Historical Society presentation focuses on Medina hospital experience – before computers and corporations

Photos by Ginny Kropf: Reinhard Rogowski, president of the Medina Historical Society, and Barbara Hancock look at a display by Erica Wanieski depicting how things were in hospitals years ago.

Erica Wanieski explains how an old blood pressure cuff worked.

MEDINA – The final meeting of the Medina Historical Society for spring took place Monday night at the Medina Senior Center. The meeting place was changed because of the library being closed for construction.

Guest speaker was Erica Wanieski of Medina, who once studied to be a physician assistant. She gave a presentation on “The Medina Hospital Experience, BC,” before corporations, consortiums and computers.

She displayed a large selection of gadgets, equipment and clothing used decades ago. These included charts written by hand, a surgeon’s coat, a student nurse’s uniform, an early blood pressure cuff, a kit to draw blood and a variety of bed pans, all made of metal, as opposed to today’s which are plastic.

Orleans County historian Catherine Cooper produced a photograph of a nursing class which included Marian Vail, a longtime nurse at Medina Memorial Hospital.

“Things have really changed,” Wanieski said. “We used to have to sterilize bed pans by hand, isolation techniques are different, EEG’s were recorded on paper (not computers) and blood pressure cuffs had rows of snaps, instead of Velcro.”

Wanieski remembers reading the first article about CAT scans in 1975.

She also shared how in older days, nurses always gave patients a back rub in the evening. They don’t do that anymore, she said.

That was the Medina Historical Society’s last meeting until September. Cooper reminded the audience the Historical Society on West Avenue is open from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. the first Saturday of every month through the summer.

Tim and Catherine Cooper, left, chat with Sue Jannick at Monday night’s meeting of Medina Historical Society, at which Erica Wanieski gave a presentation on working in a hospital before computers. Jannick spent 47 years as a medical transcriptionist, which now is considered “a dinosaur.”