Montréal Baroque Festival at Osler Library

Last Saturday we were pleased to host a sold out festival event in the Osler Library’s Wellcome Camera. Vincent Lauzer (pictured below) performed solo works for recorder as part of the 14th annual Montréal Baroque Festival. Each piece was composed by young Quebec composers, inspired and influenced by the Baroque style. We look forward to hosting more music events like this in the future! Details about a winter concert series will be announced later this year.

Vincent Lauzer performs at the Osler Library, part of Montreal Baroque Festival 2016.

Vincent Lauzer performing at the Osler Library’s Wellcome Camera, part of Montreal Baroque Festival 2016.

For more information about the Montréal Baroque Festival, please visit https://www.montrealbaroque.com.

Pathologisch-anatomische Tafeln

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Illustration from Pathologisch-anatomische Tafeln: nach frischen Präparaten mit erläuterndem anatomisch-klinischem text, circa 1892

Recent summer housekeeping has turned up a series of rare mounted chromographed plate illustrations from late-19th century patho-anatomical atlas Pathologisch-anatomische Tafeln: nach frischen Präparaten mit erläuterndem anatomisch-klinischem text (Pathological anatomy plates: reproduced from fresh preparations with explanatory anatomical-clinical text) by German internist Alfred Kast (1856-1903).

The archives has eight of these illustrations in total, donated to the Osler Library back in the 1970s as part of the Maude Abbott Collection. Unfortunately no copy of this atlas exists at McGill, however WorldCat shows The Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library at the University of Toronto as having a copy in their catalogue. For those interested in seeing more of this series, The Wellcome Trust in London has fifteen of Kast’s anatomical illustrations included in their online Wellcome Images collection.

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Illustration with microscopic detail from Pathologisch-anatomische Tafeln: nach frischen Präparaten mit erläuterndem anatomisch-klinischem text, circa 1892

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Illustration with microscopic detail from Pathologisch-anatomische Tafeln: nach frischen Präparaten mit erläuterndem anatomisch-klinischem text, circa 1892

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Illustration from Pathologisch-anatomische Tafeln: nach frischen Präparaten mit erläuterndem anatomisch-klinischem text, circa 1892

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Illustration from Pathologisch-anatomische Tafeln: nach frischen Präparaten mit erläuterndem anatomisch-klinischem text, circa 1892

Preserving the “art” in Heart

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A sampling of Maude Abbott’s wooden printing blocks, housed at Osler Library.

Last week in the archives, we made a few updates to our Maude Abbott Collection that included rehousing and preserving various media and artifacts. For students who are unfamiliar, or are discovering the work of Dr. Maude Elizabeth Abbott (1869-1940) for the first time, we encourage you to explore the Osler Library’s collection.

Maude Abbott was a true medical luminary and a pioneer for women in medicine. Her extraordinary career garnered an international reputation for excellence in pathology, as well as medical museums – particularly impressive considering she was denied entry as a young medical student to McGill’s Faculty of Medicine in 1889 because of her gender (women were not admitted to the Faculty until 1917).

William Osler was one of Abbott’s greatest mentors, and was the first to encourage her research into congenital cardiac disease. These wooden printers blocks (above) and glass lantern slides (below) represent a small sampling of the many diagrams and illustrations created for Abbott’s ground-breaking Atlas of Congenital Cardiac Disease, published in 1936.

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A sampling of Maude Abbott’s glass slides, housed at Osler Library.

Wilder Penfield Digital Collection

penfield_public_screenWe are pleased to announce this week that the Wilder Penfield Digital Collection is now available to access online! The new website includes Wilder Graves Penfield (1891-1976) biographical information, as well as meters and meters worth of digitized archival images, letters, and other materials from the Osler Library’s extensive Penfield fonds.

Students and researchers are encouraged to explore this website for information ranging from Penfield’s childhood, education and medical training, to his widely influential research. As founder and head of the Montreal Neurological Institute (MNI) from 1933-1960, Penfield was Canada’s foremost neurosurgeon at the time and his career continues to influence generations of neurologists around the world.

The digitization of this collection was made possible thanks to a generous grant from the R. Howard Webster Foundation, obtained by the late Dr. William Feindel (1918-2014).