Moody Medical Library

Academic Resources | Blocker History of Medicine Collections


Rare Books

The Truman G. Blocker, Jr. History of Medicine Collections at the Moody Medical Library hold over 18,000 titles and 10,000 pamphlets and reprints documenting the development of Western medicine and allied sciences.

The library's holdings of books published prior to 1501 place it among the top medical sciences libraries in the United States. The Moody Medical Library houses the largest and most significant collection in the history of the biomedical sciences in the southern United States. The strengths of the collections include fundamental and secondary works in anatomy and surgery, anesthesiology, immunology, occupational medicine and psychiatry.

The immunology collection contains a large number of books and off-prints previously owned by Louis Pasteur and are considered the most significant outside of the material held by the l' Institut Pasteur in Paris, France. In addition, foundational works in immunology by Edward Anthony Jenner (1749-1823) and Benjamin Waterhouse (1754-1846), as well as microbiology and the germ theory of disease by Heinrich Hermann Robert Koch (1843-1910) and Paul Ehrlich (1854-1915), are available.

The Titus Harris Collection

Decorative | Rare Books

The Titus Harris Collection of the History of Psychiatry, one of the largest and most comprehensive accumulations of works on the history of the subject, contains over 4,500 volumes.

The collection contains the earliest works on mental illness including a first edition of Robert Burton's (1577-1640) Anatomy of Melancholy (London, 1642), which was considered to be the most important medical book ever published by a layperson.

Also included in the collection is the first American work on the subject, Benjamin Rush's (1745-1813) Medical Inquiries and Observations, Upon the Diseases of the Mind (Philadelphia, 1812) in addition to all of Sigmund Freud's (1856-1939) first editions in their original German.

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Blocker History of Medicine Collections

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