Special Collections Research Center

Erica Reiner Bequest Enables Purchase of Rare Collection

The rare book collection of the Rush University Medical Center is being acquired by the University of Chicago, in a decision that reflects the historic connections between the two institutions. 

 

The acquisition is made possible by the bequest of Erica Reiner (1924-2005), the John A. Wilson Distinguished Service Professor Emerita in the University’s Oriental Institute, the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, and the Department of Linguistics, and Editor-in-Charge of the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary. Reiner, who began working on the dictionary in 1952 when she came to the University as a research assistant, specialized in Babylonian history of science, including medicine.

 

An affiliation between the University of Chicago and Rush Medical College was established in 1898; for nearly three decades the University was responsible for the first two years of preclinical training, with clinical training provided at Rush. When Billings Hospital opened in 1927, the University began to develop the clinical component of a medical school on campus, and the affiliation with Rush was terminated in 1941.

 

Comprising over 3,500 volumes dating from 1500 through the mid-20^th-cenutry, the collection includes nearly 500 rare titles printed before 1800. The most represented author in the collection is Hippocrates, editions of whose works were very popular through the 18^th century; many early editions of the works of Galen are also present, including 1531, 1549 and 1561-2 editions.

The collection will be known as the Stanton A. Friedberg M.D. Rare Book Collection of Rush University Medical Center at the University of Chicago. Books relating to otorhinolaryngology (diagnosis and treatment of the ear, nose, throat and neck), Dr. Stanton A. Friedberg’s medical specialty, and infectious diseases, in particular mid-19^th century European cholera epidemics, are areas of particular strength.

 

The earliest book in the collection is a bound volume of two works by the Renaissance philosopher Marsilio Ficino:  De Christiana religione ad Laurentiu [m] Medicem opus aureum (1500) and Opuscula (1503). Other important works from the 16^th century include Pietro Mattioli, Commentarii (1554), an early medical botanical with hand-colored woodcut illustrations; Gaspare Tagliacozzi, De curtorum chirugia (1597), the first work on plastic surgery, with the extra engraved title page; and an intact, 1660 anatomical “flap” book, Johann Remmelin’s Catoptrum microcosmicum.  

 

A highlight of the collection is the first edition of Andreas Vesalius’s De Humani Corporis Fabrica (Basel: Johannes Oporinus, 1543) in a contemporary binding dated 1581. The collection also includes the first edition of the translation of Vesalius’s work into German, Anatomia Deudsch (Nurnberg: Jul. Paolo Fabricio, 1551), and the Bremer Press 1934 edition, Icones anatomicae, which used the 1548 second edition woodblocks, which were destroyed in World War II.

 

The history of medicine collections have been a focus at the University of Chicago since the early 20^th century; these materials are used extensively by historians of science and medicine, art historians, and cultural historians. During the 20^th century, gifts from the collections of Chicago physician and scholar Dr. Mortimer Frank, who translated a classic book on anatomical illustration, and Chicago collector Joseph Halle Schaffner expanded this substantial core.

 

The University of Chicago’s archival collections include professional papers of physicians and medical researchers associated both with the University and Rush, including James B. Herrick, Charles Huggins, Leon Jacobson, Ralph S. Lillie, Franklin McLean, Howard Ricketts, and Nicholas Senn, as well as administrative records relating to the University of Chicago’s medical school. The papers of physician, editor, and writer Morris Fishbein, a University of Chicago and Rush Medical College graduate, are another example of the interlocking relationships between the two institutions reflected in the collections.

 

With the merger of the University of Chicago and the formerly independent John Crerar Library in the early 1980s, many rare books and the professional papers of Chicago physicians and the archives of Chicago medical organizations came to the University of Chicago Library. These accessions further deepened the documentation in the University of Chicago’s collection of personal, professional, and institutional connections between the University of Chicago and the Rush University Medical Center.

 

Stanton A. Friedberg received his M.D. from the University of Chicago in 1934. Dr. Friedberg and his wife, Martha Friedberg, a poet, were longtime friends of the University of Chicago and donated books from Dr. Friedberg’s library to the University of Chicago.

 

The collection will be available to University of Chicago students, faculty and staff;  members of the Rush University Medical Center community; and other interested researchers who wish to study the history of medicine and the relationships between these institutions and the individuals who built and were associated with them.

 

Processing of the collection will begin immediately, and items will be available through the Library’s catalog or Lens as they are cataloged. If you are interested in specific titles, authors or subjects, please contact Alice Schreyer, Director, Special Collections Research Center; or Andrea Twiss-Brooks, Co-Director, Science Libraries, University of Chicago Library.

 

 Image of Erica Reiner from the Archival Photographic Files, University of Chicago Library

 

 

Russian Satirical Journals

The University of Chicago Library’s “Collection of Russian Satirical Journals Published During the Russian Revolution of 1905-1907” consists of 110 titles in 378 issues. Primarily it is comprised of journals, but some newspapers, broadsides, and illustrated periodicals are also included.

 
This collection documents some the most important events of the period known as the first Russian Revolution of 1905-1907. It was during this unprecedented rise of national self-identity that the first Russian Constitution and Russian Parliament were initially created. The first Russian Revolution was a period of struggles for political, social and human rights. The press, which had previously been subject to censorship, enjoyed a new freedom which had never before appeared in Russia.

Nevertheless, disillusionment with the political and social reforms was expressed through political satire and caricature, published in numerous journals all over the country. Journals’ pages served as an arena for political parties and the newly born social classes of Russia – bourgeois and workers. The explicit satirical form of these publications and their subsequent immediate distribution to interested readers attracted many well-known writers and artists who were either contributors, or occasionally editors, of these journals.

The journals in the collection, like “Zhupel”, “Adskaia pochta”, “Zhurnal”, “Signal”, “Zritel”, and many others, present a unique and sparkling collaboration among famous Russian authors like D. Bal’mont, I. Bunin, M. Gorky, A. Kuprin, V. Brusov, etc., with the artistic talents of I. Bilibin, B. Kustodiev, L. Bakst, V. Serov, A. Benois, and others.

As the Russian autocracy regained its power, the unprecedented freedom of the Russian press diminished and then vanished. While some journals were published continuously for months afterward, many others were either closed or suppressed, their editors prosecuted, and the entire publication of some issues was confiscated and destroyed by the authorities.

The entire University of Chicago’s collection of satirical journals has been cataloged, and an inventory list of journals is also available.

Manuscript Mystery Solved

 
Joseph G. Barabe of McCrone Associates examining Archaic Mark

A collaboration between University of Chicago Library special collections and conservation staff, a University of Chicago Divinity School faculty member, the Walters Art Museum's head conservator, and a firm specializing in micro-chemical analysis has resolved a decades-long debate by concluding that the manuscript known as 'Archaic Mark" is a late 19th- or early 20th- century forgery, not a 14th-century witness to the Gospel of Mark:http://news.uchicago.edu/news.php?asset_id=1801

Jeffrey Kallberg's Chopin Seminar

[Photos by Dan Dry]

The University of Chicago Magazine has published a report on a seminar recently held in the Special Collections Research Center.

You can read the entire story on the Magazine's website.

From the piece:

Sixteen graduate students stand over two musical scores in a seminar room at the Regenstein Library’s Special Collections Research Center. “Go ahead and turn the pages—don’t be shy,” says their guide, Jeffrey Kallberg, AM’78, PhD’82, an expert on the composer Frédéric Chopin. “I want you to get a feel for these things as material objects.”

Jeffrey Kallberg, Professor and Chair of the Department of Music at the University of Pennsylvania, visited campus as part of the University's 500th Convocation Celebration. 

The graduate seminar made of use the SCRC's extensive collection of the works of Chopin. The Chopin Early Editions collection can also be used online.

Gift of African American and Children's Literature

 

Barbara and Bill Yoffee, AB'52, of Chevy Chase, Maryland, have donated nearly 1,000 titles in African American and children's literature to the University of Chicago Library. Included are many editions and versions of Helen Bannerman's Little Black Sambo; and collections of Kate Greenaway, Beatrix Potter, and the Rev. W. Awdry, author of the Thomas the Tank Engine books. See the Fall 2009 issue of Libra for more information.

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New Web Exhibit! The Darwin Centennial Celebration

The Darwin Centennial Celebration of 1959 is the subject of a new web exhibit.

The Celebration, commemorating the 1859 publication of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, was held at the University of Chicago from November 24 through November 28, 1959. Sol Tax, Professor of Anthropology, served as the chairman of the Centennial Committee.

The Celebration featured some of the most prominent evolutionary scientists in the world, as well as intellectuals such as Sir Charles Darwin and Julian Huxley. 

This Web exhibit was planned in conjunction with the Darwin/Chicago 2009 conference held at the University of Chicago, October 29-31, 2009 and compliments the exhibit Chicago Celebrates Darwin held at the John Crerar Library, October 19, 2009-March 26, 2010.

The present Web exhibit and the John Crerar Library exhibits draw heavily on the Darwin Centennial Celebration Records, which are held in the Special Collections Research Center. T

Visit the Darwin Centennial Celebration exhibit to read more, view documents and film footage, and listen to archival audio recordings.

Some Collections Unavailable November 16, 2009 - January 18, 2010

The Special Collections Research Center will be closed for three weeks in December 2009 to allow for construction work in both our public and collections storage spaces.  As we have previously posted, we will be closed beginning December 14, 2009 and re-open on January 4, 2010. In preparing for this construction we will need to move more than 5000 archival boxes, rendering them temporarily inaccessible.

During this time, some collections and parts of collections will not be available for the period November 16, 2009 - January 18, 2010. Please see our list of Inaccessible Collections for more information.  

Please contact us at any time with questions.

Image: Archival Photographic Files, showing archival boxes in Special Collections, ca. 1987.

Chicago's Archaic Mark:
A Report on the Results of Chemical, Codicological and Textual Analysis

Presented by the Early Christian Studies Workshop and the Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago

Speakers:

Joseph Barabe,
The McCrone Group, Westmont, IL

Abigail Quandt,
The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore
 
Margaret M. Mitchell,
The University of Chicago Divinity School

Monday October 26 from 6-8 pm
Special Collections Research Center
Joseph Regenstein Library 1100 E. 57th Street

At a special session of the Divinity School's Early Christian Studies Workshop, the final results of a multi-year commitment by the University to solve a decades-long enigma — is this miniature codex a genuine Byzantine manuscript preserving a very early text-type of the Gospel of Mark or a modern forgery? — will be announced.

The manuscript will be available for viewing, and Barabe, Quandt and Mitchell will document their findings and their implications in advance of their forthcoming article in the journal Novum Testamentum.

All interested parties are welcome to attend. A light reception will follow. (Please note special evening time.)

SCRC to close for three weeks in December

The Special Collections Research Center (SCRC) at the University of Chicago Library will close for a three-week period in December 2009 to allow for construction work in both our public and collections storage spaces.

SCRC will be closed beginning Monday, December 14, 2009 and will re-open on Monday, January 4, 2010.

During these weeks, construction of the new Joe and Rika Mansueto Library will move into Regenstein Library as the contractor creates a new entrance route to Mansueto Library across the first floor of Regenstein. This construction project within Regenstein Library will extend to November 2010.

We encourage you to contact the Special Collections Research Center with questions: http://www.lib.uchicago.edu/e/ask/SCRC.html

For more information about the Joe and Rika Mansueto Library project, please visit the Mansueto Library’s website: http://mansueto.lib.uchicago.edu/

For up-to-date information from the Special Collections Research Center’s, consult our Construction Information website:  http://www.lib.uchicago.edu/e/spcl/scrcconstruction.html

[Click image to enlarge]

Chicago Jazz Archive and the Hyde Park Jazz Festival

The Special Collections Research Center is proud to be a part of the University of Chicago and a member of the Hyde Park Alliance for Arts and Culture, two of the three producers of the  Hyde Park Jazz Festival, coming up this Saturday, September 26. 

The festival will offer 15 hours of live jazz performances from 11 a.m. to 2 a.m at venues across Hyde Park.  As part of the festivities, our Chicago Jazz Archive will have a booth on the Midway, near the James W. Wagner Mainstage.  It will be open from 11 a.m. to 9:00 p.m.  Stop by for information about the Chicago Jazz Archive and the Special Collections Research Center, or visit our CJA page for a description of the Archive’s collections.

Library archives student Will Faber directed a short video, “Hyde Park Jazz Fest: An Interview with Willie Pickens,” for the University’s multimedia Jazz Fest news feature.  It includes photographs from the Wilbur and Valarie Campbell Collection (part of the Chicago Jazz Archive).