The Medical Profession and Libraries

Abstract

The history of medical libraries is closely connected with challenges facing the medical profession at different times. That truism, so general as to be virtually meaningless, can, however, be taken apart and examined in detail. That is what I will do in this essay, with focus on medical libraries in Boston. I will show that medical libraries, like the general libraries of universities, do not automatically develop into oaks from acorns. The creation and survival of medical libraries—plus their precise content--is shaped, by among other factors, the state of medical knowledge and the struggle for status both among different types of physicians and within society, patterns of education, and the desire for unity in a profession characterized in the nineteenth century by different types of practitioners and in the twentieth by increasing specialization. Many of these factors have furthered the development of collections of rare books and medical memorabilia, almost always a consequence of the extraordinary extent--greater than that of other groups—to which physicians have collected rare books.