The Medical Center Guild Collection
Members prepare mailings for the Mother’s Day offering in the 1950s.
The Medical Center Guild Collection contains papers from 1943 through the current year. Members of the Guild are wives of school of medicine faculty and hospital residents. The Guild was founded by Dorothy Carpenter, wife of the founding dean of Bowman Gray School of Medicine.
The collection is 3.50 cubic feet and consists of minutes, newsletters, directories, president’s notebooks, program papers, play scripts, invitations and oral histories. Some responsibilities of the Guild have included a bookmobile for patients, hosting prospective medical students, compiling mailings for the annual Mother’s Day offering and providing hospitality for new faculty and residents.
After helping plan the Medical Center’s fiftieth anniversary in 1991, members discovered that their memories needed to be collected and documented. Jean Cooper, wife of retired oncologist Dr. Robert Cooper, spear-headed the Guild’s Oral History Project in 1995. To acquire a comprehensive history, persons from every decade of the Guild’s existence were interviewed. The Project won an award from the North Carolina History Association.