Health and Medicine | Page 5

Children’s Preventorium patients playing basketball

Patients of the Children’s Preventorium of Ramsey County play basketball. Photograph by the St. Paul Daily News, ca. 1926.

Children’s Preventorium of Ramsey County

Between 1915 and 1953 over 950 Ramsey County youth, most between the ages of four and fourteen, resided at the Children’s Preventorium of Ramsey County, in Shoreview. A handful stayed for a day or two; hundreds lived there for years. As its name suggests, the purpose of the Preventorium was to prevent disease—in this case, tuberculosis. It was the only such institution to function in Minnesota.

“Social” scale of patient progress

“Social” scale of patient progress used to evaluate participants in the University of Minnesota’s Transsexual Research Project. Donald W. Hastings, MD, and Colin Markland, MD, “Post-Surgical Adjustment of Twenty-Five Transsexuals (Male-to-Female) in the University of Minnesota Study,” Archives of Sexual Behavior 7, no. 4 (1978), 332. From the Transgender Informational Files, 1941–2014, in the Transgender Research Guide (Tretter-357), Jean-Nickolaus Tretter Collection in GLBT Studies, University of Minnesota.

"Economic" scale of patient progress

“Economic” scale of patient progress used to evaluate participants in the University of Minnesota’s Transsexual Research Project. Donald W. Hastings, MD, and Colin Markland, MD, “Post-Surgical Adjustment of Twenty-Five Transsexuals (Male-to-Female) in the University of Minnesota Study,” Archives of Sexual Behavior 7, no. 4 (1978), 330. From the Transgender Informational Files, 1941–2014, in the Transgender Research Guide (Tretter-357), Jean-Nickolaus Tretter Collection in GLBT Studies, University of Minnesota.

Dr. Donald W. Hastings

Dr. Donald W. Hastings, 1958. University Archives, University of Minnesota Libraries, Minneapolis.

Transsexual Research Project news articles

Articles announcing the start of the University of Minnesota’s Transsexual Research Project. Minneapolis Tribune, December 18, 1966, page 1.

Transsexual Research Project

The University of Minnesota performed sex-reassignment surgeries (as they were called at the time) on twenty-five trans women from 1966 to the mid 1970s as part of a program called the Transsexual Research Project. Helmed by psychiatrist Donald W. Hastings and surgeon Colin Markland, the project sought to alleviate the gender dysphoria of its patients through hormone treatment, psychotherapy, and surgery. At the same time, it tried to reform them into middle-class, heterosexual, conventionally respectable members of American society. Fueled by a complex mix of empathy, sensationalized concern, and pity, the project established Minnesota as the center of trans life it remains today.

Cover of Food Is Medicine

The cover of Food Is Medicine, by Winona LaDuke with Sarah Alexander. The book was published in 2004 by the White Earth Land Recovery Project and Honor the Earth.

MN90: The Genesis of Artist George Morrison

When George Morrison was ten, he was living away from his Chippewa (Ojibwe) community in Minnesota’s Arrowhead, convalescing in a children’s hospital and working on his art. That child became one of America’s great post-war abstract artists. MN90's Britt Aamodt reports.

Uprising at St. Peter State Hospital, 1969

Twin News reporter Richard Albers visits St. Peter State Hospital after a patient uprising. The clip includes an interview with Dr. Carl Schwarz, the hospital's medical director. Filmed on September 9, 1969.

Gale Family Library