Books & Bodies
Tour and Talk at America's First Hospital

Medical books are profoundly important to physicians, nurses, and hospitals, indeed, all of health care. Imagine, for example, medicine without Henry Gray's Anatomy of the Human Body...

Join us for a tour of the original pine building of historic Pennsylvania Hospital, the nation's first hospital, and see a small exhibition of rare books curated especially for "Books & Bodies." This living history of medical science was founded in 1751 by Benjamin Franklin and Dr. Thomas Bond. Some say ghosts still inhabit the old building, watching over the care and preservation of this fabulous monument to American medicine.

The tour, led by Pennsylvania Hospital Archivist Stacey Peeples, will end in the famous Surgical Amphitheatre, the oldest surviving surgical amphitheatre in North America. Here, Charles Rosenberg, Professor of the History of Science and Ernest E. Monrad Professor in the Social Sciences at Harvard University and one of the world's leading medical historians, will take you on a magical mystery tour of medical libraries and their importance to the practice of medicine.

The Penn Humanities Forum gratefully acknowledges the generous assistance of Stacey Peeples, Archivist, Pennsylvania Hospital, and Edward Mormon, Director,
The Francis C. Wood Institute for the History of Medicine, College of Physicians of Philadelphia in preparing the exhibition.