Three-fourths of approximately 140 Fellows of The College of Physicians of Philadelphia engaged with war work at the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861. I hypothesize that the ownership evidence in the books can re-create the social world of wartime physicians. The digital catalogue of the Historical Medical Library does not include information on bookplates or inscriptions written by authors or past owners. The inadvertent discovery began with my noticing ownership signatures in Civil War-related works and College bookplate data (signifying how books came into the collection). Jorge Luis Borges wrote that a book is “an axis of innumerable relationships.” A current research project has led to an inadvertent discovery and a hypothesis about relationships. Historians of the book anatomize books for their bindings, printers, paper, illustrators, and consider past readers and cultural contexts. Historical Medical Library, and Wood Institute for the History of Medicine*
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