"When thinking about anthropodermic books, we can't simply fault the doctors of the past for engaging in behavior that was tacitly or explicitly sanctioned by the laws and mores of their time and place in history; nor can we expect them to retroactively adhere to the deeply important beliefs we now have about informed consent. What we can do, and have a moral obligation to do, is examine the institutions in which these injustices were able to proceed, learn from their mistakes, and critically view the pernicious ways these mindsets might persist in our current society and fight to eradicate them."

"Baker discovered that most of the places where he expected to find 1856 copies of the Syracuse Daily Standard, such as the Syracuse University Library and the Syracuse Public Library, had discarded their newsprint after they were stored in microfiche in 1972. He visited the storied mummy-print newspapers at the beleaguered historical association that saved them from a landfill and reported that the pages of the Daily Standard's mummy issue rattle when you turn them. Couldn't new or future scientific techniques or future biocodicologists and historians interested in material culture for that matter uncover more about this esoteric practice and the culture from which it arose? Was it not our responsibility as librarians, I asked Nedam to preserve these objects for whatever avenues future researchers might take? 'I agree that librarians have a responsibility toward preservation,' Nedam responded, 'but libraries have violated this incessantly in terrible ways, so it's a little hard to stand firmly on the pedestal if you're only applying it in the car of one book binding at Harvard when you've destroyed or thrown away tens of thousands of items of historical interest,' he countered. 'Here, it's not a question of destroying the entire object. It's not about the binding in that sense, it's the covering on the binding.' As two collections librarians, we could agree on the challenges we face when deciding from our limited vantage point what libraries should keep and what they should toss. All libraries wrestle with financial and spatial concerns, and how to weigh those concerns against the potential needs of future researchers."

"When the young doctor John Stockton Hough first encountered [Mary] Lynch, it was on his autopsy table in January 1869. In an article in The American Journal of the Medical Sciences, two cases of trichinosis at the Philadelphia Hospital Blockley, Dr. Hough reported that when he opened her chest cavity to observe her tuberculosis-ravaged lungs, he noticed that the pectoral muscles that were sliced along the way had some unusual lemon-shaped cysts. Looking into his microscope, he realized that the cysts were teeming with tiny spiralis, worms in various stages of development. 'Counting the number in one grain of muscle, the whole number of cysts were estimated to be about 8 million,' Hough reported, making Lynch's the first case of trichinosis discovered in his hospital and, as far as he could find, in Philadelphia as well. It was during that autopsy that Hough removed the skin from Lynch's thigh. He preserved her skin in a chamber pot and stored it for safekeeping, while the rest of Mary Lynch's body was dumped into a pauper's grave at Old Blockley. Decades later Dr. Hough, then a rich, respected bibliophile, used Lynch's skin to bind three of his favorite medical books on womens health and reproduction."

"Dr. John Stockton Hough, like many gentleman doctors of his day, enjoyed a classical education at the finest academies New Jersey had to offer before pursuing simultaneous degrees in chemistry and medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. During his residency at the Philadelphia General Hospital, he cultivated disparate clinical interests in reproductive medicine and parasitic trichinae. His family wealth and a lucrative private practice afforded him gentlemanly pursuits, and he began collecting rare books with vigor, particularly medical books from the dawn of the age of print. He traveled often to Europe, sending ahead to antiquarian booksellers a printed list of the medical incunabula he wanted to find. Bibliophiles called these wishlists desiderata. He was invited to join book collectors societies like The Grolier Club in New York, established in 1884 to foster the study, collecting, and appreciation of books and works on paper, their art, and their history, production, and commerce. He delighted in showing off his collection in his luxurious home library in Ewing, New Jersey, to reporters, fellow book men, and on Sundays only, his own children. With a roaring fire flickering off a bookshelf stuffed with rich leather bindings, he would pull down book after book, pointing out one marvelous gem or beauty after another. By the time Hough was 50, he had amassed a collection that was the envy of his fellow doctor bibliophiles. He estimated in 1880 that he owned about 8,000 books."

"In The Birth of the Clinic, the philosopher and social theorist Michel Foucault described how this revolutionary change in education altered the doctor-patient relationship: 'The presence of disease in the body with its tensions and its burnings, the silent world of the entrails, the whole dark underside of the body lined with endless unseen dreams, are challenged as to their objectivity by the reductive discourse of the doctor, as well as established as multiple objects needing his positive gaze.' Foucault asserted that this style of medical education brought with it a distanced view of patients, which he referred to as the clinical gaze. Before clinical medicine, doctors had little to go on in diagnosis besides a patient's complaints and the outward manifestations of the alleged disease on the body. Primarily working with the wealthy, these doctors saw few patients and had widely divergent levels of training. They also didn't interact as frequently with one another as they do today, nor was there constant continuing education now required. Their viewpoints were rather limited. The Paris School brought a scientific structure to the art of medicine and created a foundation for shared medical knowledge. It also encouraged systematic ways of learning about the body and diseases, including cadaver exploration and the use of instruments to allow doctors to observe patients' bodies in ways patients themselves could not. The human body became a less mysterious landscape, and the patient, too, was transformed into an object to be studied, consisting of organs and the diseases that attack them. Along the way, the medical profession lost sight of the patient as a person in favor of the patient as a collection of symptoms and manifestations or a soulless cadaver on a dissecting table. Foucault pointed out the inherent tension between hospitals servicing the sick and educating the doctors. He argued that, in fact, we all benefit from the advances resulting from a grossly unequal exchange. 'But to look in order to know, to show in order to teach, is not this a tacit form of violence, all the more abusive for its silence on a sick body that demands to be comforted, not displayed? Can pain be a spectacle? Not only can it be, but it must be. By virtue of a subtle right that resides in the fact that no one is alone, the poor man less so than others since he can obtain assistance only through the mediation of the rich. Since disease can be cured only if others intervene with their knowledge, their resources, their pity, since a patient can be cured only in society, it is just that that the illnesses of some should be transformed into the experience of others.' The rich invest in hospitals. The poor get treated. The knowledge gained by the doctors through observation of the poor can be used to better treat the rich. The clinical gaze extended to the way the collective body of the sick was viewed as a commodity."