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The Boston Medical Library (est. 1875) of Boston, Massachusetts, which evolved into the "largest academic medical library in the world," was originally organized to alleviate the problem that had emerged due to the scattered distribution of medical texts throughout the city.
Contents
Early history
In 1875, the Society for Medical Observation, the Society for Medical Improvement, the Treadwell Library at the Massachusetts General Hospital, and the Public Library all had volumes of information that needed to be more accessible to physicians. This was the second attempt to create a medical library in the city; the first attempt was in 1805. This second library was incorporated with the first "as an independent institution under the control of the profession as a whole". James Read Chadwick, a gynecologist, collected books, pamphlets, and medical periodicals and make this material accessible to the practicing physician. It later became the later the Boston Medical Library (BML). Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., Parkman Professor of Anatomy and Physiology at Harvard, served as the BML’s first president and writer Librarian.
The Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine
In 1960, the BML and the Harvard Medical Library combined their collections, to be housed in a new building named for Lever Brothers executive Francis A. Countway, whose sister, after his death, gave 3.5 million dollars of his fortune toward the library.
Current developments
In 1999, the Rare Books and Special Collections Department of the Countway Library assumed custodial responsibility for the Warren Anatomical Museum, which houses the skull of Phineas Gage.
The department was renamed the Center for the History of Medicine in 2004. It hosts rotating exhibits about the history of medicine from the library collections. The displays are located in the lobby area and are open to the public.
The New England Journal of Medicine noted that The Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine loaned out material from the 19th century in order to make the 2010 electronic-conversion of the complete journal possible as paper copies of some issues of the Journal were found missing from the Journal's own paper archive.
According to the History of Medicine Division of the National Institutes of Health National Library of Medicine, The Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine is the "largest academic medical library in the world, and its collections, which have been formed over nearly two centuries, sometimes through the medical holdings of other libraries, include rare and historical materials that can be numbered among the largest in the world."
Collections
Boston Medical Library comprises the following collections: