The Medical Library is History

Medical libraries are dying. Or at least some specific sorts of medical libraries— independent institutional libraries, owned by historic organizations, in historic buildings, with large historic collections—are under serious threat of themselves becoming part of the past. To mitigate this threat, there is a need to rethink the nature of the “historic” medical library. This involves reconsidering the library’s relationship to medicine and the history of medicine as disciplines, defining what is important about the nature of the library as a physical space and of its collections as material things, and reevaluating its audiences. Digitization has a role to play in this rethinking, but it is neither a panacea nor, in most cases, does it address fundamental questions about the sustainability and utility of legacy print collections and the spaces used to house them. Drawing on experiences of working with museum and library collections in two “independent” institutions—the Royal College of Surgeons of England and the Wellcome Trust—this essay considers what such a rethinking might look like in practice.