Medicine: Brands from the Burning

One June day in 1939, Dr. Jacob Shatzky, librarian of the New York State Psychiatric Institute in Manhattan, was mulling over a book catalogue that had just arrived from Vienna. The catalogue advertised the sale of 812 18th-and 19th-Century books and papers on animal magnetism, hysteria, interpretation of dreams. The price for the lot was $500. The name of the owner was not divulged. He was, stated the catalogue, a “famous Viennese psychic explorer.”

Dr. Shatzky had a psychic flash. He ran to the Institute’s Director Nolan Don Carpentier Lewis, exclaimed: “This can be the collection of only one man, and he is Sigmund Freud.” If his hunch proved wrong, said Librarian Shatzky, he would foot the bill himself. Director Lewis got an appropriation for the $500.

For months Drs. Shatzky and Lewis waited anxiously for the books. Finally six large, swastika-stamped boxes arrived. When they pried open the boxes they found just what the doctors had hoped they had ordered: the library of Sigmund Freud. Most of the books were marked with his rubber stamp or signature. Among the items: Freud’s medical-school texts; eleven rare volumes of Mesmerism (alone worth more than $500); a privately printed volume for “Le Roi de France” on animal magnetism (value: $100).

Last week, on the twelfth floor of the Institute, a hundred noted psychiatrists and neurologists gathered in the library, wandered into the small, wood-paneled room that houses the only Freud collection in the world, to peer at the worn volumes, the sarcastic marginal notes, the underscorings and brilliant comments.

To the assembled psychiatrists Dr. Shatzky told how the books had escaped the Nazi bonfire. After Freud fled to Britain, a Nazi official, who was also an ardent Freudian, turned the library over to a bookseller, warned him not to use Freud’s name in advertising, lest more devout Nazis seize and destroy the books.

Dr. Shatzky hopes the Freud collection will be the nucleus of a select library on psychoanalysis. Analyst Abraham Arden Brill, who translated Freud into faithfully wooden English, has already donated funds for the library, as well as a fine collection of 20 volumes on the history of sex practices. Several other psychiatrists have promised to will their valuable Freudiana to the library. Says Dr. Shatzky, with Freud in his eye, “I can’t wait that long.”