We are pleased to announce the addition of 286 classic medical rare books from the Lamar Soutter Library, University of Massachusetts Medical School, to the Medical Heritage Library (MHL)’s holdings in the Internet Archive. The Lamar Soutter Library is the first contributor of existing digital materials to the MHL; by adding the tag “medicalheritage” to the cataloging information for each book in the Internet Archive, the Lamar Soutter Library has radically expanded the volumes’ potential audience. These digital texts join materials from Columbia, Harvard, and Yale, the National Library of Medicine, and the New York Public Library that will comprise the MHL.
“These are books of lasting interest and value,” said Jack Eckert, Public Services Librarian for the Countway, a founding member of the MHL. “While few in number, the volumes digitized from the Lamar Soutter Library represent a wide variety of primary works in the history of medicine. Researchers will now be able to find and consult some early American and English titles, including works by Caspar Wistar, William Smellie, John Hunter, Sir Astley Cooper, and John Bell, as well as landmark classics in medicine, such as the 1761 edition of Morgagni’s De sedibus et causis morborum with a 1769 English translation and a 1631 edition of Spigelius’ De formato foetu–the earliest item in the Soutter collection.”
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