Happy Valentine's Day!

I recently found this inscription in a 1940's miniature English-Castilian dictionary, and thought it would be perfect for Valentines Day.

"To Cuddles, from your ever-lovin' bright eyes. 

Till the end of time. 

Your Red Head Doll xxx" 

We Celebrate Black Medical Pioneers! (Part 1)

In 1855, the Medical & Chirurgical Faculty of Maryland changed its by-laws to include both Black and Women physicians. Prior to that, they had read "gentlemen" members, which obviously didn't apply to women, and at the time, it also did not apply to Blacks. 

The Center for a Healthy Maryland is publishing a series of brief biographies of medical pioneers on their Instagram account this month, and I will be sharing some of them here. 

If you're interested in seeing what we've posted over the past years, please click here. 

A special thanks to Lindy Gapsis for posting these and sharing them with the History office.

Some Recent Finds

Recently, I have been cataloguing the rare books, including making notes of where and which bookcases the books are located. 

I recently found the Larousse Medical Illustre', circa 1924 which is delightfully illustrated with numerous colored and engraved plates, some of which are shown here. 

As with many rare books libraries, there are always bad actors lurking around who are notorious for slicing the color and engraved plates from historic and rare books. 

To do our small part in preventing any thefts, we are making a database of what books are in our collections, and any color or engraved plates are marked on the reverse with an indelible MedChi stamp. 

So, as I am making notes on the database as to where the books are located, I am also leafing through them, checking their condition, dusting them off , checking prices, and making notes. 

Women's Symposium to Celebrate Women's History Month

 A few months ago, I was thinking about our history (actually, I think about MedChi's history all of the time!), and thought about the early women members, women in medicine today and more. 

As I thought about how we could commemorate women, I realized that Women's History Month is in March. Things came together and we decided to host a Women's Symposium.

The event will take place on Saturday, March 1, from 9:30 to 12:30 at MedChi HQ at 1211 Cathedral Street, or 1204 Maryland Avenue (front and back doors). We will begin at 9:30 with a coffee meet-and-greet session and the welcome and first lecture will begin at 10:00.

We have on-site parking, and there is on-street parking and public transportation in the immediate vicinity.

Tickets are $10 per person and will benefit the preservation of MedChi's archives. For more information, or to secure a reservation, please click or scan the QR code below. 

We will look forward to seeing you then!

A Rare Book Mystery

A few days ago, a friend sent me an auction listing for a book that was once owned by our Sir William Osler.

Pasted onto the cover of the book is a letter from Sir William to Marcia Noyes, our librarian. It was written about six months before he died. At the end is a personal PS "Love to you all."

Marcia and Sir William were close friends from the time he hired her in 1896, until his death in 1919.

But how did this, and two other books signed by William Osler, end up at an auction house in Connecticut?

Of course, I had to do some sleuthing. First, I culled through our records, but could find nothing. Next, I looked through the catalogue from Swann's Auction House in NYC, where we'd sold a number of our rare books in the early 2000's. No record.

Then I called the auction house who told me that the consigner was an old client of theirs. They called him and then called me back to tell me that the client had purchased the book from a rare book dealer in Baltimore about 20 years ago.

Something pinged in my brain. About 20 years ago, a low-level staffer had contracted to sell all of the books in our stacks, about 55,000, to a rare book dealer. When the powers-that-be found out, they put a stop to the sale.

But, in the interim, the dealer must have acquired some of our books, among them, the three that are in this auction, and that was how the consigner acquired them.

Not everyone appreciates history the way I do, nor understands how important it is to retain items from our past.

Most people won't understand the relationship between Marcia and Dr. Osler. As mentioned above, they were close friends from the time he hired her in 1896 until his death in 1919.

There are dozens of letters between the two of them, all very friendly and affectionate. There are little cards from bouquets that Osler sent Marcia wishing her a happy birthday, or sending congratulations.

When Osler moved to England in 1905, they stayed in touch and she visited him in Oxford several times. He frequently sent rare books for the Library at MedChi, including two copies of Vesalius Anatomy.

We will bid on the books, but I am sure the final price will exceed my budget. All that I can hope is that the book finds a good home.

A Boom in Historic Medical Book Collecting

Although I have a subscription to the Wall Street Journal, I am usually several days late in reading it. So when I got a few texts about an article in the Weekend Edition, I got right to reading it. Without permission, I am re-printing it here (but using illustrations from our collections). 

PS Please see this post about one of our special books!

The Hot Market for Books About Bloodletting and

Delivering a Baby in 1669

Collectors with a love of medical history are bidding up the price of arcane texts; ‘I don’t need a car, but I certainly need a copy of Vesalius.’

By: Jared S. Hopkins, WSJ

Tim Opler was searching an online jewelry auction for a birthday gift for his wife when he stumbled upon something more interesting. 

The New York investment banker spent the next few hours scanning rare medical books and scooped up about 20 that piqued his interest. Since that day three years ago, he has acquired hundreds more, which he displays on shelves in his Manhattan office and estimates are worth $400,000.

His collection includes one of six copies of a 1669 guide to delivering babies. “Some guy 400 or 500 years ago did this, and I find that just amazing,” Opler said.

Brush off those old guides to bloodletting and treating a gunshot wound with boiling oil. You may be sitting on a gold mine.  

Bankers, doctors and others who share a love for medical history—and the crinkly feel of a centuries-old binding or manuscript—are bidding up the price of texts that illuminate the evolving understanding of human anatomy and treating patients.

More than $26 million in rare medical books are forecast to sell at auction in the 2020s, based on sales through 2024, marking a dramatic increase in demand for texts that had been fetching around $15 million a decade since the 1990s, according to Stifel Financial.

Collectors scour book fairs, travel together to famous libraries and compare notes in text-message groups and weekly Zoom gatherings. They spend thousands of dollars or more at auction to outbid each other and universities. With a heavy dose of admiration and a bit of envy, they recite the years and editions of each other’s texts.

“This is my life, not a hobby,” said Gene Flamm, 88, who fellow collectors consider the dean of the group. 

Flamm has a day job, as professor and chairman emeritus of neurosurgery at Montefiore Einstein Medical Center in New York City. He also finds time to lecture on old medical books and catalog his collection, with entries covering everything from the place where a book was printed to page measurements and the nature of its binding. The database runs 10 gigabytes. 

Flamm got hooked on old texts as a medical student in the 1960s. While a resident, he sold his used Porsche 356 B for $2,500 to pay for a 1555 copy of De Humani Corporis Fabrica Libri Septem by 16th-century Flemish physician Andreas Vesalius.

“I said I don’t need a car, but I certainly need a copy of Vesalius,” Flamm said.

The 700-page-plus Fabrica is the ultimate trophy of rare medical book collectors, who view its illustrations as works of art. It is said to be the first comprehensive text to feature accurate descriptions of the human body based on dissections of dead patients.  

When a text like this becomes available, collectors don’t let anything get in the way of a score. Zlatko Pozeg, a cardiac surgeon in New Brunswick, Canada, once placed bids on a copy while performing a surgery. His nurse held the phone as he gave instructions. He won the auction. 

“I can look at these books and I feel like I’m enveloped by their wisdom, like part of their spirit is in the room with me,” Pozeg said. “It feeds your soul in a crazy way. I kind of have this unequal tranquility and solace that I just can’t get anywhere else.”

The $2.2 million sale last year of a 1555 edition of Fabrica brought international headlines to the world of rare medical book collecting.

The edition, which was sold to a university in Belgium called KU Leuven, contained crossed-out paragraphs, edited drawings, rewriting of text and fixes to punctuation and spelling. A Vesalius expert found the annotations were the work of the author, who was probably preparing a new version.

Gerard Vogrincic, the seller, said he bought the Vesalius edition for $14,520 in 2007. He said he was comfortable selling it, especially to a university where scholars can access it, because he plans to use the proceeds to fund further purchases.  

“I get a lot of excitement from the thrill of the hunt,” said Vogrincic, a retired pathologist in North Vancouver, Canada.

Collections can be built at any price point, thanks to the sheer number of books, the deteriorating conditions of some, and the varying significance of many. Fans say they constantly check auctions and booksellers online for new finds. Collections can get so large that owners struggle to store them.

[MedChi Member] Mario Molina, former chief executive of Molina Healthcare who got the collecting bug while a student at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine learning about its co-founder William Osler, stored his 14,000 books in a room in his Los Angeles house until space ran out. 

“I thought, Aha, we have a guesthouse. I can fill my guesthouse up with books. And my wife said, ‘No, you get a room.’” They compromised by putting extra books in his home office. 

Flamm primarily stores his 2,000-book collection in the living room of his Manhattan Upper East Side apartment. It fills floor-to-ceiling glass shelves backed by panels illuminated with fluorescent bulbs to avoid heating the books. 

Before moving to Bloomington-Normal, Ill., recently retired cardiologist Brian Morrison had devoted 12 shelves in his Oregon home to books by a single author: a 16th century English physician named William Harvey who penned De Motu Cordis, the first text to show that blood pumped by the heart circulated throughout the human body.

Now, he is storing those and other books in 139 one-cubic-foot boxes, two larger boxes and six large tubs, while figuring out what to do with them.

Morrison acquired his first copy of Cordis two decades ago. “Then I realized, No, that wasn’t enough. I had to have every edition.” (He pines for the first edition of Cordis, published in 1628, but it hasn’t gone to auction in more than two decades and he says he probably can’t afford it.)

After buying English physician Evan Bedford’s papers at auction in 2020, Morrison discovered Winston Churchill’s electrocardiogram. “The heartbeat of the lion was in this lot,” Morrison said. “As a cardiologist myself I think that’s the coolest thing in the world.”