Archives West Finding Aid

The Jarvis Edwin Seegmiller papers (1942-1992) have been divided into four sections. Every attempt was made to preserve the original order of the Collection, but it had to be arranged in a format that would make the papers easy to research. Although there is some duplication and crossover of the material between sections, it is not substantial.

Section One contains information on Dr. Seegmiller's personal life and professional training. Box 1 contains all of his correspondence. Box 2 contains information on his personal life and family. Boxes 3-7 contain notes taken during his years at the University of Chicago Medical School. There are fifteen different subjects upon which he took notes, and those subjects are arranged in alphabetical order.

Section Two contains information from Dr. Seegmiller's files. This section has been divided into nine groups of information: business office files, catalogues, conference and seminar files, desk material, illustration files, patient related files, proposals and reports, specimen records and laboratory office files, and unidentified notes. Whenever possible, the files were kept in the order in which Seegmiller had arranged them.

Several folder titles in the business office files (boxes 8-21) start with the acronym UCSD, which stands for the University of California, San Diego. Every grant or research proposal funded by that university was given a UCSD number for clarification on paperwork. Boxes 20 and 21 contain an extensive file, "The General View of Subjects on Aging Related Research Supported by the National Institutes of Health." This file is divided into several subsections identified by their folder titles, and represents topics sanctioned by the National Institutes of Health.

Boxes 28-30 contain materials taken out of his desk and off the walls of his office. A major portion of this group consists of old calendars, but only pages with information written on them were retained. The illustration files in boxes 31 and 32 contain charts, graphs, medical illustrations, photocopies of photographs and slides (the originals are in the Multimedia Section of the Manuscripts Division, P0622), transparencies, and tables. Some of the items in these files were used in Seegmiller's papers, books, and lectures.

The final group of this section (boxes 44-47) contains charts, graphs, and handwritten notes taken during research and/or experiments. However, for most of these files, there is no indication of who did the research, when it was done, what it was, or why it was being done. A more detailed explanation of specific research can be found in Section Four of this Collection.

In 1996, Seegmiller donated an additional group of office files (Boxes 133-164). Box 133 contains general office material such as notes, correspondence, awards, information on visiting professors, and equipment instructions. Boxes 134-138 contain more information on grants and research proposals. The largest portion of these grant files are related to the Human Biochemical Genetics Program (HBGP). These files are organized by each of the twelve years that this grant was awarded, and then followed by miscellaneous material related to the program. Boxes 139-164 contains correspondence, pamphlets, programs, abstracts, related articles, and lecture notes for more of the conferences, symposiums, and annual group meetings upon which Seegmiller attended or received information. At many of these gatherings, he gave a lecture on gout, metabolism, or geriatric health care.

Section Three contains material used in Seegmiller's publications. Boxes 48 and 49 contain material used in his various appearances as a guest lecturer, or by his colleagues for one of their own lectures. Boxes 50 and 51 contain research material and some of Seegmiller's resulting publications. For some of the writings, Dr. Seegmiller was a co-author whose name is not listed first. Boxes 52-61 contain writings by some of Seegmiller's associates, and he used many of them as research for his own articles. Boxes 62-65 hold Seegmiller's bibliographic reference system. Whenever he did research, he kept a bibliography of every source he used. Then, he put those sources on these cards so that, in the future, he could gain access to them easily.

Section Four materials document the identifiable research done by Dr. Seegmiller or one of his assistants. The notebooks in boxes 69-109 contain detailed notes of Dr. Seegmiller's procedures and experiments. These notebooks are arranged in chronological order. Boxes 110-131 contain the laboratory notes of his assistants and/or students. These notebooks are arranged in alphabetical order by the last name of the author. If there is more than one book written by the same person, then those books are arranged in chronological order.

Box 132 contains architectural drawings of the rooms in which Dr. Seegmiller conducted his experiments (which were remodeled for his own use) at the National Institutes of Health. The ideas and notes for these renovations can be found in Section One, at the beginning of box 8.