“To Support the Southern Medical Public”: The Medical College of Georgia as a Southern Information Agency, 1828–1861

A traditional perspective situates nineteenth-century southern academic library culture as a late-century phenomenon. This article challenges that assertion and traditional beliefs about the South’s indifference to cultural advancement by examining the print culture of one of the South’s leading educational institutions, the Medical College of Georgia. An antebellum information agency, the Medical College of Georgia leveraged its medical library, museum, and journal to transform medical information production, dissemination, and consumption in the South and represents an important symbol of southern modernity. This article presents a distinct analysis of early nineteenth-century southern medicoscientific information culture.