Rare Book Collection

Located in the Institute of the History of Medicine, the rare book collection of some ten thousand volumes has scattered strengths, largely concentrated in the seventeenth and eighteenth century, and primarily in western medicine (although the collection does own some important Asian texts). The collection contains some of the earliest printed editions of the works of classical and medieval medical writers. Our oldest medical text is a six-hundred-year-old manuscript copied from a tenth century treatise written in Salerno, Europe's first center of medical education. We also own fifteen incunabula (books printed in the fifteenth century), about six hundred books published between 1501 and 1600, and over one thousand seventeenth century editions.