“How can one help but be moved by such volumes as these:” the Josiah Charles Trent Collection in the History of Medicine

First published in 1517 as a handbook of wound surgery, this 1551 copy includes hand-colored illustrations, including the first illustrated depiction of an amputation. Several of the illustrations became the inspiration for Dr. Trent’s bookplates.

Title page from William Beaumont's Experiments and Observations on the Gastric Juice, and the Physiology of Digestion (1833).

In 1956, Mary Duke Biddle Trent Semans donated the Trent Collection, the same year she wrote the eloquent piece, "Josiah Charles Trent as a Collector" (Library Notes, December 1956), about her husband and their collection. She notes, “In our evaluating our collection, it can be said that it contains much value to the social historian as well as to the medical historian.” Mary Trent Semans explains she cannot describe each item in the short piece, adding “How can one help but be moved by such volumes as these? Here at Duke University, noted for its freedom in all cultural fields, a library such as this can grow. May God grant that Joe Trent’s ideals for it will be fulfilled."

The Trent Collection in the history of medicine includes remarkable and unique materials. Dr. Trent collected 4,000 rare books, numerous medical manuscripts, and medical instruments. Notable items from the Trent Collection include:

• First editions of the classics of medical history including De humani corporis fabrica by Andreas Vesalius (1543) and De motu cordis by William Harvey (1628)
• The Four Seasons, a unique set of seventeenth-century copperplate engravings with moveable flaps illustrating human anatomy along with allusions to alchemy, astronomy and botany
• Manuscripts by Benjamin Rush, an 18th-century physician and signer of the Declaration of Independence
• The largest collection of ivory anatomical manikins in North America

William Beaumont’s work seems to be the item that launched the Trent Collection. In the Library Notes article, Mary Trent Semans shares a story from a lecture Dr. Trent gave on book collecting: “Christmas 1938, I received as a Christmas gift, a small book, unpretentious, poorly printed and poorly bound, entitled Experiments and Observations on the Gastric Juice and the Physiology of Digestions, by William Beaumont. The book appeared innocuous enough, but actually carried the deadly virus of bibliomania.”