Tag Archives: 175th Anniversary

Library Luminaries: Gertrude Annan

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This post is the last in a four-part series showcasing notable figures in the history of the Academy Library as we celebrate our 175th anniversary. The first post focused on Dr. Samuel Smith Purple, the second post featured Dr. Archibald Malloch, and the third post featured Frank Place. A blog post on Janet Doe, another Library Luminary, appeared in 2021.

By Arlene Shaner, Historical Collections Librarian

In a Medical Library Association Oral History Committee interview published in 1978, Gertrude Annan (1904–1993), recounted the serendipitous turn of events that led her to the Library at the New York Academy of Medicine. Annan was born on December 4, 1904, grew up in Rhode Island, and graduated from Brown University in 1925 with a degree in English. A problem with her eyes initially prevented her from working, and during that time she decided not to pursue a teaching career, enrolling in secretarial school instead. She then accepted a job at the John Carter Brown Library, working for the librarian, Lawrence Wroth. Here she found the “most exciting, rewarding, enriching world that I never knew existed.”[1] Wroth recognized how talented she was, quickly shifted her away from her secretarial duties and took her on as his assistant, teaching her about the history of books and printing, and how to catalog rare materials.

For two years Annan worked on a cataloging project at the JCB, but when she expressed an interest in going to New York, Wroth provided her with letters of introduction to scholars and bookmen. The book dealer Lathrop C. Harper introduced her to Archibald Malloch, who had become the Librarian at the Academy in 1926. Malloch already had plans to enrich the Library with a Rare Book and History Room, having purchased the Edward Clark Streeter collection of rare historical medical texts in 1928. When he offered Annan a job in 1929, Wroth told her to “Give it a good try. Stay at least 6 weeks.”[2] She stayed for 41 years.

Annan took on the position of Head of the Rare Books Department shortly after her arrival in the Library, serving in that role for the next quarter century, a period of significant growth. The deep knowledge of Americana and the history of books and printing that she developed at the JCB combined with Malloch’s expertise in the history of medicine to make them ideal partners. Committed to developing the rare book holdings, they also recognized that building an extraordinary collection of reference books about the history of books and printing and the history of science and medicine was the key to making the Library even more useful. Their legacy endures: these reference works continue to be consulted by readers and library staff alike.

With her encouragement, in 1946 a group of interested Fellows formed the Friends of the Rare Book Room, and she worked closely with that group from its inception until her retirement. When the Friends decided in 1948 to launch a small periodical, The Academy Bookman, they did so because they were assured of her full collaboration. She collected content, provided editorial assistance, and documented the many gifts and purchases that arrived in the Library due to the generosity of the Friends and other donors in issue after issue over the course of the next several decades.

In 1953, Janet Doe, who stepped into the role of Librarian in 1949 after Malloch’s retirement, moved Annan into the position of Associate Librarian, and she became the Librarian herself when Doe retired in 1956. Annan and Doe already had a history of collaboration. Doe asked her to write two chapters, one on rare books and the history of medicine and the other a guide to the most useful reference works for a historical medical collection, for the first edition of the Handbook of Medical Library Practice, published in 1943. Annan later took on the role of editor herself, with Jacqueline Felter, for the third edition, which appeared in 1970.

As she shifted into her new administrative role in the Library, Annan also took on national leadership roles, as the leader or a member of the publication, finance, and nominating committees of the Medical Library Association, and then as its president in 1961, shepherding the association through the process of creating a central administrative office. She delivered the inaugural Janet Doe Lecture at the MLA annual meeting in 1967, and in 1968 was the recipient of its Marcia C. Noyes award. An advocate for collaboration among libraries, she was instrumental in the creation of the Medical Library Center of New York, which began providing services in 1961 at NYAM itself until its own headquarters opened in 1964. With others, she then worked on a model to expand the reach of the MLC into the broader New York metropolitan area and the state.

Annan’s interests in the history of medicine, the history of NYAM itself, and the development of the library profession led to a wide range of publications on many topics. She wrote short biographical articles about early Academy Fellows, including Alexander Stevens and Valentine Mott, and wrote extensively about the importance of collecting the history of medicine, and about the changing roles of medical and rare book librarians. A special tribute issue of The Academy Bookman published in 1971 provides a long (but not complete) list. A founder of the Medical Archivists of New York, after her retirement Annan spent years sorting and organizing the Academy’s own archives, and the meticulous finding aids she created are invaluable to anyone searching for information about NYAM’s history up through the early 1980s.

Joseph Tamerin began his Bookman tribute piece to Annan and her work with archives with an illustration of her with one of her acknowledged Academy heroes, Samuel Smith Purple.

To honor her years of devoted service, in 1974 NYAM awarded the Academy Plaque to its two great woman librarians, Gertrude Annan and Janet Doe. It was a well-deserved honor for them both. Annan died on December 2, 1993.

Gertrude Annan and Janet Doe (n.d.), gift of Donna Brennan.

References

Annan, Gertrude L. (Gertrude Louise), Vicki Glasgow, Myrl Ebert, and Estelle Brodman. Medical Library Association Oral History Committee Interview with Gertrude Louise Annan. Chicago, IL: Medical Library Association, 1978.

Annan, Gertrude L., Jacqueline W. Felter, Erich Meyerhoff, and Lee Ash. “Regional Plans for Medical Library Service New York State and the New York Metropolitan Area.” Bulletin of the Medical Library Association 52, no. 3 (1964): 503.

Keys, Thomas E. “Past presidents I have known.” Bulletin of the Medical Library Association 63, no. 1 (1975): 49.

Lambert Jr, S. W. “Presentation of the Academy Plaque to Miss Gertrude L. Annan.” Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine 50, no. 10 (1974): 1059.

Meyerhoff, E. “Gertrude Louise Annan, 1904–1993.” Bulletin of the Medical Library Association 82, no. 4 (1994): 458.

Morgenstern, S., P. Cranefield, P. Wade, J. W. Felter, M. H. Saffron, J. A. Tamerin, C. C. Morchand, and A. S. Lyons. “Tributes to Gertrude L. Annan.” The Academy Bookman 24, no. 2 (1971): 2–20.

Notes

[1] Gertrude L. (Gertrude Louise) Annan, et al. Medical Library Association Oral History Committee Interview with Gertrude Louise Annan. Medical Library Association, 1978, p. 2.

[2] Ibid.

Library Luminaries: Frank Place

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This post is the third in a four-part series showcasing notable figures in the history of the Academy Library, as we celebrate our 175th anniversary. The first post focused on Dr. Samuel Smith Purple, and the second post featured Dr. Archibald Malloch.

By Arlene Shaner, Historical Collections Librarian

After Frank Place (1880–1959) passed away in September 1959, The Academy Bookman, a publication of the Library’s Friends of the Rare Book Room, published an unsigned tribute to him and his 40 years of devoted service to the Academy Library. “Frank Place to many Fellows of the Academy was the Academy Library,” it notes. “Some have said that they often stopped in the Library first to see Frank Place, and then to use the resources of the Library.” Even now, more than 75 years after he retired, we regularly use some of the guides that Place originated to answer questions about the collections.

Place grew up in Cortland, New York, and made his way to New York City to earn a degree at the Pratt Institute Library School, from which he graduated in 1902. Three years later he joined the Library staff at the invitation of Librarian John Brownne, taking on the afternoon and evening shifts (the Library stayed open until 10:30 pm at that time), when all of the readers were Fellows or Members. Place was a keen observer and an enthusiastic amateur photographer, and we have him to thank for much of what we know about how the Library looked and functioned while the Academy was still in its building on West 43rd Street and during the first two decades after we moved into our present building in 1926.

Frank Place at his desk in the West 43rd Street building in 1926, several months before the Academy moved to its current home.
At right, Frank Place consulting with a reader in the reference lobby of the current building some years later.

When Place took up his position, the Library contained about 35,000 volumes, thousands of pamphlets, domestic and foreign periodicals, and a steadily increasing number of Paris medical theses. A collection of what he called “old authors” or “classics,” or what we now refer to as rare books, was shelved in the C. (or Classics) case, and a small group of incunabula were housed in a specially purchased metal exhibition case. The Library’s subject card catalog was very new, having been started in 1901, and until 1917, when he received a typewriter, Place hand wrote the main entry cards for the author/title part of the card catalog himself.

Two of the most used guides to the Library’s collection are the Portrait Catalog of the New York Academy of Medicine Library and the Illustration Catalog. At a talk delivered to an audience of medical librarians, Place explains the portrait catalog’s origins:

“Away back in 1908 I discovered a small batch of portraits of former members of the Academy, steel engravings that nobody seemed to know anything about. It occurred to me that a file of portraits with an index of them in our catalogue was indicated. Why not add to the index such portraits as we came across in books and periodicals, was the next thought?”

By the time he made his remarks, Place estimated that the portrait catalog had grown to include over 8,000 printed or framed images and about 100,000 entries for images in published works, documenting at least 50,000 individuals, and it continued to grow for decades after his retirement. The success of the portrait catalog inspired Place to start the illustration catalog as well, and in the 1960s both the portrait catalog and the illustration appeared as published volumes, purchased by libraries around the country.

In that same talk, Place encouraged librarians to document their own institutions by taking pictures of spaces and staff and labeling them with names and dates. A box of his photographs, taken between 1925 and 1941, does just that.

The box contains snapshots of the West 43rd Street building, as well as of our current building and some of the staff. The photographs document the construction of the 1932 addition that added the rare book room and other spaces, as well as the construction of the Museum of the City of New York and the transformation of the conservatories in Central Park to the more familiar Conservatory Gardens just across the street.

Back in 2015, the Library staff used those early photographs as inspiration and recreated some of them, matching the locations of the new images as closely as possible to their earlier counterparts.

It is worth mentioning two of Place’s other notable achievements, one directly related to the Library and the other a bit less so. Place took great pleasure in collecting and trading bookplates with individuals and other libraries. He organized his bookplates alphabetically in three small two-ring binders, mounting each individual bookplate on recycled pamphlet covers. All three volumes can still be found on the shelves in the rare book room. A few years ago, our conservators, worried about the damage caused by acidic paper backing and the unstable structures, remounted all the bookplates and modernized the original binders. The results of their efforts can be seen here. He also spent many hours outdoors, and co-authored the New York Walk Book with Raymond H. Torrey and the physician and illustrator Robert Latou Dickinson, who spent years collaborating with the sculptor Abram Belskie in a Library office. When Place retired in 1945, his Library colleagues presented him with this charming caricature done by Belskie, showing the man in his element, leafing through one of his volumes of bookplates, with a bookworm peering over his shoulder.

Gallery

The greenhouses in Central Park across the street from NYAM in 1927.
The newly constructed Museum of the City of New York in the summer of 1931, with the Academy to the right.
The Conservatory Gardens taking shape in the spring of 1937, after the greenhouses were removed.

References

“Frank Place 1880—1959.” Academy Bookman 12:2 (1959), pp. 3–4.

Place, Frank. “Records off the Record.” Bulletin of the Medical Library Association 32.2 (1944): 214–16.

Place, Frank. “Reminiscences of the Library.” Academy Bookman 12:2 (1959), pp. 4–6.

Library Luminaries: Dr. Archibald Malloch

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This post is the second in a four-part series showcasing notable figures in the history of the Academy Library, as we celebrate our 175th anniversary. The first post focused on Dr. Samuel Smith Purple.

By Arlene Shaner, Historical Collections Librarian

Dr. Archibald Malloch (1887–1953)
Academy Librarian, 1925–1949

On September 17, 1925, Dr. Linsly Williams, the director of the New York Academy of Medicine, sent Dr. Archibald Malloch (1887–1953) a letter offering him the position of Librarian. The offer came after the Academy’s first dedicated librarian, John S. Brownne, retired in August of 1925 after 45 years of service. His assistant, Mrs. Laura E. Smith, became the Acting Librarian, while Dr. Williams and the Committee on Library searched for a new librarian.

 

Laura E. Smith, Malloch’s predecessors
John Stuart Brownne (1854–1931) and

The Academy could not have been more fortunate in its selection of Thomas Archibald Malloch. A professionally trained physician, he had already demonstrated an interest in the history of medicine and possessed a growing knowledge of the world of rare books and libraries. Canadian by birth, Malloch was the son of Dr. Archibald E. and Mary Frances Reynolds Malloch. His father was a notable physician in Hamilton, Ontario, and had been a house surgeon to Joseph Lister in Glasgow in 1868. Malloch recalled that Lister paid a visit to the family home in 1876. The senior Dr. Malloch also established a long-lasting friendship with Sir William Osler, and the relationship extended across the generations, with family visits to Oxford and correspondence cementing the bond between the younger Malloch and the older doctor.

Malloch graduated from the medical school at McGill University in 1913 and began work as a pathologist and bacteriologist until the outbreak of World War I. He joined the Canadian Red Cross, serving in the Friends’ Ambulance Unit at Dunkirk; Antoine Depage’s military hospital at De Panne, under the direction of the Belgian Red Cross; at a hospital for convalescent officers at Burley-on-the-Hill, Rutland; at Alford House in Lincolnshire, which had been converted to a hospital for officers; and finally in the McGill Unit at Canadian General Hospital No. 3 near Boulogne. After the war, he took appointments at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital and Queen’s Square Neurological Hospital in London. In December 1919, Malloch moved to the Osler household in Oxford as one of the attending physicians who cared for Osler until his death on December 29th.

Despite a busy professional life, he began publishing articles about his wartime medical experiences in 1915. His first article about a specifically historical topic, “Sir John Finch and Sir Thomas Baines,” appeared in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine the following year, prompted by his experience in Burley. That article, exploring the thirty-six-year friendship between two seventeenth-century physicians, grew into Malloch’s first short book, Finch and Baines. A seventeenth century friendship. More articles appeared, most of them about medical topics. After Osler’s death in 1919, at the request of his widow, Grace Revere Osler, Malloch continued to live in Oxford through 1921, working as one of the editors of the Bibliotheca Osleriana, the catalogue of Osler’s books that became the foundation of the Osler Library of the History of Medicine at McGill University. Malloch started practicing medicine in Montréal in 1922, dividing his time between his medical work and his bibliographic work and returning to Oxford for months at a time to work on the Bibliotheca.

Archibald Malloch was a collector in his own right. Here is his personal bookplate.

When Williams offered Malloch the position of Librarian, he was about to return to England. During the last few months of 1925, he visited medical libraries in England, Scotland, Ireland, and Paris, as well as several Parisian booksellers. He took advantage of these opportunities to develop plans for the library he was about to lead. He officially took up his new duties on January 1,1926 and began thinking about how to bring his vision of a much-expanded Academy Library to life. In his first report on the needs of the Library, published in the June 1926 issue of the Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine, Malloch wrote of the many ways the Library could provide more services to Fellows, to the public, and to other medical libraries. He argued for a larger staff to care for the ever-increasing collection of periodicals, for exhibits, for greater outreach services, and for the expansion of both the modern and the historical collections, noting that “a library is judged chiefly by its general usefulness in supplying modern books and periodicals and those for as far back as a hundred years. But by other libraries and by the cultured and educated, a library is also judged by its possession of medical treasures in the guise of written or printed medical works.”[1] He also recognized that everything he was proposing would require a significant financial investment, an issue that would be a challenge from the beginning of his tenure until he retired due to ill health in 1949.

Malloch’s time at the Academy was marked by notable achievements. He supervised the relocation of about 140,000 books, journals, and pamphlets from the West 43rd Street building to the new Academy building—our current one—in the late summer and fall of 1926, assuring that the Library would be ready for visitors when the new building opened in November. He made brilliant hires, bringing on Janet Doe in 1926, to supervise the periodicals department, and Gertrude Annan, in 1929, to work as the rare book librarian. Both women developed enormous reputations in the world of twentieth-century medical librarianship, and both eventually succeeded him as Librarian.[2] He enlarged the Library’s holdings of unique and rare medical works by making well-considered purchases and accepting a number of important gifts. Working with Dr. Samuel Lambert and Dr. Williams, he raised $185,000 for the 1928 purchase of the Edward Clark Streeter Collection of manuscripts and important early printed medical books, adding about 1,200 volumes to the Library’s then-modest rare book collection. Twenty years later, in 1948, he also helped convince the New-York Historical Society and the Brooklyn Museum to donate the Edwin Smith Surgical Papyrus, the most important single gift ever made to the collections.

The new “Rare Book and History Room,” opened 1933, as sketched by Dr. Robert Latou Dickinson.

Malloch’s greatest wish, however, was for a room specifically to house the Library’s rare books and the reference collection to support them. Edward S. Harkness offered a gift of $350,000 towards that project, provided that an additional $400,000 in new endowment funds be raised. With the support of Lambert, Williams, and a Building Committee headed by Dr. Arthur Duel, the funds were successfully in hand by May of 1931, as Williams reported to Malloch in a telegram: “Four hundred fund completed… Your rare book room assured.”[3] The new Rare Book and History Room opened to readers on June 15, 1933.

Malloch passed away on September 19, 1953, at the age of 67, after suffering from heart disease for several years. After his death, the rare book room was renamed the Malloch Room in his honor. As a result of a large donation from the Samuel J. and Ethel LeFrak Charitable Trust and Charitable Foundation, Inc., in 2012 the room was renamed again, and it is now the Drs. Barry and Bobbi Coller Rare Book Reading Room. Dr. Malloch’s many accomplishments continue to live on in the Library, though, through the richness of its collections and the settings in which readers use them to this day.

Notes

[1] “The needs of the Library.” Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine vol. 2:6 (1926), p. 293.

[2] Janet Doe succeeded Malloch directly, serving from 1949 to 1956, and Annan succeeded her, serving up to her retirement in 1970.

[3] Doe, J. “The Malloch Room.” Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine vol. 30:3 (1954): 221–2.

References

Academy Bookman. 6:3 (1953), the Malloch memorial issue.

“Archibald Malloch Librarian of the New York Academy of Medicine 1925–1949,” Academy Bookman vol. 2:2 (Spring 1949), pp. 2–5.

Doe, J. “The Malloch Room.” Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine vol. 30:3 (1954): 221–2.

Heaton, C. E. “Archibald Malloch, M.D.—1887–1953.” Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine vol. 30:5 (1954): 399–401.

“The needs of the Library.” Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine vol. 2:6 (1926): 287–98.

New York Academy of Medicine Archives. “Malloch, Archibald. 1925–1953. Letter engaging as librarian, 1925; correspondence; tributes…1949, 1953.”

New York Academy of Medicine Archives. “Malloch Rare Book and History Room. Correspondence re founding, 1928–1954.”

Van Ingen, Philip. The New York Academy of Medicine: Its First Hundred Years. New York: Columbia University Press, 1949.

Library Luminaries: Dr. Samuel Smith Purple

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This post inaugurates a four-part series, Library Luminaries, showcasing notable figures in the history of the Academy Library, as we celebrate our 175th anniversary.

By Arlene Shaner, Historical Collections Librarian

The New York Academy of Medicine started collecting books for a library at its second meeting, on January 13, 1847, when Isaac Wood donated two volumes of Martyn Paine’s Medical and physiological commentaries. The Library now contains over 550,000 volumes; hundreds of thousands of pamphlets; archives; manuscripts; images; all kinds of ephemera; and even a small group of artifacts. The collections span many centuries, from the oldest item in the building, our early ninth-century manuscript of Apicius, De re culinaria, Libri I-IX, to recently published monographs in the history of medicine. The foundation of any great library, however, is the work of dedicated people, both benefactors and librarians. During this year, when we are celebrating the 175th anniversary of NYAM and of the Library, we will tell the stories of some of the people who made the Library into one of the most significant collections of materials in the history of medicine and public health in this country, if not the world.

S. S. Purple, M.D., 1822–1900”
from Portraits of Fellows of the New York Academy of Medicine (1896?)

One of the earliest and most vocal advocates for a Library was Dr. Samuel Smith Purple (1822–1900). Born in Lebanon, New York, Purple was the oldest son of Lyman Smith Purple and Minerva (Sheffield) Purple. His father made a modest living as a tanner and shoemaker, and by the time he turned 13 Purple was often working with him in the shop, limiting his formal education. The family relocated to Earlville, New York, in 1836, and when his father passed away three years later, Purple took over managing the business, supporting his mother and younger brothers. Around the same time, without telling his family, he quietly began studying medicine with the help of the local physician, Dr. David Ransom, who then helped him get a scholarship to attend Geneva Medical College for a year in 1842. The following year a relative, Dr. W. D. Purple, secured financial support for him to attend the lectures at the University of the City of New York, from which he graduated in 1844.

After a few months back home, Purple decided to see if he could succeed in New York City. He worked at the Marion Street Maternity Hospital and the New York Dispensary, and slowly grew a private practice until it provided him with enough stability to buy a house and have his mother join him. Memberships in the New York Pathological Society, the Society for the Relief of the Widows and Orphans of Medical Men, and the New York Academy of Medicine, of which he was a founding Fellow, provided a community of physicians. Through a connection with Dr. Charles A. Lee, one of his professors at Geneva, he became the editor of the New York Journal of Medicine, founded in 1843 by Dr. Samuel Forry, a position he held for a decade before returning more fully to his private practice in 1858.

Purple’s interest in collecting books and pamphlets about medicine was sparked by his relationship with John B. Beck, who taught at the College of Physicians and Surgeons. The two met during Purple’s decade of editorial work at the Journal. Beck “urg[ed] the young editor to avail himself of the opportunity which his position afforded him of securing and preserving every early publication obtainable. At the same time, Beck gave Purple a large number of pamphlets, which really formed the nucleus of the enormous collection he subsequently made.”[1] Not only did Purple put together a stellar collection of books and pamphlets about American medicine, he expanded his interests to serials, and also to the early history of New York.

“Samuel S. Purple, M.D., President of the New York Academy of Medicine, 1875–1879,” from Portraits of Fellows of the New York Academy of Medicine (1896?)

Purple became the president of the Academy in 1875, and in his inaugural address, “Objects and Purposes,” delivered on January 21, he proposed taking on two large tasks. The first was to move the organization into a building of its own, specifically, the brownstone at 12 West 31st Street that the Academy had recently purchased. The Academy moved in a few months later, and the new building created an opportunity for Purple’s main objective: “a great reference Medical Library.” Purple acknowledged that earlier efforts to develop the library had been stymied by lack of space. In the new building, two second-floor rooms were set up for the library, and Purple enhanced the small existing collection by donating 2,000 books of his own.

Two years later, Purple was re-elected president and he devoted almost his entire presidential address to the subject of medical libraries, reviewing the history of every collection he had been able to document in the city of New York and then turning his attention to the Academy. He called for the establishment of a Library Fund; encouraged voluntary donations and the opening of the library to all regular practitioners in the city, not just Fellows; and reminded the audience that “No book or pamphlet is worthless; every word from the mental laboratory of the practical physician contains a fact, or, it may be a statement of facts, which, however darkly concealed or obscured by peculiarities of language or description, will ultimately be unearthed, and serve the genius of practical medicine or medical history.”[2]

To prove his point, he then recounted the story of his rescue of Dr. Samuel Bard’s An enquiry into the nature, cause and cure, of the angina suffocativa, which describes an outbreak of diphtheria in New York in 1770. Purple discovered the pamphlet in “the press-box of a second-hand paper-dealer in this city in transitu to the maw of a paper-mill. Its former owner had sold it for the eighth part of a cent, or at the rate of two cents per pound.”[3] That copy is still here in the Library today, with Purple’s bookplate and an inscription about its provenance. In 1998, at the Christie’s auction of the Haskell F. Norman Library of Science and Medicine, a copy of the same pamphlet sold for close to $3,000, a far cry from an eighth of a cent.

By the end of his second term, Purple had raised the money to expand the Library stacks, and a collection that numbered some 400 items in 1875 boasted over 9,000 by 1880. Thousands of Purple’s volumes continue to reside in the Library today. By 1900, when Purple died, the Academy had moved on to its next home, a new building on West 43rd Street. To honor Purple’s role in creating the Library, the Academy installed a bronze plaque honoring him at the entrance to the reading room. In 1926, the plaque traveled to our current building, where it sits above the door to the Library on the third floor: That plaque reads

SAMUEL SMITH PURPLE, M.D.

BORN JUNE 24, 1822 — DIED SEPTEMBER 29, 1900

FOUNDER OF THE LIBRARY OF THE

NEW YORK ACADEMY OF MEDICINE

TO WHICH HE GAVE LARGE AND VALUABLE CONTRIBUTIONS.

A PRESIDENT OF THE ACADEMY AND AN EARNEST

AND SUCCESSFUL WORKER IN ITS INTERESTS.

THIS TABLET IS ERECTED TO COMMEMORATE

HIS MANY VIRTUES AND RARE USEFULNESS.

We are still grateful to Samuel Smith Purple. His determination, foresight, and devotion to collecting the history of American medicine all contributed to the richness of the collections we continue to use today.

Notes

[1] Smith, Stephen. “Memorial Address on the Late Samuel Smith Purple, MD.” Medical Library and Historical Journal. 1903 1(2), p. 110.

[2] Purple, Samuel S. Medical Libraries: an Address Delivered before the New York Academy of Medicine, January 18, 1877, on Taking the Chair as President a Second Term. New York: Printed for the Academy, 1877, p. 18.

[3] Ibid., p. 19.

References

Flint, Austin, and Samuel S. Purple. Addresses: Dr. Austin Flint’s Valedictory : Dr. Samuel S. Purple’s Inaugural. New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1875.

Purple, Samuel S. Medical Libraries: an Address Delivered before the New York Academy of Medicine, January 18, 1877, on Taking the Chair as President a Second Term. New York: Printed for the Academy, 1877.

Smith, Stephen. “Memorial Address on the Late Samuel Smith Purple, MD.” Medical Library and Historical Journal. 1903 1(2): 102–116.

Van Ingen, Philip. The New York Academy of Medicine: Its First Hundred Years. New York: Columbia University Press, 1949.