Some Newly Acquired Manuscript Material at Johns Hopkins
- Some Newly Acquired Manuscript Material at Johns Hopkins
The Johns Hopkins Institute of the History of Medicine has recently acquired some significant nineteenth-century manuscript material from the estate of Huntington Williams, a graduate of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine who later served as health commissioner of Baltimore.
Most appropriate for the Hopkins collection is an autograph letter to an unknown man, signed by Edward Jenner. Hopkins’s collection of more than one hundred Jenner letters, donated by Henry Barton Jacobs in the 1930s, was edited by Genevieve Miller and published as Letters of Edward Jenner and Other Documents Concerning the Early History of Vaccination (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983). The text of the new acquisition is as follows:
My dear Sir:
I have not yet had an opportunity of procuring my Ticket of admission to the library of the London Institution. Will you be good enough to procure it for me and give a rect if it be required?
Yours truly,
Edw. Jenner
June 25 1814
The Institute of the History of Medicine owns one other original Jenner letter not included in the Miller edition of 1983. Dated 8 September [End Page 499] 1805, it is to John Bolton, of Savannah, Georgia, a former patient of Jenner’s at Cheltenham, a popular spa; it deals with Jenner’s resentment about being insufficiently rewarded financially by Parliament for his personal expenses in introducing and teaching about vaccination. The Bolton letter was published in the Bulletin of the Johns Hopkins Hospital, 1916, 27: 177–78. The Institute also holds several facsimiles and typescripts of Jenner letters that may not have been published, as well as some autograph prescriptions.
A second manuscript letter in the Williams legacy, dated 22 November 1887, is from Robert Koch to August Joseph Lutaud, editor of the Journal de médecine de Paris. Koch thanks Lutaud for sending him a copy of his recent attack on Pasteur and assures him that he will personally make certain the book is placed in the library of the Berlin Institute of Hygiene. This letter was unfortunately damaged in a recent fire, but it remains legible.
A third letter, substantially longer than the other two, is dated 9 June 1824, and is from R.-T.-H Laennec to Jean Cruveilhier. In this letter Laennec advises Cruveilhier on career choices and discusses his thoughts about the relative merits of practice in Montpellier, Limoges, and Paris, and elsewhere in France.
Finally, in very fragile condition is a letter dated 12 June 1868 from Mériadec Laennec to “Monsier le Préfet.” Mériadec Laennec (1797–1873), the much younger first cousin of the inventor of the stethoscope, studied medicine in Paris just as his relative was developing mediate auscultation. He inherited his cousin’s papers and edited one edition of Laennec’s Treatise on Auscultation, before giving up medical practice at a relatively early age. He wrote the letter recently added to the Hopkins collection as a minor official of the Department of Loire-Inférieure. In it, he expresses concern that a dyke to control the Loire might not be built because of financial cutbacks.
The author acknowledges the assistance of Genevieve Miller and Jacalyn Duffin.
Edward T. Morman is Associate Academy Librarian for Historical Collections and Programs at the New York Academy of Medicine, 1216 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10029, and was Librarian of the Johns Hopkins Institute of the History of Medicine until June 1997. His current research interests center on public health in the United States during the twentieth century. He is the author of a biographical essay on George Rosen that appeared in the expanded edition of Rosen’s History of Public Health (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993).
