The National Library of Medicine’s second-oldest book, which disappeared nearly 50 years ago, has returned home. Treatises of Medicine, a 198-page parchment manuscript copied by a monk 855 years ago, went on display at the library May 22.
Acquired by the library in 1921, the book disappeared in the 1940s or 1950s and then reappeared in 1998, when it was offered for sale by B&L Rootenberg Rare Books to the Wellcome Library in London, the Washington Post reported May 22. A librarian researching the manuscript suspected it was a volume listed as missing from NLM in a census of medieval manuscripts. The dealer eventually returned the book to the NLM, at a loss of about $75,000.
“It belongs there, and that’s why we gave it back,” said Howard Rootenberg. The firm had bought the manuscript from another book dealer, who purchased it at the estate sale of former NLM librarian Claudius Francis Mayer. Some speculate Mayer took the book home for safekeeping when the library moved in the 1940s and forgot to return it.
Posted May 29, 2000.