Historical Services

About the Collections

Ebling Library holds one of the preeminent collections of rare and antiquarian health sciences books in the country. Ranging in date from the late fifteenth century to the early twentieth century, the collection encompasses the development of western medicine and related disciplines as recorded in books, journals, and pamphlets.

Titles in the collection can be found by searching the Library Catalog where their location is identified as "Ebling Library Historical Vault". Guidelines for access to these materials can be found on the Using the Collections page.

Materials listed as "AIHP Kremers Reference Files" are not held at Ebling Library. To access these materials, please contact the American Institute of the History of Pharmacy at research@aihp.org.

Rare books in the Historical Collections have been acquired over time in large part due to generous donations from benefactors. Their contributions continue to represent some of the best items in the collection, and they illuminate general subject strengths, such as anatomy and vaccination, which we continue to collect. The collections have also grown through the timely purchase of major groups of materials, made possible by further donations and skillful pursuit by former health sciences librarians, like Helen Crawford. For a look at a few of these collections and the stories behind them, choose from the links below:

Using the Collections

The Historical Reading Room is open to all patrons of Ebling Library and to researchers working in the Library's historical collections.

Reading room hours are dependent upon staffing availability. If you would like to research from the historical collections, we strongly recommend making an appointment by emailing the Historical Services team.

If you are in need of an item listed in the Library Catalog that indicates “Ebling Library Historical Vault” please complete our online form. The item will be retrieved for you to consult in the Historical Reading Room.

Use Policies

Historical Services provides access to rare books and documents that are often fragile and in need of special handling to ensure their preservation. All patrons are required to sign a Handling and Use Policy to use the Reading Room, including those not consulting historical materials. Signing the policy indicates an acknowledgment of the following guidelines:

• All external visitors must check in at Health Sciences Learning Center Room 3310 before entering the Historical Reading Room.
• There is to be no food around collection materials, including gum and cough drops.
• There are to be no drinks (including water) around collection materials.
• Pens are not to be used around collection materials.
• Bags, coats, and heavy jackets are not allowed in the Historical Reading Room or other secure collections areas.
• Patrons must wash hands before handling materials.
• Flash photography is not permitted anywhere in the collections.
• All electronic devices must be silenced when in the Historical Reading Room.
• Nitrile gloves must be used when handling photographic, vellum, or metal materials, or as directed by a staff member.
• All bound materials must be consulted in cradles, regardless of age or condition.
• Some materials may be unavailable for consultation due to restrictions related to content or condition of items.
• Materials may not be transferred from one researcher to another without consent of Ebling staff member.
• Manuscripts must be maintained by the reader in the order in which they are received. If errors of arrangement or identification are noted, please inform an Ebling staff member.

Historical Research Guide

Please note that the History of Health Sciences Research Guide is currently undergoing maintenance and is not available.
For research assistance, please email the Historical Services team.

The Research Guide for the History of the Health Sciences can get you started with various primary and database resources. Please contact Hannah Swan for further assistance.

The easiest way to locate historical materials held by Ebling is to search in the UW-Madison Library Catalog for your preferred search terms, then to filter by library and sort by date. Most materials dating to 1923 and earlier will be held in the Vault.

Jan Bleuland, Icones anatomico-physiologicae partium corporis humani et animalium... (1826).

Historical Materials Request Form

Please use this form to request materials listed as "Ebling Library Historical Vault" in the Library Catalog. You may add a preferred date to visit the Reading Room to consult the materials or indicate whether you are looking for reproduction services. Please note that reproduction orders are subject to item condition and staff availability.

Visitor Information

The Historical Collections are available for consultation by appointment. To make an appointment to view materials from the Vault, please email the Historical Services Team or submit a Vault Request form.

Getting to the Library

The Historical Reading Room is located on the south side of Ebling Library's third floor. All visitors must check in with the attending librarian in Room 3310 before using collection items. Storage is provided for bags, coats, drinks, and other materials not permitted in the Reading Room.

Visitor parking is available in Lot 75 and Lot 76. Visitor parking rates can be found on the University of Wisconsin's Transportation website.

Several bus routes run regularly to the Health Sciences Learning Center, including the 28, 38, 65, C, and J lines, as well as the free campus bus lines 80 and 84.

Those patrons joining us by bike will find ample bike parking on the north and east sides of the building, as well as parking for B-Cycle shared e-bikes across the street at the School of Nursing.

Welcome to Collections Corner!

Collections Corner is a new column published in tandem with the Ebling Post Newsletter. Each piece will dive into particularly unique, mysterious, and bizarre histories, printing techniques, and provenance from our historical collections, as well as give updates into the goings on behind the scenes at Ebling's Historical Services Department.

Spring 2026

Welcome to the Spring 2026 edition of Collections Corner! Things have been busy in the Historical Services world. This term, I hosted seven events and workshops, reaching over 100 attendees, collaborated with other libraries on two additional outreach events, and hosted twelve instruction sessions that totaled almost 250 students all together!

Looking ahead to summer, outreach events will slow down as students leave and the campus population thins out, but I have a lot of exciting in-house projects in the works. I have been working with Katie Nash at UW Archives to identify and transfer materials that can be made more accessible in their collections, as part of a broader push to shift materials in our secure stacks and make room for new acquisitions and donations.

Plagued! Age of Enlightenment

One of the most exciting (and fun!) projects I worked on this term was the development of a medical history teaching game in collaboration with Health Sciences Librarian Susan Vandagriff. Though initially inspired by the classic computer game Oregon Trail, Plagued! Age of Enlightenment can perhaps best be described as Dungeons and Dragons meets The Game of Life. Created using real medical history from the pages of Ebling Library's Historical Collections, players make choices (and friends!) as their eighteenth-century characters, but it’s a dangerous time to be alive, and the choices they make affect their chances of surviving the dire diseases and medical mishaps of the time.

Susan and I had so much fun making Plagued! and were excited to debut it at “Weird Science Fair,” an event put on by our colleagues at Steenbock Library for the UW community and beyond. The reception was entirely positive, so much so that we are preparing a take-home version to enter Ebling’s Recreational Board Game Collection! We will also be promoting Plagued! over the summer at the Play, Make, Learn conference hosted by the UW-Madison School of Education.

Student Collections Assistants: Year One

This year was not only my first year in Historical Services at Ebling, but also the first year of my three wonderful Collections Assistants! Cheyenne, Layk, and Magnolia are all first-year students in the iSchool (UW-Madison’s Library and Information School). They joined the Historical Services team during the fall semester and have undertaken a number of important projects this term, from processing our ephemera collections to accessioning new book donations. I have been so lucky to have such a great group of students, and I can’t wait to see what we get done next year!

Historical Exhibition: “Hospital Food: Historical Precedents of a Bad Reputation”

This term, the exhibition in the Historical Reading Room focuses on the history of hospital food. I have a background in food history, so I was interested in exploring the intersections of food and medicine. As I began my preliminary research, I began to wonder why we have such negative cultural associations with hospital food, especially as someone who is treated to our delicious UW Health hospital cafeteria regularly! My research took me from the abbeys of 16th-century religious hospitals to the sick rooms of the Victorian period, from the Lake Placid Home Economics Conferences of the 1910s to the groovy food styling of Hospital and Nursing Home Food Management in the swinging sixties.

And yet, I still don’t know why hospital food gets such a bad reputation! Perhaps it’s the persistent mythology of the cockroach-ridden food of the 19th century asylum, perhaps it’s the loss of the 20th-century personalized meal tray, or perhaps it’s just some greater sense that sick food should be made in the home by a loved one. You’ll have to visit the exhibition and see what conclusions you can draw…

One of the most exciting developments to come out of the exhibition was the launch of Ebling’s new “Hospital Menu Collection.” As I was working on the exhibition, I knew I wanted to include a hospital menu to showcase both the types of foods that were being served and the print medium that facilitated hospital food service. I was surprised to learn that there was no collection of hospital menus anywhere in the United States. A hospital in Loma Linda, California had a collection of in-house menus, but there was no aggregate collection. As such, I decided to inaugurate the first-ever hospital menu collection here at Ebling.

There are currently about twenty-five menus in the collection, all acquired via purchase. The collection ranges from a 1916 sanitarium menu to a 2010s menu from a hospital in Springfield, Illinois. The most unique menu, by far, is a Viewfinder menu from the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, for young patients to have a fun, interactive way to choose their meals. We are looking to grow the collection, so if you have any menus you are interested in donating, please reach out to the Historical Services team.

Hospital Food: Precedents of a Bad Reputation is on view until August 2026 in the Historical Reading Room. During term time, the exhibition is open Tuesday through Thursday, 9:30am to 4:00pm. Outside of those hours, contact Ebling’s Historical Services to arrange for the room to be opened.

Fall 2025

Howdy, and welcome to Collections Corner! My name is Hannah Swan, and I am the Curator and History of Health Sciences Librarian at Ebling Library. I oversee all the Historical Services and Collections, including our extensive collection of rare books, manuscripts, artifacts, and ephemera. In this new Ebling Post column, I will be highlighting special, unique, and bizarre collection items that make ours one of the most important medical history collections in the country!

This issue, I will introduce myself, then crunch some numbers, highlighting a recent statistical analysis I have been working with Ebling’s Head of Resource Management and Collections Services, Andrew Osmond, to quantify what makes Ebling’s Historical Collections unique. Finally, I will show off a recent acquisition that uses a surprising printing technique to achieve its unique, colorful look.

Take a Look, It’s a NEW BOOK: New Donations & Acquisitions

Since beginning my tenure as Curator, I have made some exciting acquisitions to continue to strengthen the holdings of the Historical Collections. These include items I have purchased from dealers (and at the Friends of the UW Libraries Sale!), as well as items generously donated by our community. Today, I will be featuring Ballière’s Synthetic Anatomy, which was the first item I acquired in my new position!

Ballière’s Synthetic Anatomy by J. E. Cheesman joins a significant number of medical teaching aids in the Ebling Historical Collections. Published between 1927 and the late 1930s, the book consists of a folder of fourteen fascicles (separate parts of a book, published in installments), each of which features a different part of the body (head, eyeball, foot, etc.) Each fascicle contains leaves of glassine paper printed with layers of the body part. As you flip through them, the structure mimics a dissection, revealing deeper and deeper anatomical strata. In fact, the accompanying instructions actually explicitly frame the reading of the text as a substitution for dissection: instructions are given in two parts, “for those who haven’t dissected” the given organ or limb, and for those who have.

Though single fascicles of Synthetic Anatomy are relatively common in historical medical collections, the full set of fascicles in its original binder is rare, especially in such good condition. Our copy is also notable for its provenance. Inside the front cover of the binder is an ex libris ink stamp from Henry Guze and Vivian Segerman Guze, a married couple, both psychologists. Henry was a founder of the American Association of Psychotherapists, the Society for Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis, and the Society for the Scientific Study of Sex. His wife, Vivian, was also an accomplished psychologist and bibliophile, whose passion lives on in an endowed fund for the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, Massachusetts. It is likely because of this private ownership that the book was maintained in such good condition, whereas the fragile glassine pages of copies used for anatomical instruction by hundreds of students are often torn or removed.