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VOLUME 20. NUMBER 11
March 16. 1973
DURHAM, NORTH CAROLINA
Their Motto Is ^Serve and Disappear*
ospital Auxiliary Extends A Helping Hand
--Mamie McClees is 78, and Dana
Williams is 20.
-Josefina Tiryalian taught yoga for
two years and is currently doing
research for a book on colonial Latin
America in the 18th Century.
-Pearl Alden plays the violin in the
Duke Symphony Orchestra.
-Evelyn Maddox won many awards
as a pianist in her youth.
--Terry Dow makes pottery, and
Carol Kylstra is a student sculptress.
These women, with such varying ages
and interests, have at least two things in
common. They are all animated by a
desire to serve others, and they are
members of the Duke Hospital
Auxiliary.
The Auxiliary is a volunteer
organization open to all residents of the
Durham community and surrounding
areas who can give half a day or more a
week toward making a large hospital run
a little more smoothly and be a more
pleasant place to visit.
The Auxiliary was founded on March
9, 1950. On that evening Ross Porter,
then superintendent of the hospital, held
a meeting attended by more than 50
interested women leaders of Durham
and suggested that the need for an
auxiliary was great. The group voted to
act on his proposal, and on April 11 of
the same year, an organizational meeting
was held during which 242 women
became charter members.
A three-fold program was adopted by
the Auxiliary which included: (1) service
to others, (2) interpretation of the
hospital to the community, and (3)
1
OFFICE STALWARTS—Ser\i\ce%
Co-ordinator Mary Daugherty (right) and
Business Manager Jean Pridgen keep the
Auxiliary's services on an even keel day
by day and year by year. Mrs. Shelton
Smith, past president of the Auxiliary,
said that the organization is fortunate
indeed to have staff members who attack
their jobs with the zeal of volunteers.
(Photo by David Williamson)
readiness to serve in any emergency.
Special projects in the early years
included the operation of a coffee cart
in the main lobby of the hospital and a
shop cart which was pushed to the
various wards carrying gift items such as
baby clothes and toys as well as such
necessary things as toothpaste, brushes,
soap, shaving cream, razors and
stationery.
Other projects were a guide service to
assist patients in finding clinics and
departments in an expanding medical
complex; a library book and magazine
cart; a children's service which
emphasized recreational activities and
crafts; and a series of special funds
providing gifts for children hospitalized
at Christmas, lunch money for indigent
outpatients and taxi fares for those with
no transportation. In addition, a three
year nursing scholarship was established
in 1954.
The color, first cherry and later pink,
chosen by the Duke Auxiliary for their
smocks, was adopted by the national
auxiliary as the standard color for
members' uniforms. It has become a
symbol for helpfulness in hospitals
across the nation.
Over the years, the Auxiliary has seen
many changes. The coffee cart was
replaced by two snack bars, and the
shop cart was supplemented by the
!N THE PINK SAfOC/f—Lettie Saylor (left) and manager Mallory Mahoney arrange
gifts in display cases on a busy afternoon. Proceeds from the shop, where patients and
visitors can buy anything from teddy bears to ornamental glassware, are returned to
the hospital in a number of Auxiliary projects. (Photo by Dale Moses)
successful operation of the "Pink
Smock" gift shop, established in 1967.
The volume of business in the auxiliary's
enterprises increased so much that three
full-time and six part-time employes had
to be hired to meet the demand. Profits,
after expenses were met, increased
seven fold over the humble beginnings.
Giving has been a tradition with the
Auxiliary which has not changed over
the years as the medical center
expanded, and all the receipts from sales
have been returned to patients in one
(Continued on page 3)
Clifford Tests Body Image Measurements
When ■ you were little, did your
mother want to show you off to
everybody? Did she cry a lot? Was your
father worried?
People of relatively normal
appearance might find those questions
easy to answer.
But when Dr. Edward Clifford gave
the test to a girl born with a badly
disfigured face, she broke down and
cried, unable to complete the questions.
Clifford, an associate professor of
medical psychology, also gave the
questionnaire to a group of asthmatics
and to a group of cleft lip and cleft
palate children. He found the asthmatics
perceived themselves to have been more
highly accepted by their parents at birth
than the cleft lip-palate group.
The questionnaire is part of a
six-hour battery of tfists Clifford is using
to try to come up with a reliable
measure of "body image." Body image is
the total of a person's conscious and
unconscious attitudes toward his body
and its functioning. It is a part of a
person's total self-concept, his
self-esteem.
Such a concept is especially
important, Clifford feels, in a culture as
oriented to beauty as ours. The concept
is widely used in psychiatry and
psychology, and there is need for
systematic investigations of body image
as a concept, he says.
Clifford came to Duke in 1965 to
work with cleft lip-palate children under
a program funded by the National
Institute of Dental Research. He set
about trying to look at how having such
a facial anomaly might affect a person.
Clifford found that there is no such
thing as "cleft palate personality." All
cleft palate children are not similarly
affected by having the birth defect.
He found it necesary to investigate
(Continued on page 2)
BODY IMAGE MEASUREMENTS—Dr. Edward Clifford demonstrates the tilting
chair he uses as part of an experiment to try to measure a person's body image. In
a totally dark room, a person is strapped in the chair, tilted and told to straighten
himself up with no visual clues to guide him. He must defend on his body to tell
him when he is vertical. (Photo by Thad Sparks)