At the end of the 19th-century, the medical students in Pittsburgh would be able to borrow books from the Carnegie Public Library.

Before the Western Pennsylvania Medical College created a library, students could use the collection of the Carnegie Public Library per mutual agreement between two institutions. The nucleus of the school’s library were private books of the professors, which probably were made available to students in a reading room, possibly adjacent to the Albert G. Walter Museum, and maybe curated by one of the professors on side, in addition to his main duties. Though there is a mention of “valuable additions […] made to the Museum and Library” in the Western Pennsylvania Medical College catalog for 1889/1890, the school did not have a formal library until later.

When the College moved from Polish Hill location to a newly constructed Pennsylvania Hall in Schenley Heights in 1911, a new story unfolded. It was now the Medical School of the University of Pittsburgh, the academic standards were raised up, and several things changed.  SOM started to readmit women after a three-year hiatus, R.B. Mellon purchased the private library of Viennese pathologist Ernst Ziegler and donated it to the library, and the first professional librarian – Mabel C. Burland was hired in 1912. Finally!

However, at the end of the 19^th-century medical students in Pittsburgh had to depend on the Carnegie Public Library. They did not have the luxury of the state-of the-art medical library tailoring its collections and instructions to user needs as the 21^st-century students have.

The required reading lists for each year were printed in the school’s catalog. The extensive collection of the textbooks used by medical students in the past, had been a subject of the earlier display “Readings for a medical student from the 1886 Syllabus”. Therefore, the books chosen for the current exhibit do not illustrate the required readings, but show the creative ways of using manuals.  One of our professors, while attending the Jefferson College, used the printed Thomas Mütter’s “Syllabus of the course of lectures on the principles and practice of surgery, delivered in the Jefferson Medical College, Philadelphia”, which was rebound to insert the extra blank pages for note taking. This practice turned it into a workbook where he recorded the lectures notes, added his comments and annotations.