A few of their favorite VCU things

The doctor will see you now

From the neat rows of concave and convex lenses to the metal trial frame, this turn-of-the-20th-century optometrist’s kit is one of the more identifiable objects in VCU’s 6,000-plus piece medical artifacts collection. “One of the most interesting things to me about medical artifacts is being able to see the history of medicine over time and, in this particular instance, how little has changed,” says research and collections specialist Sarah Clay.

For hints of what has changed, she says, look instead to the German-made kit itself. It’s sturdy, compact and velvet-lined, built not for a shelf but for the road. House calls were once an elemental feature of medicine and, in 1930 still accounted for about 40% of all physician-patient interactions, according to Paul Starr’s “The Social Transformation of American Medicine,” which won the 1984 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction. “[Everything] is all very neatly packed into the kit,” Clay says, for an era when “doctors needed to bring their materials with them.”

Old enough to fight …

Late 1960s collegians might recognize this poster promoting Time magazine’s Choice ’68 mock-presidential primary. Held weeks after the April 4 assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., and as the Vietnam War raged on, the national collegiate primary drew nearly 1.1 million participants, with a plurality voting for anti-war Democrat Eugene McCarthy.

Effectively a poll of future voters (the voting age was 21), the Time primary became a step toward 1971’s 26th Amendment lowering the voting age to 18, says University Archivist Ruth Cody. On the 1,200 participating campuses, Choice ’68 was a form of “sanctioned” activism, she says.

“Sanctioned because it’s [through an] institutional platform — student governments, student organizations, student newspapers,” Cody says. “And [1968] was really the heyday for this sort of thing. You’ve got the Civil Rights Movement. You’ve got a lot of anti-war activity, a lot of antiestablishment, anti-government activity. And of course, the draft. Politics has always been personal, but nothing can beat the fact that your government can tell you to go fight in a war. 

“You’ve got young people feeling like they need to have a say. They’re protesting and they’re finding other ways to effect change.”

A page-turning work of art 

Part memoir, part Advent calendar, part choose-your-own-adventure novel, this 2022 Chinese thread book by Julie Chen is part of VCU Libraries’ book art collection. Titled “Accretion of Identity,” it incorporates book elements — including a cloth cover and letterpress printing — into a box housing a grid of paper flowers. 

Meticulously folded, the flowers “are like pages,” says arts collections curator Sarah Scarr. Each contains text — questions like, “Where are you from originally?” and anecdotes from Chen’s life — that reveal a portrait of the author beneath layers of pleated paper.

“This book, to me, really does speak to the genre of memoir,” Scarr says. “It’s really telling [a] story about the creation of identity and building identity through a series of interactions [and how] we’re constantly re-creating ourselves based on the feedback we get from the outside world. And it starts with all these closed little flowers. Instead of having a book with a thousand pages