Hidden treasure : the National Library of Medicine / edited by Michael Sappol ; designed by Laura Lindgren ; photography by Arne Svenson ; National Library of Medicine.
239 pages : illustrations (some color) ; 29 x 26 cm
Summary
Despite more than a century and a half of classification and cataloguing, buried in the sheer mass of the National Library of Medicine's collection are wondrous items largely unseen by the public and obscure even to librarians, curators, and historians. The individual objects brought to light in this book glow with beauty, grotesquery, wit and/or calamitous tragedy. Among the objects features are a series never before reproduced of hauntingly delicate paintings and illustrations of early "monstra" collected in the early decades of the nineteenth century "from the museum of Dr. Klinkenberg" in the Netherlands; charming hand-painted glass "magic lantern slides," which doctors projected in slideshows to entertain and help cure inmates at St. Elizabeths Hospital for the Insane; the mimeographed report of the Japanese medical team first to enter Hiroshima after the atomic blast; surreal views of mechanically sliced cadavers in the photographic anatomical atlas of fin-de-siècle France's notorious surgeon-provocateur Eugène-Louis Doyen; and a staggering variety of objects from around the world and through seven different centuries.