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.”
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