The script in black ink on cream cotton rag paper is filled with flourishes on the title page of the dissertation by University of Pennsylvania medical student Americus Vesuvius Payne, dated March 30, 1820. In the corner, in pencil, is the address, No. 201 Walnut.
Photographed at the Penn Libraries earlier this summer, it is one of more than 60,000 pages in more than 1,000 Penn medical student dissertations from the early 1800s that have been digitized over the past two years. The dissertations are available to the public free of charge through the Libraries online catalogue.
The CLIR-funded project includes 54 volumes and cover all surviving theses from before 1829, with the earliest dating from 1807 and the majority written in the 1820s. There are many more dissertations on the Kislak Center’s shelves, at least five times the amount they have just digitized, Fraas says, while standing in the stacks in front of the rows of black-covered volumes. The Libraries also has hundreds of volumes of lecture notes taken by medical students.
Gary Price (gprice@gmail.com) is a librarian, writer, consultant, and frequent conference speaker based in the Washington D.C. metro area.
He earned his MLIS degree from Wayne State University in Detroit.
Price has won several awards including the SLA Innovations in Technology Award and Alumnus of the Year from the Wayne St. University Library and Information Science Program. From 2006-2009 he was Director of Online Information Services at Ask.com.
