René Joseph Bertin's work on syphilis, the Traité de la maladie vénérienne (Paris, 1810) showing the armorial binding of the Emperor NapoleonResearchers from the Harvard-Longwood community and beyond benefit from the Medical Heritage Library, a growing collection of freely available digital texts.
Jack Eckert, Public Services Librarian, reports that, for the Center for the History of Medicine, one of the unintended benefits of the selection process for digitization is the unexpected discoveries made in the collection. During a close and thorough examination each item considered for scanning, staff encounters and documents imperfections, incomplete sets, unrecorded titles bound with others, and corrects inaccurate cataloging information. While this sort of information enhances the accuracy of the catalog, we are finding unexpected treasure as well. A large percentage of the rare book collection was acquired for its current informational value at the time, and little attention was paid to marks of ownership, provenance, and annotation. But these are some of the very aspects that now enhance the rarity and value of the works.
For example, pioneer psychiatrist James Jackson Putnam (1846-1918) owned and donated a number of titles concerning the treatment of neuroses with electricity. Many of our homeopathic titles were formerly part of the library of the Massachusetts Homeopathic Medical Society and contain inscriptions and annotations by local leaders in the movement, and physician Edward Jackson (1803-1884) was also clearly interested in homeopathy and owned a number of works on this subject. A number of titles derive from the collection of the Boston Medical Library of 1805, and still more were part of the original library at Harvard Medical School and donated by James Jackson (1777-1867) and other members of the early faculty. While Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s interest in the water-cure was known to scholars and historians, we were until recently unaware that several of our hydropathic titles were part of his own library.
Probably the most exciting discovery we’ve made in our own collection to date is a copy of René Joseph Bertin’s work on syphilis, the Traité de la maladie vénérienne (Paris, 1810) which has an armorial binding of the Emperor Napoleon. The book was probably part of the collection of noted dermatologist Edward Wigglesworth (1804-1876), whose library was donated to the Boston Medical Library in 1897.
To see these and other titles digitized for the Medical Heritage Library, see http://www.archive.org/details/medicalheritagelibrary.
For more from the Medical Heritage Library, please visit our full collection!
(Cross-posted from the Center for the History of Medicine blog.)