Lister Hill Letter
Newsletter of the Lister Hill Library of the Health Sciences at UAB

January/February 2000

CUNNINGHAM COLLECTION MOVES TO HISTORICAL COLLECTIONS, 3RD FLOOR LISTER HILL LIBRARY

     On Dec. 7 the Cunningham Collection was relocated from the second floor of Lister Hill Library to the historical collections area on the third floor.  The move was prompted by two major considerations:  First was security; second was organizational.  The issue of security for this valuable collection of early American imprints and other predominantly 19th-century materials has been a major concern for some time.  The second floor location was a public area, and although this provided open access to the collection, it also compromised the safety of these books, many of which are worth hundreds and in a few cases thousands of dollars.  Secondly, the nature of the collection itself in early American medical treatises and texts augments and supports the existing Reynolds Library materials in significant ways and is logically better situated proximate to these historical books and documents.  As such, housing this collection on the third floor of LHL appreciably expands the primary sources for the Historical Collections Unit of UAB.
     The name Cunningham does not refer to a donor or benefactor but rather to the individual responsible for the system by which it has been classified, Eileen Cunningham (1894-1965), Head Librarian at the Vanderbilt School of Medicine.  Her Classification for Medical Literature was issued in four editions, becoming a widely adopted classification scheme for medical libraries and forming the basis for the current classification standard established by the National Library of Medicine.  The Cunningham Collection at LHL has no affiliation with the Eileen R. Cunningham Collection at the Eskind Biomedical Library of Vanderbilt University.
     Lister Hill Library's Cunningham Collection comprises imprints from the Medical College of Alabama at Mobile, including rare books and pamphlets authored by that institution's first professor of surgery, Josiah Clark Nott (1804-1873).  Other valuable works include titles by the French physiologist and pioneer in experimental medicine and physiological chemistry, Claude Bernard (1813-1878); scarce early American commentaries on the 18th century Italian anatomist Giovanni Morgagni (1682-1771); and historically rich dispensatories, formularies, and materia medicas from the early 19th century which form a very detailed picture of therapeutics in America prior to the Civil War.
     We are happy and honored to assume responsibility for this collection.  Plans for cataloging and classifying these materials according to current bibliographic control standards have been made with the LHL Cataloging Department and Library Director Scott Plutchak.

Mike Flannery
Associate Director for Historical Collections