Is there a doctor in the house?

Have you ever needed a ride to the hospital? Or emergency medical care? Consider the medical care available 80-100 years ago. It used to be that ambulances simply transported a person to the hospital (or the morgue). Check out the image of this ambulance used in Lincoln in 1922. (Hodgman ambulance, Townsend Studio collection) You might not get much medical aid on the trip, but there are curtains to close for privacy. No matter how you reached the hospital all those years ago, you might still have a problem getting into the building. At the Ord Hospital (and others), you had to navigate quite a few stairs to the front entrance. (Ord Hospital, Nebraska State Historical Society collection) Once inside the hospital, there weren’t many bells and whistles like today. In this image from the Alegent Health Immanuel Medical Center collection, the operating room is plain and simple. A basin for the staff to wash up in, a table that could be raised and lowered, a single light fixture above the table–but hey, there were large windows for extra light, and they opened for fresh air, too. Other mechanical improvements, such as the incubator in the image to the left, may look clunky and out-of-date to us, but you can’t argue with success. The image to the right shows Nancy Lonn, the baby in the incubator, at age four with her older sister Belva Joy. (Thorpe Opera House Foundation/Boston Studio Project collection) Check out more medical-related images or visit Nebraska Memories to search for or browse through many more historical images digitized from photographs, negatives, postcards, maps, lantern slides, books and other materials. Nebraska Memories is a cooperative project to digitize Nebraska-related historical and cultural heritage materials and make them available to researchers of all ages via the Internet. Nebraska Memories is brought to you by the Nebraska Library Commission. If your institution is interested in participating in Nebraska Memories, see http://nlc.nebraska.gov/nebraskamemories/participation.aspx for more information, or contact Beth Goble, Government Information Services Director, or Devra Dragos, Technology & Access Services Director.