Hidden Treasure: Ten Centuries of Rare Archival Images Visualizing the Body
By Maria Popova
For the past 175 years, the The National Library of Medicine in Bethesda has been building the world’s largest collection of biomedical images, artifacts, and ephemera. With more than 17 million items spanning ten centuries, it’s a treasure trove of rare, obscure, extravagant wonders, most of which remain unseen by the public and unknown even to historians, librarians, and curators. Until now.
Hidden Treasure, following on the heels of The Art of Medicine, is an exquisite large-format volume that culls some of the most fascinating, surprising, beautiful, gruesome, and idiosyncratic objects from the Library’s collection in 450 full-color illustrations. From rare “magic lantern slides” doctors used to entertain and cure inmates at the St. Elizabeth’s Hospital for the Insane to astonishing anatomical atlases to the mimeographed report of the Japanese medical team first to enter Hiroshima after the atomic blast, each of the curious ephemera is contextualized in a brief essay by a prominent scholar, journalist, artist, collector, or physician. What results is a remarkable journey not only into the evolution of mankind’s understanding of the physicality of being human, but also into the evolution of librarianship itself, amidst the age of the digital humanities.

Zahn’s baroque diagram of the anatomy of vision (left) needs to be viewed in relation to his creation of a mechanical eye (right), the scioptric ball designed to project the image of the sun in a camera obscura
Printed book, 3 volumes

Left to right, top to bottom: Philippines, Denmark, British Honduras; Hong Kong, Madeira, Kenya; Nepal, Dominican Republic, Colombia
Jersey City, New Jersey. 93 color photographs, glossy

Optometrist George Mayerle combined an array of eye tests on a single chart that, he boasted, was ‘accurate, artistic, ornamental, practical and reliable.’ Marketing the chart to fellow practitioners, he promised that it ‘makes a good impression and convinces the patient of your professional expertness.’
San Francisco. Lithograph with hand-colored swatches on cardboard.
Michael North, Jeffrey Reznick, and Michael Sappol remind us in the introduction:
It’s no secret that nowadays we look for libraries on the Internet — without moving from our desks or laptops or mobile phones… We’re in a new and miraculous age. But there are still great libraries, in cities and on campuses, made of brick, sandstone, marble, and glass, containing physical objects, and especially enshrining the book: the Library of Congress, Bibliotheque Nationale de France, the British Library, the New York Public Library, the Wellcome Library, the great university libraries at Oxford, Harvard, Yale, Johns Hopkins, and elsewhere. And among them is the National LIbrary of Medicine in Bethesda, the world’s largest medical library, with its collection of over 17 million books, journals, manuscripts, prints, photographs, posters, motion pictures, sound recordings, and “ephemera” (pamphlets, matchbook covers, stereograph cards, etc.).

The fourth and fifth ‘figure of muscles’ conclude the illustrated/typographical dissection, showing more bone than muscle. They also present the anatomy of the head and brain.
Bound printed book, illustrated with woodcuts

Muscles and attachments
Kaishi Hen. Kyoto, Japan. Printed woodblock book, color illustrations

The expression of emotions in cats and dogs, The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals (London, 1872)
London, New York, and other locations
(Also see how Darwin’s photographic studies of human emotions changed visual culture forever.)

Two figures provide a model of how the motions of running and springing can be accurately drawn.
Mechanik der menschlichen Gehwerkzeuge. Germany. Printed book with atlas containing lithographs.

Flyers from a larger series of anti-tuberculosis flyers (Shanghai, 1940s and 1950s), Chinese Public Health Collection, National Library of Medicine

The Army Medical Museum’s staff mined incoming reports for ‘interesting’ cases — such as a gunshot would to the ‘left side of scalp, denuding skull’ or ‘gunshot would, right elbow with gangrene supervening’ — and cases that demonstrated the use of difficult surgical techniques, such as an amputation by circular incision or resection of the ‘head of humerus and three inches of the left clavicle.’
Washington, DC. 146 numbered cards, with tipped-in photographs and case histories

Arachnoid villi, or pacchionian bodies, of the human brain.
Studien in der Anatomie des Nervensystems und des Bindegewebes. Stockholm. Printed book, with color and black-and-white lithographs, 2 volumes.

Hand-drawn Korean War propaganda posters, from two incomplete sequence in the collection of Chinese medical and health materials acquired by the National Library of Medicine
Fuping County, Shaanxi Province, China. Hand-inked and painted posters on paper.

The front of a Dr. Miles’ Laxative Tablets movable, die-cut advertising novelty card, lowered and raised (Elkhart, Indiana, ca. 1910)
France, Great Britain, Mexico, United States, and other counties. Donor: William Helfand
Thoughtfully curated, beautifully produced, and utterly transfixing, Hidden Treasure unravels our civilization’s relationship with that most human of humannesses. Because try as we might to order the heavens, map the mind, and chart time in our quest to know the abstract, we will have failed at being human if we neglect this most fascinating frontier of concrete existence, the mysterious and ever-alluring physical body.
Images courtesy of Blast Books / National Library of Medicine
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Published April 5, 2012
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https://www.themarginalian.org/2012/04/05/hidden-treasure-national-library-of-medicine/
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