World Book Day

Today is World Book Day. World Book Day changes lives through a love of books and shared reading. Their mission is to promote reading for pleasure, which is the single biggest indicator of a child’s future success – more than their family circumstances, their parents’ educational background or their income.  

MedChi has an extensive collection of books, mostly medical journals from the 20th century, from each state, national and specialty medical society. Fortunately, most of these have now been digitized, many through Archive.org, who digitized our pre-1900 medical journals. 

In addition to the journals, we have hundreds of books, some medical, some botanical and some anatomical. Many of these date from the 1700's and 1800's and are fascinating to look through. 

As I was poking though the stacks recently, I took some pictures of some books which caught my eye.

This book, A Treatise on Madness, came with a pressed four-leaf clover. Very poignant.

Someone, who presumably didn't know any better, cut out the inner pages of this book from the 1600's to make a secret hiding place.

This book, dated 1787, is an illustrated guide to skin problems. 

I love how you can see, and feel, the imprint from the type-pieces on the reverse side of the page. 

This is an illustrated 1789 botanical guide.

See if you can take a half-hour or so and read just for fun today, and try to read from an actual book. Happy World Book Day!