We marvel at modern medicine's ability to heal life-threatening injuries, prolong lives, and cure diseases. And yet, as any physician will tell you, medicine is an imprecise science. A cell undergoes permutation or an organ fails, and no number of pills or procedures can help. A full understanding of the intricacies of the human body—the fragile sack of liquids, organs, nerves, and bones that propels us through our brief, mortal existence—remains elusive.

Human nature: colored lithograph by Charlotte C. Sowerby of the medicinal sarsaparilla plant, from The Flora Homeopathica, published in the mid-nineteenth century

Bill Bamberger

On the ground floor of the Duke University Medical Center Library, a stone's throw from labs in which researchers conduct experimental drug protocols and doctors perform groundbreaking surgical procedures, the History of Medicine Collections offer glimpses into how our knowledge about the human condition has evolved  It's a stunning assortment of rare medical texts and manuscripts, instruments, artifacts, and artwork. On display are doctors' bags, home medicine chests, early-sixteenth-century Italian apothecary jars, portable syringe kits, dauntingly large amputation saws, a box of blue-iris glass eyes, a late-eighteenth-century horseshoe tourniquet, and an exquisite array of ivory anatomical manikins from Western Europe.

The most valuable item in the collections, says curator Suzanne Porter, is a first edition of British physician William Harvey's Exercitatio Anatomica de Motu Cordis et Sanguinis in Animalibus, a landmark text published in 1628 in which he accurately detailed the circulation of blood. Kept with other precious volumes in a walk-in safe, the Harvey book contains meticulously recorded handwritten notations by previous owners and collectors documenting its provenance. 

Porter explains that the core of the collections was assembled by Josiah Charles Trent, the founding chief of the division of thoracic surgery at Duke. For Christmas in 1938, the young intern received a rare copy of William Beaumont's Experiments and Observations on the Gastric Juice and the Physiology of Digestion. The gift "carried the deadly virus of bibliomania," Trent wrote. For the next ten years, until his premature death in 1948 at the age of thirty-four, he amassed, with assistance from dealers in rare medical books, a remarkable array of materials.

Human nature:carved ivory manikin from the seventeenth or eighteenth century, used to explain anatomy and illness to lay doctors and patients

Bill Bamberger

In 1956, Trent's widow, Mary D.B.T. Semans '39, Hon. '83, donated the Trent collection—4,000 books and 2,500 manuscripts—to the medical library. In addition to the Trent Collection, the History of Medicine Collections comprise 8,000 volumes of medical journals and books donated by the Georgia Medical Society, rare and historical manuscripts, a collection of works by Duke authors, and non-print materials that range from a medicinal herb garden to bloodletting equipment to a wooden stethoscope with an ivory earpiece.

The collections contain the only known copy of The Four Seasons, four seventeenth-century copperplate engravings that illustrate human anatomy over four stages of life. Also included: one of the last surviving hand-colored copies of the first edition of George Bartisch's Ophthalmodouleia (1583), the first systematic work on eye diseases and surgery, and manuscripts by William Osler, a Canadian physician and co-founder of the Johns Hopkins Hospital (Wilburt C. Davison, the founding dean of Duke's medical school, studied with Osler as a Rhodes Scholar from 1913 to 1916).

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