder of the Hospital and who served as a Trustee from 1936 until his death in 1987, contains material related to the Board and its activities.

Processed by Nicholas Webb in June 2016.