Location: 1900 East Monument Street, Welch Library, 3rd floor, Baltimore, Maryland 21205-2113
Contact: Michael Seminara, Curator, 410-955-3159, michaelseminara@jhmi.edu
Access: contact before visiting
Websites: Main Library page; Institute of the History of Medicine page; History of Medicine Library page
The Historical Collection contains about forty thousand volumes, including runs of more than 300 journals. It has one of the most comprehensive collections of secondary literature in the history of medicine; and the 108 periodicals to which the collection now subscribes include almost all currently published titles in history of medicine, history of science and social studies of medicine. The rare book collection of some ten thousand volumes has scattered strengths, largely concentrated in the seventeenth and eighteenth century, and primarily in western medicine (although the collection does own some important Asian texts). Among its treasures are a copy of the 1500 edition of Johannes de Ketham’s 1491 Fasciculus Medicinae, and first editions of Andreas Vesalius’s De Fabrica (1543), William Harvey’s De Motu Cordis (1628), Robert Hooke’s Micrographia (1665), and Giovanni Battista Morgagni’s De Sedibus (1761). The collection contains some of the earliest printed editions of the works of classical and medieval medical writers. The collection also includes publications by François Rabelais, Louis Pasteur, Edward Jenner, William Osler, along with works relating to tuberculosis, smallpox, and nineteenth-century French medicine.
The Historical Collection also contains manuscripts. Some specific examples include: a morocco-bound French fourteenth-century version of Constantinus Africanus’ Latin translation of the Viaticum of Ibn al-Jazzār; folders of correspondence of Edward Jenner; cartons of papers of the Rockefeller foundation malariologist, Paul Farr Russell. There is a large amount of miscellaneous correspondence and manuscripts, mainly by physicians from the seventeenth to the twentieth century, and a collection of Ceylonese palm-leaf medical manuscripts dating from the seventeenth through the nineteenth century.
The Prints and Photographs image collection contains over 20,000 items, such as caricatures, institutional views, hospital postcards, along with portraits of physicians and scientists from the sixteenth through the twentieth centuries. The largest portion is the unique pathological print collection created by Dr. Jonathan Hutchinson, an English surgeon, ophthalmologist, dermatologist, venereologist and pathologist, whose career spanned the mid-nineteenth through the early twentieth centuries.
The Object collection contains items such as 19th century phrenological heads, 18th century bloodletting instruments, smallpox artifacts, and medical stamps.