Archives West Finding Aid

The Crohn's Support Group collection, which dates from circa 1980 to 2007, consists of newsletters, organizational communications, pamphlets, recipes, and research on alternative treatments, documenting decades of active involvement with the Crohn's community. The collection documents the ephemera of one person's history of illness, as well as the community of illness that surrounded her. Although largely limited to published materials - newsletters and other communications from support groups - it is an in-depth chronicle of the ways that people with chronic illnesses interacted with each other in the 1980s and 1990s. From these records, we can learn how support groups saw and presented themselves at a historical moment when a community of the sick was still a new idea. The collection will be of interest to researchers of the medical history of Crohn's, the history of peer support and advocacy among the chronically ill, and the ways that doctors through the years have explained Crohn's and headed off myths about its causes.