Carol Benenson Perloff, MS
Curator, historian and co-author of this catalogue
Born and raised in northern New Jersey, Perloff came to Philadelphia to attend the University of Pennsylvania and adopted the city as her new home. She received both her bachelor of art degree in English and masters of science degree in historic preservation from Penn. After seven years working in other firms as a historian documenting buildings for their restoration and preservation, Perloff launched her own firm with an emphasis on interpretive history. That was more than 20 years ago.
While Perloff’s portfolio ranges from an auto tour of the Molly Maguires through Pennsylvania’s coal region to an exhibit on the Magna Carta, the majority of her work has focused on medical history. At Penn alone she has curated and written exhibits and/or catalogues on the history of the medical center, medical education and student life, the Pepper Laboratory of Clinical Medicine and individual specialties including obstetrics, neurosurgery, ophthalmology, otorhinolaryngology, pharmacology, gastroenterology and radiology. Perloff authored To Secure Merit: A Century of Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine; The Asylum: The History of Friends Hospital and the Quaker Contribution to Psychiatry; and Philadelphia: A Tradition of Rheumatology. She researched and wrote the script for a video documentary on the history of orthopaedics in Philadelphia.
Perloff is also a writing tutor, an award-winning mosaic artist and a volunteer dance teacher for children with disabilities. She resides in Narberth, PA, with her daughters Leah and Abby.
Daniel M. Albert, MD, MS
Collector, benefactor and co-author of this catalogue
“Medical ephemera formed a legacy I could pass on which would be of value and use to others. It was ‘payback’ for the wonderful medical education Penn provided to me, and the University of Pennsylvania Archives was the place where these cards would find the best future use by historians and scholars.”
Daniel M. Albert, MD, MS, 2012
Albert was born and raised in Newark, NJ. He attended Franklin and Marshall College and the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, staying at Penn for his internship and residency in ophthalmology. Albert pursued additional training in pathology at the National Institutes of Health and the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology. In his subsequent career at Yale and Harvard, and for the past twenty years at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (UW), he has been a leader in the treatment and study of tumors of the eye, contributing numerous scientific papers, chapters and texts to this field.
As a medical student while Penn was preparing for its 1965 bicentennial celebration, Albert and Harold G. Scheie, MD co-authored A History of Ophthalmology at the University of Pennsylvania (Charles C. Thomas, 1965). Albert continued to develop a strong interest in medical history and has written and lectured extensively in this area. He is a bibliophile and has collected rare medical and scientific texts and ephemera.
Albert continues his work as the F.A. Davis Professor of Ophthalmology and Visual Science at UW. He is married to Eleanor Albert, a retired English teacher and currently a docent at the Chazen Museum of Art at UW. They have two sons, Steven and Michael, and five grandchildren.