Rare Book Collection

The third day of internship was pretty interesting.  We went to a staff meeting. The cataloging librarian brought a collection of the rare books. It was an amazing collection.  There were books as old as the 1483 books. During the meeting Ms.Epstein explained about the books. She talked about the books and how their covers were made. She also talked about the history of sciences. For example in the anatomy book that we saw, there were images of cadavers who were people that were sentenced to death. Those cadavers were dissected in front of a community. In one of the drawings, the surgeon was standing in between crowd of people and teaching them anatomy of the body.  The librarian also talked about the covers of the book which was pretty interesting. She talked about how people didn’t bind their books until the 1850’s.  Also one thing that struck me was, in the past days if a person wanted to become a doctor they had to know Latin first. So they had to learn Latin as a kid.

We also saw some medical tools that were used centuries ago. For example Charles Darwin’s microscope was very similar the microscopes today but as Paul Andrew said that the new microscopes are made of plastic and the one that he showed us was made of brass, steel, and iron.  The medical tool collection was interesting but scary.   One more thing that I learned and will always remember was the materials the tools were made of. For example the saw handle was made of organic material; therefore, it was easier for the bacteria to get in to it and spread infectious diseases. The rare book collections and the artifacts were really interesting. I learned more about history of medicine and medical tools.