Medical collecting at the Library Company of Philadelphia, 1731 to the present

James Green

The Library Company of Philadelphia

The history of medical collecting at the Library Company of Philadelphia begins in 1731, with its founding by Benjamin Franklin. Fifty young men, mostly artisans, many of them members of Franklin’s mutual improvement club (the Junto), bought shares in the library which provided the funds needed to import books from London. The first order of books, dispatched in 1732, listed 45 titles, all of the sort the shareholders called useful books, that is, books that told you how to do things or that could help you improve your mind, your community and your position in society. The books were carefully chosen by the shareholders to be comprehensive introductions to their respective fields of knowledge that were authoritative but accessible to the generalist. Three of them were medical books: John Allen’s Synopsis Medicinae; or, a Brief and General Collection of the Whole Practise of Physick (London, 1730), said to be intended for “the young physician”; James Drake’s Anthropologia Nova; or, A New System of Anatomy (London, 1727-28), said to be intended for “the young anatomist”; and John Quincy’s Lexicon Physico-Medicum; or, a New Medicinal Dictionary (4th ed., London, 1730), said to explain “the difficult terms used in the several branches of the profession.” These were not exactly popular medical books but they were aimed at serious seekers of medical information, including provincial autodidacts like Franklin and his friends. The semi-professional audience is implied by the Latin title that precedes the English subtitle for each of these books.

By the time the library’s first extant catalog was published in 1741, the collection had grown to 375 titles, of which two dozen can be classed as medical. There were more books like the three mentioned above, but also quite a number that were more explicitly directed at a general audience, books that we can now see as antecedents of the medical self-help discourse that occupies such a prominent place in the book trade today, as well as on cable television and the internet. The two fitting that description most closely are Lewis Cornaro’s Sure and Certain Methods of attaining a long and healthy Life (5th ed., London 1737) and George Cheyne’s An Essay of Health and long Life (2nd ed., London, 1725). Both are foundational texts of popular medicine.

Cheyne (1673-1743) was a Scottish physician who was at that time the most prominent advocate in Britain for a vegetarian diet, which he said had cured him of obesity and other health problems. He was also a prototype of the celebrity diet doctor, numbering Hester Thrale, Samuel Richardson and John Wesley among his disciples. Luigi (or Lewis) Cornaro was a 16th century Venetian nobleman who, beginning in his 40s, limited his diet to twelve ounces a day of bread, meat, soup or egg yolks, and fourteen ounces of wine. He presented this regimen as the epitome of moderation and sobriety. However, when he was 78 years old his relatives, understandably, began to worry he was not eating enough, so against his better judgment, he increased his food ration to fourteen ounces and his wine allotment to sixteen ounces daily. Almost immediately he came down with a “fit of cholick” and a fever that nearly killed him. It only abated when he returned to the former measures. He lived to nearly 100, said to be proof of the efficacy of his diet. His writings were often reprinted and widely translated – in fact they seem never to have gone out of print.