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These files represent an almost complete official record of the Clinical Excellence Committee, the Task Forces, and their subcommittees. The minutes are complete, with only one exception. There are few interim reports or correspondence among the coordinators, the chairmen of the committees, and members. The final report is contained in Box 2, folder 1.

Some of the minutes have notes made by Dr. Thomas Chalmers, President and Dean of The Mount Sinai Medical Center and School of Medicine. The files probably came from that office, although, aside from these few notes, they are generic.

The collection is organized into three series: Medical Subject Files, General Subject Files, and Research Notebooks. Medical Subject Files contains Dr. Hodes' files on medical topics, the majority of them related to his specialties of pediatric bacteriology and virology. Files typically contain a mixture of correspondence, manuscripts and research material related to a particular disease, syndrome or chemical compound. Of particular note are the files related to Dr. Hodes' study of infant diarrhea and the extensive collection of papers related to polio, which include the records of his service on the Congressional panel that testified to the efficacy of the Salk Vaccine. Many subject files contain manuscript material received from other researchers. Major manuscripts by Mount Sinai staff have been identified. General Subject Files includes professional association records, personal correspondence, and material relating to Dr. Hodes' employment at Mount Sinai. They document Dr. Hodes' term as President of the American Pediatric Society, his service on the executive committee of the Mount Sinai Physicians' Practice Association, and many other activities. The series contains correspondence with numerous major figures in the history of Mount Sinai as well as with distinguished colleagues at other institutions. It includes correspondence with his brother Robert and son David, both of whom worked at Mount Sinai. The Research Notebooks series contains eight research notebooks dating from the early 1950s which document experiments carried out on laboratory animals.

This collection of papers from Dr. Rowe’s office is different from previous Presidents’ collections, providing a higher level view of Mount Sinai. There are very few files relating to the various departments of the Medical School or the Hospital as is seen in earlier President’s files. There is also little here relating to the Hospital’s establishment of the Mount Sinai Health System, although the merger with New York University is covered. This is undoubtedly due to the fact that Dr. Rowe served as President of the Mount Sinai Medical Center only. Earlier Presidents had also been Dean of the School of Medicine and so had oversight over these departmental or institution specific issues.

There is a great wealth of material regarding Mount Sinai’s efforts vis-à-vis other institutions. This includes proposed initiatives with Columbia University, the affiliation with the City’s Queens Hospital Center and the years of controversy over privatization of the Queens’ municipal hospitals, and the School of Medicine’s affiliation contracts with Elmhurst and Queens Hospitals. There are also files relating to the Department of Geriatrics and the development of creating ties with businesses and Keio University in Japan.

The merger with New York University is documented by two distinct series of files that were received and processed separately. The “MS-NYU Initiative” files (boxes 24-25) cover the initial proposal, development and implementation of the merger. The “NYU” files (boxes 27-28) document Dr. Rowe’s service as President of the combined Mount Sinai-NYU Health following the merger and include departmental correspondence, real estate / building records, and an extensive collection of material related to the NYU Downtown Hospital.

Mount Sinai’s real estate holdings and physical facilities are documented by an extensive subject file on buildings (BLD, boxes 4-6), and its financial activities by a finance series (FIN, boxes 13-14) and an extensive series on fundraising (FND, boxes 15-20.) There is a small amount of material related to Mount Sinai School of Medicine (box 26), primarily covering commencements, convocations and honorary degrees.

Also of importance are the extensive files on the search for a new Dean in 1996/97, the many files charting Mount Sinai’s efforts to deal with the rise of AIDS in New York, and the files on establishing the Office of Technology Transfer and its later efforts, a matter of great importance to institutions in the late 20th, early 21st century.