Library Newsletter

During the past several months, as the New Stacks building renovations have been in progress, the Historical Collections staff has been working on doing some collection inventory. As part of the process, a small notebook that was donated to the NYAM collections in 1997 by Professor Bert Hansen of CUNY’s Baruch College came to light. The notebook, which was kept by Haller Hippocrates Henkel beginning on July 25, 1879, tracks Henkel’s experience as a Junior Assistant, Senior Assistant and House Surgeon at Bellevue Hospital. Dr. Henkel made notes about medical cases he attended, about the compounding of prescriptions, and recorded what he was learning from senior physicians at Bellevue over the course of his training. By happy circumstance, Professor Hansen noticed an announcement in the summer 2010 newsletter of the American Association of the History of Medicine about a new digital collection of materials that had recently been made available through the National Library of Medicine, “Physicians’ Lives in the Shenandoah Valley: Henkel Family Correspondence, 1786-1907” and asked us to investigate whether there was a connection between the man who kept our notebook and the family whose letters make up the content of NLM’s collection.

It turns out that the Dr. Henkel who wrote our notebook is one of the brothers whose correspondence forms part of this collection. H. H. Henkel began his medical school training at the University of Virginia in October of 1876. He then continued his studies at the University of New York Medical School beginning in the fall of 1877, and went on to become the Junior Assistant at Bellevue beginning in the spring of 1879. Henkel wrote to his brothers while he was a medical student in Virginia and continued to correspond with them after he had moved to New York, providing many details of his experience as a student and then as a new physician. NYAM’s curators contacted the National Library of Medicine after we discovered the connection, and we agreed to digitize our notebook and send them the scans. We are anticipating that a digital version of the notebook will be linked to the NLM collection sometime soon, offering an enriched experience to researchers both here and there.

Breakthrough: The Dramatic Story of the Discovery of Insulin is the title of a new exhibit at The New York Historical Society which opened on Tuesday, October 5th and will continue until Monday, January 31st, 2011. It tells the story of the isolation and manufacture of injectable insulin, a miracle drug which saved the lives of countless children affected by diabetes and allowed them to grow into adults. And, as the title suggests, the story is indeed a dramatic one. The Academy’s Library has made it possible for the Historical Society to tell that story from classical antiquity with the 1554 editio princeps of Arataeus of Cappedocia’s work, De acutorum, ac diuturnorum morborum causis & signis, Lib. IIII. De acutorum, ac iuturnorum morborum curatione,Lib.III. The title notwithstanding, the work is actually printed in Greek.

Aretaeus of Cappedocia was a Greek physician about whom little is known. Even his dates are disputed. He did, however, give a name to the disease and his observations to determine its etiology were quite extraordinary. Editio princeps is the term employed for the first appearance in print of a text which existed previously only in manuscript. The English translation and critical edition which appeared in 1856 and was edited by Francis Adams was included in the loan. All in all 14 items were loaned to the Historical Society for the exhibit and they date from March 28, 1500 to the 20th century.

In the course of preparing the Library’s materials for their trip across the park, it was discovered that the Library had purchased, in the 1960s, a “made-up” or “sophisticated” copy of Sir Thomas Willis’ Pharmaceutice rationalis; or, an exercitation of the operations of medicine in human bodies. Shewing signs, causes and cures of most distempers incident thereunto… (London, 1679). Although all of the illustrated plates were present, the copy had very skillfully been doctored to appear complete, but actually had two copies of Part I and only a fraction of Part II bound in the leather and marbled paper covered boards. Fortunately, the Library had not paid very much for this copy, but it had been fooled. Perhaps when the materials are returned in 2011, we will have a little demonstration in the Rare Book Room of how analytical bibliography aided in the detection of this fraud. Luckily for the New York Historical Society, the section dealing with diabetes was present.