The bulk of this collection is comprised of sixteen volumes of transcriptions taken from Dr. George Dock’s Diagnostics Clinic, which were made by a stenographer twice a week while class was in session from 1899 through 1908. The transcriptions capture, verbatim, Dock’s teaching and his exchanges with students and patients in a clinical instructional setting. Processing staff sought identifying information about the stenographer(s) responsible for the transcriptions but found none. The collection also contains a scrapbook Dock kept containing news clippings and a folder of miscellaneous photographs including portraits and a photograph of a sculpture of Dock commissioned in 1935.
George Dock was born on April 1, 1860 in Hopewell, Pennsylvania to Gilliard and Lavinia Lloyd Dock. He attended medical school at the University of Pennsylvania, from which he graduated in 1884 and went on to intern at St. Mary’s hospital in Philadelphia. After spending a few years abroad gaining medical experience in Europe, Dock returned to Philadelphia, where he took a job as a laboratory assistant in the Clinical Medicine unit at the University of Pennsylvania teaching hospital. There he worked under William Osler, whose emphasis on the importance of hands-on instruction influenced Dock’s pedagogical approach.
In 1891, Dock became a professor at the University of Michigan Medical School, where his teaching reflected a dedication to practical and experiential learning of medicine rather than a primarily lecture-driven approach. His decision to employ a stenographer to record his exchanges with students and patients in his semi-weekly Diagnostics Clinic during the period from 1899 to 1908 yielded over 6,800 pages of transcriptions, which were later bound in a sixteen volume set.
Dock left the University of Michigan in 1908 and went on to teach at Tulane University and Washington University of St. Louis. After retiring from teaching in 1922, Dock moved to California, where he had a private practice for many years. He died of pneumonia in 1951, having reached the age of 91.
