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).

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.”