Medicine: Specialist’s Specialist

A specialist who caters to a profession of specialists is Bookseller Henry Schuman, dealer in rare medical books. Mr. Schuman has made a very good thing out of what started as a hobby. Last week he moved ten tons (about 20,000 volumes) of valuable books to his new, five-story house-and-bookshop on Manhattan’s swank East 70th Street.

Nine years ago, as a young businessman in Detroit, Henry Schuman opened a little bookshop with his collection of first editions. One day an elderly doctor wandered in, asked for a volume by Réné Laennec, inventor of the stethoscope (1819). Bookseller Schuman found the search for this book as exciting as “digging in the Klondike,” turned up several unexpected medical treasures along the way. After this, he devoted himself to rare medical books.

Mr. Schuman has tracked down books for almost every medical bibliophile in the U.S. His star customer was the late Neurologist Harvey Cushing, whose famed medical collection was recently installed in the new Yale Medical Library. Dr. Cushing longed for the first medical book ever published in the American colonies—a copy of a lurid best-seller on herbalism which had been written in England by one Nicholas Culpeper (Boston, 1708). But he never got his hands on one of these first editions.

No less than three first editions of medicine’s great classic—De Motu Cordis, by William Harvey (1578-1657), discoverer of the circulation of the blood, have passed through Mr. Schuman’s hands. About 17 first editions of this work are extant. The third copy, worth several thousand dollars, Mr. Schuman found in Los Angeles. Its owner, a confirmed invalid, was lying in bed drinking whiskey, flanked by a bar and a vault of rare book’s.

Reprints of medical articles announcing great modern discoveries are as rare and valuable as 15th-Century incunabula. One of the rarest items Mr. Schuman ever handled was a reprint of Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes’s brief essay proving that childbed fever may be caused by filthy obstetricians and hospital wards. Several years ago, Mr. Schuman visited the late Sir Frederick Banting in Toronto, asked him to sell a reprint of his first article on the discovery of insulin. Replied Sir Frederick ruefully: “I have only one copy left on file.”