Item talk:Q27977

Harvard University Library Open Collections Program:

William Norton Bullard Collection

Dr. William Norton Bullard (AB 1875, MD 1880, Harvard University) specialized in neurology. He was designated physician for diseases of the nervous system at Boston City Hospital and staff neurologist at Boston’s Children’s Hospital. In 1900, Dr. Bullard married Mary R. Reynolds, and together they began to assemble an extraordinary collection of early medical books, concentrating at first on 16th- and 17th-century titles, then turning later to the acquisition of incunabula, or early printed books. This collection is now located at the Countway Library.

A manuscript volume from this collection, noted below, consists of medical treatises and prescriptions, written ca. 1450 by an English scribe who was probably a physician. It includes John of Burgundy’s Tractatus contra morbum epidemialem, with a summary in English; drawings of urine glasses, and a man with bodily and astrological regions coordinated.