Our friends from the Harford County Historical Society came down for a tour last week and brought along some presents for us! They were de-accessioning some medical books which were not relevant to their collections and thought we'd be interested in them.
One in particular caught my eye. The book is "The Synopsis of the Course of Lectures on Materia Medica and Pharmacy, Delivered in the University of Pennsylvania, 1855.
What's fascinating about this book is that about half of the pages are blank, so someone could amend the lectures with their own notes. Even more interesting is that the notes look to have been taken over a number of years by various students.
Some of the writing is the beautiful copperplate writing of the age, clearly done in a pen dipped in ink. Other writing is less beautiful and almost scribbled in pencil.
I have never seen this in any of our other books and was surprised when I started flipping through it and found all of the hand-written notes.
Another interesting aspect of the book was the botanical notes on everything from camphor to calamine to cannabis.
It is always a lot of fun to share what I find on my desk.
Hello Meg, A treasure to find that personalized book. Do you have any idea who made all the notes? I wonder if the book was published that way, or whether someone had a copy specially bounds and interleaved with blank paper.
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From the rare book guy at Johns Hopkins: This is quite interesting indeed! An interleaved and annotated book (so bound from the date of the spine illustration, which is clearly from the period of the book’s initial publication). It was specially bound for the purpose of annotation. The dated/located note in manuscript facing page 41 (“Philadelphia 1868”?) gives some internal evidence for dating the annotations. This is rare in any book, but a long tradition regardless, of recipes for “simples” (i.e., medicinal preparations and compounds) comprised here not only of naturalia (i.e., naturally occurring herbs, roots, ground resins, metals, etc.) but also of artificially formed chemicals, some perhaps commercially available (by the mid-19th c.) through industrial means. I hope that helps shed a bit more light.
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