VANV individual collections, 1940-2018 (inclusive): Dataset

The Vernacular Archive of Normal Volunteers (VANV), 1940-2018 (inclusive) is a collection of oral histories, associated archival documents, and project records created and collected by Laura Jeanine Morris Stark (born 1975) to explore the lives of the first “normal control” research subjects at the Clinical Center of the United States National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland who were recruited through NIH’s Normal Volunteer Patient Program. Dataset consists of materials from two sources. First, it includes audio recordings and transcripts of oral histories Laura Stark conducted from 2010-2017 with individuals who were involved with the NIH Normal Volunteer Patient Program between 1954 and 2002, along with related personal documents given to Stark by interviewees such as photographs, letters, diaries, news clippings and other memorabilia. Most of the interviewees were former “normal controls” and others were NIH staff members or scientists who did research on the “normal volunteers.” For the interviewees who provided Stark with historical contextual documents, these materials were digitized and the files were combined into one \"records\" PDF file for each individual interviewee by the Center for the History of Medicine as part of the dataverse deposit process. Original contextual documents remain in the possession of the interviewees. Second, the Dataset includes digital duplicates of materials related to the Normal Volunteer Patient Program compiled by Stark from the special collections of organizations that were the sources of “normal volunteers” for the NIH Clinical Center. Physical copies of the materials remain in the historical collections of organizations, such as universities, churches, civic groups, and labor unions, that signed contracts with NIH to provide healthy people for scientists to research through the Normal Volunteer Patient Program. Records for individual collections are grouped alphabetically by the last name of the interviewee or the name of the organization. Data files include audio files of the oral history interviews, interview transcripts, individual consent and release forms, and related contextual documents supplied by interviewees or organizations. Associated records such as interview questions, the protocol for interview transcription, and template consent, release, and donation forms may be found in the dataset \"VANV project records, 2010-2018.\" Note that the date span (1940-2018) of this dataset reflects the creation dates of original materials that may exist here only as more recently created digital reproductions, for example, items from 1940 are digital scans of letters, photographs, and other documents created in 1940.