Brenda Dunn-Lardeau gazes at three copies of Pliny’s Encyclopedia on the natural world in a glass case in the entryway of McGill University’s Osler Library of the History of Medicine.

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The influential Historia naturalis was written by the ancient Roman scientist and statesman in the first century AD. But these versions were published in Germany in the 15th century, after Gutenberg’s printing press revolutionized the dissemination of information, then were intricately hand-decorated by artisans in Italy for wealthy buyers.

This is the first time these 1472, 1481 and 1497 editions of Pliny — and several other early books known as incunabula — have been put on display. They are part of an exhibition at the Osler Library that lasts until April 2, offering an opportunity to behold some of the building blocks of medical discovery and glimpse the rich holdings of an institution that, though world renowned, is not well known to Montrealers.

“Here we have a very, very precious Pliny cluster,” said Dunn-Lardeau, an associate professor of medieval and Renaissance literature at Université du Québec à Montréal, while giving a tour last week of the exhibit she curated. “This book was very, very influential. It’s a must in a medical library.”

To underscore the point, Dr. Rolando Del Maestro holds up a modern reproduction of another important work, the original of which is also housed in the Osler’s collection. A 1493 Italian translation of the Fasciculus Medicina contains four woodcuts, one of which depicts a physicians’ library with Pliny’s seminal work prominently propped open.

“It’s rather amazing,” said Del Maestro, director of McGill’s Neurosurgical Simulation and Artificial Intelligence Learning Centre and an honorary librarian at the Osler. “They’re right here — the open book, it’s that book.”

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He points at the image in the early medical textbook, then back down at the thick tome in the glass case.

It’s the kind of full-circle moment the great Dr. William Osler might have hoped for when he bequeathed thousands of volumes upon his death in 1919, including many incunabula, to establish a library at McGill’s medical school, his alma mater.

Osler was arguably the most important physician of his generation and is often called the “father of modern medicine.” After graduating from McGill, he went on to chair the University of Pennsylvania medical school, found the faculty of medicine at Johns Hopkins University, and serve as Regius professor of medicine at Oxford University. Among his important contributions was instilling humanism in medicine by insisting doctors learn from seeing and talking with patients.

But Osler was also a bibliophile.

If the scientific books from the first century were indispensable in the 15th, and prized by Osler when he purchased them in the late 19th and early 20th, they remain invaluable teaching tools in the 21st. Del Maestro recently brought the students from his AI lab to see the exhibit.

“I think medical students seeing the books and being engaged with the books provides a different view of the world. There’s no question,” he said. “In Osler’s mind, it was really the ability of medical students to engage not only in the present, but in the past, and sort of bridge that gap between the past and the present in a knowledge-filled way.”

Incunabula are books published between 1454, when the printing press was invented, and 1500. The name is derived from the Latin word for cradle and describes an industry in its infancy, which was also a period of great experimentation in publishing, said Dunn-Lardeau, from how many columns of text to use on a page to the development of fonts, some of which are still in use today.

The majority of the first mass-produced books to roll off Gutenberg’s presses were Bibles, but about one-quarter of incunabula were medical tomes.

The scientific texts on display now were drawn from both the Osler Library’s archives and McGill’s department of rare books and special collections. Together, the two institutions have close to 300 — one of the largest collections in Canada.

While most incunabula were black and white, Dunn-Lardeau focused on those that were illuminated or illustrated for the show.

As publishing transitioned from handwritten manuscripts, which were often ornate, to mass production with the printing press, wealthier buyers would take their plain copies to illuminators to have them decorated and personalized, Dunn-Lardeau explained. This hand-finishing included painting borders, illustrating initials (the first letter starting a chapter or paragraph), adding diagrams, and stamping the owner’s coat of arms on the page.

The different types and costs of decoration transformed the incunabula into luxury items for status-conscious clients, Dunn-Lardeau said — and kept illuminators in business as mass printing gained steam. But the kinds of incunabula their owners had decorated are also indicators of what they valued.

“That’s another interesting aspect. They’re not just painting Bibles or religious books; also medical, scientific books,” Dunn-Lardeau said. “And that to me is interesting that they give the same refined attention to science and not just religion or literature. It’s a cultural attitude: It’s respect for the books and beauty that can be everywhere.”

Since most of these artisans didn’t sign their work, part of her research has been aimed at identifying who illuminated the incunabula, through the colour palettes they used or telltale stylistic traits. She linked one of the most intricately finished Pliny volumes to the Pico Master, a prolific illuminator at the time.

One specimen Dunn-Lardeau said is “dear to me” remains a modern-day (relatively speaking) mystery. While at Oxford around 1910, Osler asked a young woman studying the lost art of illumination to decorate an unadorned 1478 copy of Celsus’s De medicina liber, another medical text that originally dates from the first century BC.

But Dunn-Lardeau said she has been unable to uncover the latter-day artist’s name.

“I’ve been looking all over,” she said. “That’s my deepest wish, to know who. It’s a bit surprising. Because William Osler took pains to put annotations when he bought a book in the catalogues. He wrote about the books, he gave lots of detail — the price he paid, where he bought them. And somehow he didn’t put her name. I looked at correspondence for those years, hoping that I might find her, that somebody might mention her. But to no avail.”

Dunn-Lardeau’s ultimate goal is to develop a catalogue of all the incunabula in Quebec. There are smaller collections held by other universities, museums and religious orders. The parliamentary library at the National Assembly has incunabula that once belonged to Quebec’s first premier, Pierre-Joseph-Olivier Chauveau, but the collections at McGill are the most significant.

Mary Hague-Yearl, the head librarian at the Osler, said the exhibition is not only an occasion to showcase some of the gems stashed away in the library, but to learn more about them.

“For me, I think part of what’s really fulfilling is seeing and enjoying the scholarship that’s behind it,” she said. “There is something that is deeply touching about interacting with those materials and if you’re appreciating them that much, I think you’re appreciating the people who created them. It’s easy for us to be kind of smug about the past and think that people didn’t know things. But you look at a book and you realize, ‘Ya, they did.’”

There are thousands of other artifacts besides incunabula in the Osler, which now holds more than 100,000 items. For instance, there are two ancient Japanese dissection scrolls, a first-edition Copernicus, pre-publication handwritten copies of John McCrae’s poem In Flanders Fields, not to mention the files, letters and correspondence of Osler himself, as well as other important historical figures, like Dr. Wilder Penfield.

Dr. Mario Molina, a California-based physician and health CEO, sits on the Osler Library’s board of directors and executive committee. He calls it “one of the finest medical-historical libraries in North America” and “an unbelievable resource.”

Aside from the quality of the collection, he said “the other thing that makes it special is that it is used. People come from all over the world to use it.”

But like many libraries, Molina said, the Osler suffers from the underfunding of the humanities and is dependent on philanthropy for a large portion of its activities. Osler donated all his books, but he didn’t leave a big endowment.

Molina said $4 million was recently raised to fund the head librarian’s role in perpetuity. But since McGill has agreed to continue covering this post, an assistant librarian will be hired.

The history of medicine remains more crucial than ever in the age of artificial intelligence and genomics.

“We’ve forgotten that disease is only a part of this. Illness is the whole experience that that person has,” Molina said. “And while I might know exactly what germ is bothering you and what pill to give you, I need to understand you as a person and how this is affecting your life. And that’s going to affect the way I treat you. … That’s something that Osler and ancient Greeks emphasized that I think is forgotten in modern medicine. The patient matters. It’s not just the disease.”

Dr. David Wolf, a professor of medicine at Cornell University and president-elect of the American Osler Society, said there is a push to digitize ancient texts like incunabula to enhance access, but important things can be missed or lost in the process. Exhibits like the one at the library now promote Osler’s cherished values.

“You need to know about (incunabula) in order to be a good doctor, but the practice of medicine isn’t just about scientific endeavour — it’s also an art,” Wolf said. “The best doctors are also interested in the humanities. … The best doctors know a little bit about history. You can learn a lot from the past.”

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