Francesco Durante (1844-1934); frontispiece from vol. 1 of "Per il XXV Anno Dell'Insegnamento Chirurgico di Francesco Durante"
Internet Archive, where the Medical Heritage Library’s content now resides, has a neat feature that allows you to see what has been downloaded most often. With almost 8,500 volumes digitized by February 1, 2011, I thought it would be interesting to see what content in MHL was being most heavily used.
The results are surprising. Among the top ten most downloaded volumes are three Columbia University catalogues (numbers 2, 5, and 10); three anatomical works: John McGrath’s Surgical Anatomy and Operative Surgery (1902) in the number 3 spot; the 1913 US edition of Henry Gray’s classic Anatomy, Descriptive and Applied (number 6); and Florence Fenwick Miller’s colorful An Atlas of Anatomy or Pictures of the Human Body (1879) in the number 8 position.
But the number one most downloaded volume in the Medical Heritage Library — a whopping 420 times — is a comparative rarity: volume 2 of Per il XXV Anno Dell’Insegnamento Chirurgico di Francesco Durante nell’Università di Roma. 28 Febbraio 1898, edited by Roberto Alessandri. The second most downloaded item — the aforementioned Columbia University catalogue — can only boast 274 downloads.
No doubt you’re thinking Who? History of medicine mavens — at least those in the US — don’t need to be abashed if they have never heard of Durante. While he is little known outside neurosurgery circles in this country, Durante (1844-1934) was a pioneering surgeon, esteemed teacher, and leading political figure in his native Italy.
The child of parents of modest means (his father helped build the first road to their isolated Sicilian village), Durante received his medical degree from Naples, studied with Virchow in Berlin, Billroth in Vienna, and Lister in London before being called to teach at the University of Rome in 1872. Twelve years later, in June 1884, he was the first surgeon to successfully remove a cranial base meningioma, an operation that caused an international sensation.
His 25th anniversary as a teacher at the University of Rome in 1897 was commemorated by the publication of the hefty 3 volume festschrift recently digitized by the MHL. It contains contributions from several dozen surgeons on a wide variety of surgical topics. While most of the authors were Italian, Durante’s fame was enough to elicit contributions from Philadelphia surgeon W.W. Keen and the French neurosurgeon Auguste Broca.
Why volume 2 of this title should have been downloaded so frequently will remain a mystery, but surely its rarity outside Italy — OCLC locates only four copies of the set in North America and another in Paris — played a factor. It shows that there is a need for electronic access to even the most seemingly esoteric publications.
For more of the Durante festschrift click here: http://www.archive.org/details/perilxxvannodell02ales
For all the holdings in the Medical Heritage Library click here: http://www.archive.org/details/medicalheritagelibrary
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