A Physician's Library Bound Together

GRAFTON Duvall received his University of Pennsylvania medical degree in 1802, the year Ffirth was injecting himself with black vomit. He was twenty-two years old. The epidemic of 1793 had happened when he was thirteen, within living memory of everyone around him, still shaping the curriculum through which he was trained and the debate literature he was reading. He bound that literature together — eleven pamphlets, some presented to him by their authors, some signed in his own hand — into a single working volume with a manuscript table of contents in his own handwriting. He was making a library.

The sammelband is unlike any other item in the collection. Where the other holdings are individual publications assembled by the collector across decades, the Duvall sammelband is an assembly made by a contemporary — a physician forming himself in the immediate wake of the epidemic, acquiring the pamphlets that defined the debate, binding them together into a reference object he could carry and consult. It is the collection's most direct window into how a physician in 1802 organized and understood the literature that the epidemic had generated.