Because the records include Confidential Health Information (CHI) as defined by Columbia University policies governing data security and privacy, access is allowed only under the terms of Archives and Special Collections’ Access Policy to Records Containing Confidential Health Information.
Presbyterian Hospital patient records collected by Barron H. Lerner as research material for his book, The Breast Cancer Wars: Hope, Fear, and the Pursuit of a Cure in Twentieth-Century America (2003).
History and Biography
Physician and historian. Lerner was educated at the University of Pennsylvania (BA 1982) and the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons (MD 1986). He is the author of Contagion and Confinement: Controlling Tuberculosis Along the Skid Road (1998), The Breast Cancer Wars: Hope, Fear, and the Pursuit of a Cure in Twentieth-Century America (2003), and One for the Road: Drunk Driving since 1900 (2011), among other works. Since 2012 he has been professor of medicine and population health at the New York University School of Medicine.
Organization
Presbyterian Hospital patient records collected by Barron H. Lerner as research material for his book, The Breast Cancer Wars: Hope, Fear, and the Pursuit of a Cure in Twentieth-Century America (2003). While the bulk of these records are of cancer patients not all are, and the cancer patient records are not entirely of breast cancer patients. Records date from circa 1930 to circa 1970.
Subject Headings and Related Records
Administrative Information
Gift of Barron H. Lerner (accessions #2010.01.04, #2011.006, #2012.004).
Records were originally held by the Presbyterian Hospital Medical Records Department and were borrowed by Lerner while researching his book The Breast Cancer Wars: Hope, Fear, and the Pursuit of a Cure in Twentieth-Century America (2003). While the records were in Lerner’s custody, the Medical Records Department in 2000 destroyed all its paper patient records that showed no activity after 1979. Rather than destroy these records after finishing his book, Lerner donated them to Archives & Special Collections.