Curatorial assistant Elizabeth Arterberry gives a captivating selection of materials from the Lilly Library’s Notable Medical Books Collection!
During my time as a curatorial assistant at the Lilly Library, I have been afforded the incredible opportunity to become well acquainted with certain of the library’s collections and am grateful I’ve had the time and access to J.K. Lilly Jr’s collection of Notable Medical Books to create a digital repository for them. It hosts partial digital facsimiles of the books for wider audiences to browse and enjoy, with the goal of teaching visitors to the site why these books are important, not just as a part of medical history, but also in the ways they shaped the way medicine was practiced or perceived in their time and directed the course of study and practice to become what they are in the present.
Though the authors of many books within the collection, and the nature and impact of their work, are recognizable even to non-medical professionals by name alone—Henry Gray, Florence Nightingale, and Ivan Petrovich Pavlov, for example—there are some less well-known physicians and practitioners of medicine whose notable contributions to their respective fields I would like to bring attention to in this post. Visual interest inherent in the texts themselves and the backgrounds of the authors also factor into the items selected for this post, and more information about each has been hyperlinked to in each item’s title.
This medical text is a Lilly Library favorite for display in relevant exhibitions and in-library classes, and for good reason. A very comprehensive surgical manual from the 16th century. This tome represents the culmination of experience and wisdom the author gained from forty years as a battlefield surgeon. It is intended to be a reference manual for other surgeons, and covers field surgery, materia medica, and the treatment of leprosy. Notably, in addition to creating one of the most referenced and plagiarized surgical texts of his time, von Gersdorff was also “one of the first to discuss gunshot wounds and their treatment; unlike his contemporaries, he did not consider them to be poisonous” (Waife et al. 19). It also contains several instructive woodcuts depicting types of wounds sustained on the battlefield and their treatment. The near-universal favorite woodcut print within the text among staff has been dubbed the “wound man,” who has inflicted upon him every battlefield injury the author and artist could conjure, many of the weapons still stuck into him.
Dominique-Jean Larrey not only served under Napoleon but was the chief surgeon of his army. Like von Gersdorff, he was also an innovator in the field of battlefield medicine, with one of his most notable contributions being transport services for the wounded: he was behind the first battlefield ambulances, “light one-horse carriages called ‘flying ambulances’” that were tasked with carrying seriously wounded soldiers to military hospitals (Waife et al. 167). His ability to delegate these responsibilities and ensure the wounded were seen to quickly made him beloved by the troops—and greatly valued by the emperor himself. This series of four volumes is a personal account of Larrey’s time serving under Napoleon as much as it is a history of his medical service and innovations, and the volumes themselves are beautifully bound, with some excellent lithographic plates depicting his battlefield innovations, such as surgical techniques performed and technologies created (at least two plates of the ‘flying ambulance’).
Richard Owen was an English biologist active throughout a good portion of the nineteenth century, whose work was focused on paleodontology and comparative anatomy. His book in our collection, Odontography: or, a Treatise on the Comparative Anatomy of the Teeth, boasts an incredible wealth of high-quality, detailed illustrations of dentition and facial skeletal structure—168 lithographed plates’ worth. The plates accompany a very in-depth study of “the microscopic structure of the teeth and the physiology of dentition” in fishes, reptiles, and mammals—including humans (Waife et al. 195). It’s an incredible resource, both for those interested in the history of dentistry and those with an interest in artistic anatomical depictions.
Paracelsus is one of those foundational figures whose presence is as notable as his contributions to the field and teaching of medicine. He “spent a number of years traveling throughout Europe, collecting information not only from academicians but also from alchemists, gypsies, midwives, astrologers, barbers, and executioners. In this way, he acquired a practical body of knowledge that was in many ways at odds with the traditional medical teaching of his time. Paracelsus was appointed professor of medicine at Basel in 1527 but held the position only one year. During that year, he publicly burned the ‘Canon’ of Avicenna in a campaign to reform medical teaching, lectured in German instead of Latin, and quarreled with the authorities over fees” (Waife et al. 25). He was the first to utilize knowledge of chemistry in the practice of medicine, dismissing ancient beliefs about the effects of the four humors and proposing the influences of three alchemical elements on human health instead—mercury, sulfur, and salt (ibid). A man who was as notable for his defiant and stalwart nature as much as the notable advances he made in the practice of medicine, Paracelus’ work stands out as brazenly in the canon of medicine as he himself must have in life.
Gasparo Tagliacozzi was one of the very first practitioners of what would come to be known as reconstructive plastic surgery. He was alive and active as a practicing surgeon in the 16th century, in Bologna, Italy, during a time where individuals encountering life-altering disfiguration was incredibly common (many battles/conflicts between and within cities at this time). This work has been split into two sections, with the first addressing philosophical aspects of the treatment and the rationale behind the decisions he makes in practice, such as why he utilized skin grafts in his reconstructive surgeries as opposed to trying to reattach amputated cartilage, and the second volume dedicated to a detailed account of all stages of the reconstructive facial surgeries he performed, including preparations made before and proper care of the healing region(s) after the surgery. His techniques would only begin to be replicated by other surgeons more than two centuries later, and even then, his book contributed to the revitalization of interest in the field, when it “was rediscovered and was reprinted in Berlin in 1831” (Waife et al. 55).
In the time before Gray’s Anatomy, Descriptive and Surgical, the exemplary volume for detailed and accurate (as it could be in its day) artistic renderings of human anatomy was Vesalius’ De Humani Corporis Fabrica. Vesalius intended the seven “books” within this work to be utilized as medical reference materials for those studying to become physicians, and it remains best known for “its full-page skeletons,” and also for the first surviving instance of “accurately drawn details of organs, blood vessels, and nerves, designed and placed so as to clarify the descriptions in the text” (Waife et al. 29). It is also one of the most plagiarized books in the collection—the woodcuts, prized for their accuracy and attention to detail, were copied by other anatomists for over three centuries (ibid.).
If any of these brief introductions have caught your interest, or made you curious about the other items in the Notable Medical Books collection, you can find more comprehensive entries for each book here: https://elarte-iu.github.io/lilly_notable_medical_books/.
About the author: Elizabeth Arterberry is a curatorial assistant at the Lilly Library, and a second-year MLS student at Indiana University Bloomington. Her undergraduate work centered heavily on philosophy, and the field remains a primary area of interest for her. When not lost in the stacks (or an Excel spreadsheet), she can most often be found attempting a new recipe, working on a creative writing piece, or falling down a provenance “rabbit hole.”
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