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Vital Signs

Then & Now

A reminder of the pace of change, and of timeless truths, from a memoir by a past superintendent of the Woodsville, N.H., Cottage Hospital:

"One of the most exciting and happy moments [at] the old Cottage Hospital was in 1953 . . . when Avis Smith gave birth to triplets. It was also a very frightening time, as all the bassinets . . . were full, and we had just one small incubator. . . . At that moment the telephone rang. William Wilson, administrator of Mary Hitchcock Hospital . . . informed me that a truck had just left Mary Hitchcock with one large incubator. . . . I was to accept [it], free of charge, as long as it was needed."

1975
Year that DHMC began offering formal Perinatal Transport Conferences as a service to the region


A reminder of the pace of change, and of timeless truths, from a 1991 history of Mary Hitchcock Hospital:

The 1950s marked "a period of profound change in the hospital's scale, management, and capabilities. Mary Hitchcock was no longer a small business; in 1950 the hospital's budget exceeded $1 million for the first time, and by 1959 it had reached $3 million [and] the medical staff had grown to 70."

$1.2 billion
Operating expenditures for Dartmouth-Hitchcock in fiscal year 2010

119,663
Days of inpatient service at DH-Lebanon in FY10

1.8 million
Outpatient visits at all DH locations in FY10

1,200
DH medical staff today


A reminder of the pace of change, and of timeless truths, from the Winter 1991 Dartmouth Medicine:

"For a group of second-year students at DMS, 'Have a HEART' isn't a plea for more humanitarianism in medicine but an eminently practical statement: they think everyone should learn CPR. . . . They've already had a HEARTening response to their fund-raising appeals: CIBA-Geigy donated a 'Resusci-Annie,' a rubber model for teaching CPR."

12
Number of high-tech manikins able to sweat, bleed, drool, and cry in the current 8,000-square-foot simulation center

20,000
Approximate number of individual encounters logged in the center in 2011


A reminder of the pace of change, and of timeless truths, from the 1935 bulletin describing DMS:

"The mezzanine floor [of Dartmouth College's Baker Library] is reserved for the Medical Library, where some 14,000 volumes have been segregated from the stacks. The current numbers, as well as the bound volumes, of the periodicals devoted to the medical sciences are to be found in the journal room on this floor."

92,341
Number of books in Dartmouth's two biomedical libraries in FY2011

152,331
Number of journal volumes

4,385
Number of electronic journal subscriptions

41,246
Number of other items


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Dartmouth Medical SchoolDartmouth-Hitchcock Medical CenterWhite River Junction VAMCNorris Cotton Cancer CenterDartmouth College