Established in 1788, the College Library was Philadelphia’s central medical library for over 150 years, serving its medical schools, hospitals, physicians and other health professionals. Today, it is an independent research library devoted to the history of medicine and serves hundreds of scholars, health professionals, students and popular writers each year.

Among the first items acquired by the College was the founding book of modern pathology, De sedibus et causis morborum [On the Seats and Causes of Disease] by Giambattista Morgagni, published in Venice in 1761. Morgagni presented this copy to Philadelphian John Morgan when Morgan visited him in Padua, Italy. Morgan—a founding member of the College of Physicians and the person most responsible for the established of the nation’s first medical school at the University of Pennsylvania—later donated it to the College. Regarded as the latest in medical knowledge even twenty-seven years after it was published, De sedibus is now a medical classic and the seed from which the College’s magnificent rare book collection has grown.

The College’s collection of early printed books includes more than four hundred incunables, or editions printed before 1501. Thanks to a recent grant from the William Penn Foundation, we can claim that ours is the best-cataloged incunable collection in the world. Among our more than 12,000 other rare books are the majority of editions that laid the basis of modern biomedicine—including one of the world’s best copies of William Harvey’s De motu cordis [On the Motion of the Heart] (1628) which first described the circulation of the blood, and two copies of De humani corporis fabrica [On the Fabric of the Human Body] (1543) by Andreas Vesalius, which was responsible for the later development of both modern anatomy and modern medical illustration.

In addition to its rare books and nineteenth- and twentieth-century collections, the College Library is notable for its manuscripts and archives. Within this collection are the College’s own archives, the archives of other Philadelphia medical institutions, and letters, case books, and student notebooks that document the personal life and professional practice of doctors in the Philadelphia region and around the world. Among our most important manuscript collections are the bulk of extant letters written by S. Weir Mitchell—Civil War surgeon, neurologist, physiologist, novelist, and leading member of the College for more than fifty years.

The College Library also owns several collections of printed books associated with individual Fellows. The Lewis collections, donated by College President Samuel Lewis over several decades in the nineteenth century, consist of several thousand books, many of them rare, whose acquisition clearly established the singular importance of the College Library. Most recently, forensic psychiatrist Robert L. Sadoff donated the Sadoff Library of Legal Medicine and Forensic Psychiatry to the College. Before arriving at the College in 2002, Dr. Sadoff’s four thousand volumes comprised the world’s largest private collection of books and pamphlets on these topics.

Care of the collections has always been of great concern to the College of Physicians of Philadelphia. We recently installed a state-of-the-art climate control system in the library stacks, and several recent grants and gifts have been applied to an extensive preservation and restoration program.