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WORK TITLE: Blood Picture
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CITY: Lubbock
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https://news.uthsc.edu/announcements/dr-richard-nollan-retirement-celebration-and-book-signing-today-in-the-library/ * https://www.linkedin.com/in/richard-nollan-59a37062/
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PERSONAL
Male.
EDUCATION:University of Pittsburgh, M.L.S.; Middlebury College, M.A.; University of Memphis, Ph.D., 2012.
ADDRESS
CAREER
University of Tennessee Health Science Center, head of research and learning services, 2013-16.
MEMBER:Gottlieb Prize, Medical Library Association, 2013.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Richard H. Nollan earned his master’s degree in library science from the University of Pittsburgh, and he then went on to complete a master of arts in history and the philosophy of science at Middlebury College. Nolan additionally completed a doctorate in the history of medicine at the University of Memphis in 2012. Following his academic career, Nollan became head of research and learning services at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center. Next, in 2016, Nollan released his first book, Blood Picture: L.W. Diggs, Sickle Cell Anemia, and the South’s First Blood Bank Knoxville via the University of Tennessee Press.
Blood Picture draws on Nollan’s multiple fields of study, combining biography, the history of science, and the history of medicine to profile the work of Dr. Lemuel Whitley Diggs. Nollan’s subject was a Memphis-based physician who devoted his life to researching sickle-cell disease (SCD). While the usual biographical and personal details are included in the volume, Nollan largely focuses on Diggs’s notable professional accomplishments. The author comments on over a half-century of Diggs’s research at the University of Tennessee Medical Units. As Nollan explains, Diggs founded a pivotal SCD study, and he was responsible for sharing his findings to physicians nationwide. To this end, Diggs helmed significant public outreach regarding a disease that mostly affects African Americans (and he did so in the hear of the Jim Crow South). Thus, Nollan addresses the racial and social implications of SCD and Diggs’s research within historical context. Nollan also comments on Diggs’s related efforts to form the South’s first operational blood bank in 1938. From there, the author addresses Diggs’s essential role in creating the St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis.
Reviews of Blood Picture were largely positive, though not without some critiques, and Journal of Southern History correspondent Steven Noll remarked: “While Nollan succeeds in allowing the reader to understand Diggs as a doctor, a family man, and an individual, he does less well in placing Diggs in the context of the Jim Crow South. . . . As a layman with little medical knowledge of SCD, I would also have liked Nollan to have better explained the disease and its various permutations.” Noel went on to conclude: “These concerns. however, do not negate the value of this book.” Michael A. Flannery, writing in the Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, was even more positive, and he announced that “Diggs deserves a well-informed biography and Nollan provides it.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Journal of Southern History, August, 2017, Steven Noll, review of Blood Picture: L.W. Diggs, Sickle Cell Anemia, and the South’s First Blood Bank.
Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, July, 2017, Michael A. Flannery, review of Blood Picture.
ONLINE
Project MUSE–Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, https://muse.jhu.edu (July 1, 2017), review of Blood Picture.
Richard Nollan
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Richard Nollan
3rd degree connection3rd
Executive Director, Preston Smith Library of the Health Sciences
Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center The University of Memphis
Lubbock, Texas 155 155 connections
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Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center
Executive Director
Company NameTexas Tech University Health Sciences Center
Dates EmployedDec 2016 – Present Employment Duration1 yr 1 mo
LocationLubbock, Texas Area
ORCID: 0000-0002-9317-8670
UT Health Science Center
Head, Research and Learning Services
Company NameUT Health Science Center
Dates EmployedJul 2013 – Dec 2016 Employment Duration3 yrs 6 mos
LocationUniversity of Tennessee Health Sciences Library
Education
The University of Memphis
The University of Memphis
Degree NameDoctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) Field Of StudyHistory of Medicine
Dates attended or expected graduation 2006 – 2012
Middlebury College
Middlebury College
Degree NameMaster of Arts Field Of StudyGerman Language and Literature
University of Pittsburgh
University of Pittsburgh
Degree NameMaster of Arts Field Of StudyHistory and Philosophy of Science
University of Pittsburgh
University of Pittsburgh
Degree NameMasters of Library Science Field Of StudyLibrary science and archives
Dr. Richard Nollan Retirement Celebration and Book Signing Today in the Library
Written by Jennifer Welch | November 17, 2016
Dr. Richard Nollan, Interim Associate Director of the library, has pulled off a double feat. In June he published a biography of sickle cell researcher L.W. Diggs with the University of Tennessee Press, which chronicles Diggs’s 60-year career at the Health Science Center.
In addition, after 30 years, Dr. Nollan is retiring from the university. A reception and book signing will be held in the library this afternoon from 2-5pm on the fifth floor. Although leaving UTHSC, beginning in January he will be the Executive Director of the Health Sciences Libraries at Texas Tech University Health Science Center.
Come and wish him well!
12/17/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
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Print Marked Items
Blood Picture: L.W. Diggs, Sickle Cell
Anemia, and the South's First Blood Bank
Steven Noll
Journal of Southern History.
83.3 (Aug. 2017): p742+.
COPYRIGHT 2017 Southern Historical Association
http://www.uga.edu/~sha
Full Text:
Blood Picture: L. W. Diggs, Sickle Cell Anemia, and the South's First Blood Bank. By Richard H. Nollan.
(Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2016. Pp. xii, 187. $45.00, ISBN 978-1-62190-221-8.)
Long a staple of popular history, the biography is often a throwback to the "great man" genre of historical
writing, where authors use breezy prose to write about the lives of important people in minute detail. By
providing a lens to examine the period in which the subject lived and worked, biographies that examine
larger questions can appeal to an academic audience as well. Blood Picture: L. W. Diggs, Sickle Cell
Anemia, and the South's First Blood Bank shows the promises and pitfalls of using biography as a form of
historical analysis, as it examines the life of Lemuel Whitley Diggs, a Memphis physician and medical
researcher whose life spanned much of the twentieth century.
Richard H. Nollan chronicles the life of L. W. Diggs from his birth in Hampton, Virginia, at the turn of the
twentieth century to his death in 1995. While examining Diggs's family and personal life in some detail,
Nollan focuses most of his attention on Diggs's more than fifty-year career at the University of Tennessee
Medical Units (now the University of Tennessee Health Science Center) in Memphis. More than simply an
academic physician, medical scholar, and teacher, Diggs was instrumental in the dissemination of
knowledge about sickle-cell disease (SCD) and established the first major center for the study of the
disorder. His long career included significant research and publications on SCD, public outreach, and
intense personal work with patients (almost all of whom were African American) and their families on
living better with the disease. Tied in with his work on SCD and hematology, Diggs marshaled community
and university resources to create the first blood bank in the South in 1938. Finally, Nollan examines
Diggs's role in the founding of St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, a hospital that treated
catastrophic childhood illnesses free of charge to patients.
This book works best when Nollan discusses Diggs's relationship with both the city of Memphis and his
fellow physicians and researchers. Diggs was not simply another doctor, but also an important figure in this
emerging New South city. Nollan concludes that "Diggs's stature in the community and his reputation as a
physician grew because of his sickle cell research and his interest in medical technology, especially his
commitment to blood banking" (p. 80). Diggs's research, patient care, and commitment to teaching reflected
the larger changes taking place in American academic medicine throughout the middle of the twentieth
century. Using increased federal resources and grant monies, Diggs continued his work on sickle-cell
disease and its relationship to the African American community. In recognition of his contributions to this
field, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference awarded Diggs the Martin Luther King Medical
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Achievement Award in 1972, highlighting a life dedicated to service and a "doctor-patient relationship ...
based on trust and mutual respect" (p. 156).
While Nollan succeeds in allowing the reader to understand Diggs as a doctor, a family man, and an
individual, he does less well in placing Diggs in the context of the Jim Crow South. Nollan tangentially
examines issues of race throughout the book. Given that Diggs was engaged in a long-term longitudinal
study of a disease and its effects on the black community, Nollan should certainly have given more attention
to the infamous Tuskegee syphilis study taking place at the same time. There also is little mention of black
doctors during this period. The reader is left wondering how Diggs related to these physicians and what
they thought of him and his research. As a layman with little medical knowledge of SCD, I would also have
liked Nollan to have better explained the disease and its various permutations. These concerns. however, do
not negate the value of this book. Though at times a bit hagiographic in his approach, Nollan has shown the
reader how one man, through his single-minded dedication to the understanding and hopeful eradication of
SCD, "promoted] the dignity and rights of individuals of all races [and] embodied the timeless qualities of a
model physician" (p. 157).
Steven Noll
University of Florida
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Noll, Steven. "Blood Picture: L.W. Diggs, Sickle Cell Anemia, and the South's First Blood Bank." Journal
of Southern History, vol. 83, no. 3, 2017, p. 742+. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A501078183/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=f0f63b86.
Accessed 17 Dec. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A501078183
Blood Picture: L. W. Digg’s Sickle Cell Anemia, and the South’s First Blood Bank by Richard H. Nollan (review)
Michael A. Flannery
From: Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences
Volume 72, Number 3, July 2017
pp. 364-366
In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:
Reviewed by
Michael A. Flannery
KEYWORDS
civil rights movement, hematology, Memphis, racial segregation, St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital[End Page 364]
Richard H. Nollan. Blood Picture: L. W. Digg’s Sickle Cell Anemia, and the South’s First Blood Bank. Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 2016. xii, 187 pp., illus. $45.00 (cloth).
When Richard Nollan was awarded the Medical Library Association’s Gottlieb Prize (recently renamed the Eric Meyerhoff Prize) in 2013 for the best unpublished paper in the history of the health sciences, there was a strong suspicion that much more would result from his “Life’s Blood: Blood Banking in a Southern City.” That “much more” is now available in an interesting book-length study of Johns Hopkins-trained Dr. Lemuel Diggs’s life and career, most of which was spent in Memphis. He is largely remembered for two things: first, his opening of a blood bank at the Memphis City Hospital in 1938, an inaugural innovation in the South; and second, his establishment of the Sickle Cell Center, the first of its kind in the nation. But Diggs’s organizational skills were also put to use on the steering committee for St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital, a special passion of Hollywood entertainer Danny Thomas.
For these reasons alone, Diggs deserves a well-informed biography and Nollan provides it. The author gives a précis of work in the following:
With a moderate’s sensibility for social justice, Diggs used his professional expertise and authority to navigate the rocky waters of social and medical racism and the civil rights movement of the twentieth century. He transferred the fervor of his Methodist upbringing to leading a moral and meaningful life in pursuit of a cure for sickle cell anemia. Understanding Diggs’s life tells us about the consciousness of the South, the power and possibility of American ideals, the ongoing interplay between healthcare and society, and the evolution of the American imagination
(8).
Diggs has not been entirely neglected. Keith Wailoo features him prominently in his Dying in the City of the Blues: Sickle Cell Anemia and the Politics of Race and Health (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2001). For Wailoo, Diggs was a researcher first, a man who saw the challenge of sickle cell as an “interesting puzzle,” made all the more so because it was little known and barely studied. “It was disease that interested Diggs,” writes Wailoo, “not the patients, and not their particular complaints” (80). This is not a criticism per se, for as Wailoo also notes,” Diggs’s “academic view” of disease was a fresh and unfamiliar approach to Memphis medicine when he first arrived in 1929. Yet this very academic approach did, in fact, help focus attention on sickle cell, as Diggs re-educated “medical practitioners, students, and the public” on the meanings of the disease, both clinical and social (82).
But the picture provided here reveals a pathologist’s interest in the natural history of disease and a complementary preference for “collaborative patient care” in a research setting (2). Nollan’s portrayal amends Wailoo’s assessment by suggesting that Diggs had a researcher’s devotion to conquering disease insofar as it related to patients’ wellbeing. In this sense, disease and patients interested Diggs. This seemed to animate Diggs’s entire professional career, and formed the foundation for all his important work, whether in the South’s first blood bank, his Sickle Cell Center, or the [End Page 365] St. Jude Children’s Hospital. It was the modus operandi not of a public crusader—that was not his style—but of a socially conscious moderate, more pragmatist than idealist.
This is not to say that Diggs shrank before the racism of Memphis herrenvolk politics and benighted social conventions. The Civil Rights Movement and white retrenchment forced him to become more vocal in the interests of justice and equity, particularly as it related to healthcare in Memphis and the South. Yet Diggs’s approach was one always based upon practical ends—the supreme end being the good of the patient. In his blood bank, admonitions—even prohibitions—against administering blood interracially were routinely ignored as solely based on prejudice and without...