Library Elements
From the Village Library and my father’s den to the glorious stacks at Widener, where I had my college cubicle, musty volumes crowd together on long shelves beckoned me to unexplored corners of the world. More than the text they hold, the aging books themselves become a tangible connection to times past, present, and future.
The book selections below hold special appeal for me. Some were handed down through at least four generations of doctors and others reflect a variety of additional interests. I developed the habit of continuous book reading from my father, he from his father, sometimes two or three simultaneously. Today I read many books on an e-reader, appreciating the larger font, back light and portability. I buy a print copy to retain in my library of those volumes to which I will want to return again and again. Conversely, I especially enjoy the convenience of carrying about 1000 books in a device not much bigger than my wallet.
My grandfather and namesake practiced medicine in Fort Wayne, Indiana for nearly 40 years before his death in 1950. President of the Indiana State Medical Society, he was one of the first radiologists in Indiana. Like his son and grandson, he deeply enjoyed books; he left a varied book legacy that reflected his broad interests. The German eye texts, I believe, were from his friend and colleague, Dr. Henry Ranke, given later to my father, who became an ophthalmologist.
The shelf holds the medical books that belonged to A.E. Van Buskirk, Professor of Surgical Anatomy, Fort Wayne Medical College, excepting only the Gray’s Anatomy, in the middle. It includes Austin Flint’s Practice of Medicine, 3rd Edition, 1868 and the two Volume, Textbook of Surgery by Samual Gross, famous in T. Eakin’s painting, “The Gross Clinic.” AE Van Buskirk’s life and work are described in the Book section of this website.
Johannes Sobotta was a distinguished German anatomist in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, perhaps most famous for his “Atlas of Descriptive Human Anatomy, first published in German in 1904, ultimately in over 300 editions, 15 in English. This one was the 4TH English Edition 1936. I recall my father extolling the beautiful color “paintings”-really, the first polychromatic lithographs in a medical atlas. On the right, Figure 52, Page 61, Vessels and Nerves of the Head.
I received my ophthalmology training under many outstanding teachers to whom I am eternally grateful. Thomas Hutchinson, Morton Grant, and Paul Chander mentored me to become a clinician-scientist devoted to studying, teaching and treating the multitudes of glaucoma. In 1965, the Drs Chandler and Grant published a little compendium of their teaching entitled Lectures in Glaucoma, now six decades later, in its 6th edition. Each of the six editions are exhibited in the accompanying image.
I’ve long enjoyed mystery books, mainly series featuring an interesting detective living in interesting times or places. Among many others, the twelve Philo Vance novels by Willard Huntington Wright, using the pseudonym, S S Van Dine, shown as read but readable 1st Editions feature likable main characters, with realistic locations, conventions and illustrations of 1930s Manhattan. Despite Odgan’s Nash wanting to “kick “Vance in the pants,” I like Vance to say nothing of his narrator and assistant, Van Dine, whom Vance calls simply, “Van.”
Two leather bound volumes recently discovered among my grandfather’s books, both my Hubbard, the first one of a series, Little Journeys by Elbert Hubbard and the second, Life Lessons by his wife Alice Moore. Elbert Hubbard was an American eccentric-writer, artist and socialist philosopher in the early 20th Century who founded the Roycroft Movement, devoted to the Arts and Crafts in upstate New York. His wife Alice Moore Hubbard was an outspoken suffragist. Both died with the sinking of the Lusitania in 1917.