The History of the American College of Rheumatology Image Library

‘I learned more from being a member of the Audiovisual Aids Subcommittee than I did from anyone else.’ —Dr. Block

The contest led to a rapid and marked expansion of the collection. A half dozen of the submissions were chosen each year, based on their particular importance or how well they demonstrated a disease. These designated winners were presented during the business meeting at the annual meeting and then published in Arthritis & Rheumatism. “The contest was wildly successful,” says Dr. Block.

Probably remembered even more than the presentation of the winners were the so-called losers, says Dr. Block. Created as a takeoff on an annual and very unofficial affair at the Johns Hopkins Medical School (where Dr. Block did his medical training) in which students made fun of their professors, the committee invented slides supposedly attributed to notable officers and members of the association.

One example was a staged slide of a drunkard, face down on a bar holding high and at a very peculiar angle a can of Old Milwaukee beer, described at the business meeting as an example of “the genesis of the Old Milwaukee Shoulder, submitted by Old Dan McCarty” (who first described the Milwaukee shoulder, a destructive shoulder arthropathy due to deposition of hydroxyapatite crystals). The loser presentations were so popular that the event became known as Everybody Loves a Loser.

Eric Matteson, MD, professor emeritus of rheumatology, Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minn., who took over as chair of the committee from 1995–2000, acknowledges the major contributions of his colleague William Ginsberg, MD, who provided many high-quality slides for the collection.

Dr. Matteson describes a number of changes to the image collection under his guidance, notably the transformation of what had become a three-volume slide set to a digitized format sold as CD-ROMs.

‘One of the really important aspects of the Image Library may be the continual evolution of our understanding of our diseases … how bad some of these diseases are, how they affect people—the enormity of rheumatic disease.’  —Dr. Matteson

Further changes to the collection reflected the technological advances of the time, such as the creation of a radiology supplement. New tools, such as magnetic resonance imaging, were featured to demonstrate joint erosions, ligament or meniscal tears, and inflammation. Also enhanced was a complementary slide collection for the Association of Rheumatology Health Professionals (now the Association of Rheumatology Professionals) that included valuable teaching slides relevant to musculoskeletal rehabilitation, physical therapy and the basics of arthritis. Another addition was a collection of slides to use as learning sets for two specialized areas: pediatric rheuma­tology and the management of glucocorticoid-related osteoporosis.