Purchase Some Medical History
For decades, KCMS has stewarded a remarkable collection of historic medical and scientific books, volumes that trace the evolution of medicine from bedside observation to modern science.
This year, KCMS is offering an opportunity to bring some history into your library.
In collaboration with Collins Rare Books of Seattle, more than 150 titles dating from the 1600s through the early 1900s are being offered for sale. Proceeds directly support KCMS’s nonprofit mission.
These works are not curiosities. The collection includes landmark texts in anatomy, surgery, epidemiology, forensic medicine, and public health by figures whose influence still shapes clinical practice today, including Robert Boyle, William Harvey, Robert Koch, Henry Gray, Sir Astley Cooper, and Herman Boerhaave.
Highlights from the collection include:
- New Experiments Touching Cold (1683) by Robert Boyle. The Robert Boyle of Boyle’s Law spent years studying the regulation of temperature by living things and laid the groundwork for the modern understanding of thermodynamics.
- Micrographia (1665) by Robert Hooke. This rare book, by a contemporary of Sir Isaac Newton, was the first scientific bestseller, inspiring widespread public interest in the new science of microscopy.
- The Works of Thomas Sydenham, MD on Acute and Chronic Diseases (1815), edited by Benjamin Rush, signer of the Declaration of Independence and a pivotal figure in early American medicine.
- First Lines of the Practice of Physic (four volumes) by William Cullen, first published in 1777 and used as the leading medical textbook in Britain and the United States for nearly half a century.
- Anatomie Générale (four volumes) by Xavier Bichat, the “Father of Histology,” whose ideas reshaped the understanding of disease without the use of a microscope.
- Principles of Forensic Medicine (1844) by William Guy, a first edition text that guided Victorian-era legal and medical practice.
- The Surgical Works of John Hunter (four volumes), documenting the work of one of the most influential surgeons in history and a collaborator of Edward Jenner.
- Petticoat Surgeon by Bertha Van Hoosen, a signed autobiography of an early feminist surgeon and medical educator.
- Culpeper’s Works (1649), a radical, humanistic approach to medicine that sought to place knowledge in the hands of ordinary people.
