Anatomy of a medical librarian
You want to know what a fetal gall bladder looks like under ultrasound? Miriam Geller can find out for you. Or how to spot Marfan syndrome using MRI? She'll dig up examples. After more than 50 years working in medical libraries and 25 years with the radiology department at Children's Hospital Boston, Geller knows her stuff.
''Some of it, of course, is very mundane," she said of her work. ''Some of it's cataloging and classification, just like you'd have in any library, routine kinds of things. But I've been here 25 years and I've yet to have a day go by where I haven't learned something new. That's why I'm 77 and still working."
It's a rare gig. There are very few libraries like this in the country, much less professional librarians like Geller, who, in a flash, can find information about rare diseases for young radiology residents and others. Her work, said Dr. George Taylor, the department's radiologist-in-chief, is invaluable. Her knowledge irreplaceable. And her name, in this department anyway, is well known. ''Basically," said Taylor, ''everybody knows Mrs. Geller."
And that's what they call her -- to everyone from Taylor down to the department's newest resident, she is ''Mrs. Geller."
Geller started working in medical libraries as a student at Boston University nearly 60 years ago. She was fascinated by medicine in general and psychiatry in particular. For years she had been reading the works of Sigmund Freud, and for a time she considering pursing a career as a psychiatrist. But when Geller graduated from college, what she wanted -- more than a job -- was independence, she said.
''I had had, at that point, enough with school," she said. ''I wanted out of my mother's house. I wanted my own apartment. I wanted a car, and I wasn't going to get that as a grad student."
This is where her skills as a part-time medical librarian came in handy. She went to work, married Dr. Max Geller in 1957, and then got a job as an information specialist at the National Institute of Mental Health, where she would stay, in various capacities, for the next 20 years.
Her work there, she said, was mostly academic: helping doctors prepare for journal papers they were writing and the like. She worked from home and helped raise her boys. Then, around 1980, she took a job in the new radiology library at Children's and, in some ways, started all over again.
''I didn't know any anatomy at all," she said. Radiology and psychiatry couldn't have been more different. But Geller learned. She posted pictures of the human anatomy above her desk, and by the time Taylor came through there as a young fellow in 1983 she knew, in his estimation, ''where to go and get anything anybody wants at any time."
These days, much has changed. Research that might have taken her a few hours on paper now takes minutes, she said. ''Drugs. Imaging. Surgery. Nothing is the same anymore, and it doesn't stop changing," Geller said. ''It just keeps going and going and going."
To keep up, Geller wears New Balance running shoes as she moves around the tiny library amid hundreds of carefully shelved journals and books on everything from fetal abnormalities to embryology. ''For me," she said, ''the magic is in the chase."
Home: Born in Boston, raised in Dorchester, now living in Brookline.
Family: Her husband, Dr. Max Geller, is a psychiatrist, practicing in Brookline. They have two grown sons and two grandchildren.
Education: Earned a bachelor's degree in psychology from Boston University in 1952 and a master's in library and information science from Simmons College in 1978.
On retiring: Geller works about 30 hours a week, coming in about 6:30 a.m. every day and leaving about 1:30 p.m. With no interest in golf and other such pastimes, it's a routine Geller doesn't want to give up anytime soon. ''My husband and I look at each other about this time of year every year and say, 'Should we retire?' Then we say, 'Not yet.' "
Library history: The library where Geller works is named after Dr. William Stem, a young man who was doing a radiology/pediatrics residency at Children's Hospital in the late 1940s when he committed suicide. His mother later left half of the family's inheritance to the hospital, and the Stem Learning Center was built in the late 1970s. A portrait of Stem hangs on the wall.
