Lectures
Talks illustrated from the collection, 45 to 60 minutes with questions. Erik speaks in the Philadelphia region and travels for institutional invitations.
The Doctors Benjamin
Historical societies · library friends' groups · general audiences
Franklin and Rush were both called Doctor Benjamin — one by honorary degree, the other by an Edinburgh MD — and their thirty-year friendship shaped the institutions of a city. Mentorship, medicine, and the making of Philadelphia, told through letters, imprints, and objects from the collection.
Bleeding the Capital: Philadelphia's Yellow Fever of 1793
Medical schools · history of medicine societies · public health audiences
Five thousand dead, a government in flight, and a profession at war with itself. What Rush got wrong, what his rivals got right, and what the surviving pamphlets, minutes, and letters actually say.
Franklin's Press as a Business
Printing and book-arts groups · bibliographical societies
What the New Printing-Office printed when it wasn't printing Poor Richard: laws, bonds, hospital notes, naturalization papers, sermons. How a print shop made a fortune and printed a city's institutions into existence.
The Lantern on the Liberty Tree
Revolutionary-era societies · museums · general audiences
The Stamp Act, Franklin before Parliament, and the night in May 1766 when Boston hung lanterns in an elm — one of which now sits in Wynnewood. One object and everything it touches.
How a Private Collection Argues
Collectors' clubs · rare book and manuscript groups · museum studies
Provenance, authenticity, and the discipline of collecting to explain rather than to accumulate. A collector's account of building a research collection, mistakes included.
Write with the date, venue, audience, and format you have in mind. Talks can be tailored to an anniversary, an exhibition, or a course. Exhibition loans are considered case by case under standard facilities-report and insurance terms.
For programs and press. Erik Soiferman, DO, is a Philadelphia-area physician and the builder of the Soiferman Collection, a research collection of eighteenth-century Philadelphia books, manuscripts, prints, and objects centered on Benjamin Franklin and Benjamin Rush. He writes and lectures on the medical and printing history of the city and is the author of the collection's three narrative catalogs, published at eislibris.com.
