Hidden treasure

About this book

With more than 17 million items, dating from the eleventh century to the present, the National Library of Medicine, founded 175 years ago, is the world's largest medical library- America's home to a rich worldwide heritage of objects from rare early medical books to disturbing, precise nineteenth-century surgical illustrations to delightful mid-twentieth-century animated cartoons. Despite more than a century and a half of classification and cataloging, buried in the sheer mass of this 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. Each hidden treasure included in this volume has been specially selected and is accompanied by a brief essay by a distinguished scholar, artist, collector, journalist, or physician. Delivered from the obscurity of the library's massive archive, these marvels speak to us, charm us, repulse us, amaze us, inform us, and intrigue us- and present a tantalizing glimpse of some of the precious and remarkable objects to be found within one of the world's great hidden treasures: the National Library of Medicine. -- from Book Jacket.