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"Even though our collection is relatively young," says Porter, "we have virtually all milestone works in the history of Western medicine." She points out her own favorite item: a bas relief memento mori from the mid-seventeenth century. Carved from a single piece of ivory and based on anatomical illustrations by Andreas Vesalius, the intricate artwork depicts a skeleton, a flowing scarf draped around its neck and arms, contemplating the eventual fate of all mankind. At its feet, symbols of wealth and social status—a knight's helmet, a farmer's working tools, a king's crown—are scattered about in a jumble of earthly refuse. Vesalius' De Humani Corporis Fabrica, published in 1543, was a comprehensive study of the human body, widely considered to be the first anatomically accurate medical textbook.
Just off the main reading room is the Trent Room, built in 1956 in honor of Josiah Trent. Originally housed in the Davison Building, the room was dismantled and rebuilt in its current location in 1975. Heavy curtains, a decorative fireplace, and row after row of historic volumes evoke an English country house circa 1720. The walls of the cool, dark room are covered in pine paneling that originally had been installed in the library of the Duke of Richmond's house in Plaistow, England.
The room houses select, rare volumes from the Trent Collection and a variety of medical artifacts and objects from several other collections. Hanging in the far corner of the room, almost out of sight, is a Japanese ink-and-wash scroll showing a malevolent beast unleashing chaos onto the burning, panicked city of Hiroshima below. The scroll is part of the Warner Wells Hiroshima collection. (Wells '34, M.D. '38 was a surgeon who translated Japanese physician Michihiko Hachiya's eyewitness account of the 1945 bombing of Hiroshima.) It is one of only a handful of non-Western pieces in the collections.
Visitors are drawn to different aspects of the vast holdings, Porter says. When guest scholars or distinguished physicians are expected, she selects examples of the collection's most unusual holdings in that person's area of interest to show them.
As part of the first-year medical school curriculum, students are required to attend a special lecture on the history of medicine and concepts of disease that culminates in a trip to the History of Medicine Collections. Gray Lyons, a third-year medical student, says his curiosity about medical history was piqued by the experience. Lyons, who was an English major before switching to premed his junior year of college, says that the writing and research he has conducted using the collection has nurtured his need for creative expression.
"You could go all four years of medical school without writing an essay," says Lyons, who is pursuing joint M.D. and Ph.D. degrees. "I write for my own mental health." His essay on artistry, iconography, and ideas in sixteenth-century, pre-Vesalian anatomical illustrations was selected for publication in the spring 2007 issue of The Pharos, a quarterly journal published by the Alpha Omega Alpha medical honor society. And he's working with Porter to bring the work of British immunologist Edward Jenner to a wider audience by creating a website devoted to Jenner that features some of the collections' holdings. The site will include scanned excerpts from Jenner's diary, prescriptions he wrote for patients, and his landmark research into developing a smallpox vaccine.
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