The Library that Never Was
Many of the essential medical texts in Europe were known and circulated in manuscript copies, but the development of moveable type allowed for swift and inexpensive reproduction of printed material and a consequent spread of common medical knowledge. The first medical texts to be printed were editions of Greek and Roman works, such as the De medicina of Celsus and the writings of Hippocrates and Galen, but by the end of the fifteenth century, new and original treatises in medicine and surgery begin to appear—books that have themselves become classics of medical history.
When the Boston Medical Library and Harvard Medical Library allied to form the Countway Library of Medicine in 1965, the rare books of both collections were brought together in one repository to form an extraordinary treasure house of medical history. The holdings of the Harvard Medical Library include some ten incunables in its Warren Library, and a few additional volumes have been acquired by the Countway by purchase and gift since its opening. But the great majority of the incunables here belong to the Boston Medical Library, and these volumes represent an unusual effort to build a library that never was—a working medical collection of a scholar of the Renaissance period in the United States. The annual report of the Boston Medical Library for 1930 outlined the intention behind its acquisition of incunabula in this way: "It is to be noted that every book added to the collection is in conformity with a definite plan formulated for the building up of a replica of an independent medical library of the late 15th century."So numerous were the acquisitions and so varied were the holdings that, by 1944, it was asserted that at least one edition of virtually every book of medical interest produced before 1501 could be found in the Boston Medical Library's collection.