In 1926 Dr. Joseph Lyon Miller, an alumnus of the Medical College of Virginia and a practicing physician in West Virginia, offered to the Richmond Academy of Medicine a valuable collection of old medical books. Dr. Miller was both a renaissance man and antiquarian book collector.
The Miller Collection includes rare portraits, prints,
letters, and silhouettes of medical significance besides its 1600 volumes. Among the important items are
Andreas Vesalius's De Fabrica Humāni Corporis , second edition, Guy de
Chauliac's Chirurgia Magna,1499; Aureolus Paracelsus's Chirurgia Magna &
Minor, 1573, a rare first English edition of Ambrose Paré's Works, 1634;
Carbon's Libro del Arte; Pratis's De Pariente et Partu and the first English
edition of William Harvey's Anatomical Exercitations,1653.
The Miller Collection is now formally and finally back at
The Medical College of Virginia-Virginia Commonwealth University Health
Sciences Library- as part of the permanent archive.
Amazing.
