Carolyn Matalene

The Medical University of South Carolina, which began with seven faculty members and thirty students, is today a large and complex institution, with six colleges, hundreds of faculty and staff, thousands of students and numerous teaching hospitals and research laboratories and libraries. In this unique collection, the remarkable narrative of MUSC's survival and growth is told through the voices of the participants: the students and professors, the deans and doctors, the administrators and employees who have been there all along. They tell their stories through lecture notes and journals, letters and diaries, minutes and memos, headlines and catalogues and, finally, through e-mails and blogs. The men and women of MUSC reveal the challenges the university has met, from wars, epidemics and earthquakes to financial and accreditation crises. And they chronicle the changes in medicine from house calls and purgatives to genetics, vaccines and organ transplants. Not least of all, they record their aspirations, fears and firsthand experiences in their own honest, often humorous, words.

In celebration of the University of South Carolina's bicentennial, this remarkable volume reveals the personal stories of Carolina students over the past two hundred years. Told in their own words, these writings - from antebellum manuscripts to e-mails - capture the color and spirit of the times, revealing attitudes and opinions, issues and passions. From those first young boys chopping wood to warm their rooms, to today's young men and women surrounded by the latest technology, the voices of Carolina's students testify to the transforming power of the college experience. To gather this collection of texts from 1801 to the present, the editors searched family papers, collections of letters, university archives, autobiographies and histories, journals and diaries, student newspapers and literary magazines, and oral histories. In this volume students share their own versions of the University of South Carolina story - explaining their activities, voicing their opinions, cheering their teams, and sometimes writing home from far away. Some of their concerns have changed; twenty-first century students worry more about parking tickets and phone bills than the price of fuel or the threat of smallpox. Throughout the years, however, each generation weaves tales of living conditions and classroom practices within the context of larger historical events. In their letters and diaries, poems and memoirs, editorials and e-mails, students illustrate a colorful picture of campus history and evoke the important events of their time. Their words provide intimate illustrations of life on and around the campus as they reveal the rich history of the University of South Carolina.