The historical collections of the Lane Medical Library originated with the foundations of Stanford Medical School in the mid-19th century. Containing rare books and manuscripts from the 13th through 20th centuries, they are the first library of medical history formed in the western United States. These collections, which include rare books and manuscripts of great historical importance, rarity and beauty, provide invaluable resources for research not only on medical history, but in inter-disciplinary fields such as art history, philosophy, classics, and the history of printing. The Lane historical collections are also a tangible Lane Medical Library as the first major medical library west of record of the nineteenth century origins of Stanford Medical School in the Medical Department of the College of the Pacific and Cooper Medical College, and reminders of the historic role of the Chicago. In discussing the historical collections as a whole we need to consider how they were formed.

Lane Library's historical collections were formed in the second half of the nineteenth century and during the first three decades of the twentieth century by four scholar-physicians. The group included Dr. Levi Cooper Lane (1828-1902), founder of Stanford Medical School and the Lane Medical Library, Dr. Adolph Barkan (1845-1935), the Stanford physician who was most responsible for building the historical collections, Dr. Karl Sudhoff (1853-1938), a German physician, historian of medicine, and bibliographer who advised Barkan, and Dr. Ernst Seidel, a German physician and collector of Persian and Arabic medicine and culture, whose library Barkan purchased for Stanford. In creating this pioneering library of medical history "out West" Lane, Barkan, and Sudhoff intended to bring the ancient and rich heritage of European medicine to the young medical frontier of California.

Dr. Levi Cooper Lane (1828-1902), and his uncle, Dr. Elias Samuel Cooper (1820-1862), founded the medical schools that would evolve into the Stanford University School of Medicine. Lane graduated from Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia in 1851. As an assistant surgeon in the U. S. Navy from 1855-59, Dr. Lane traveled all over the world. He became proficient in Greek and Latin and other languages, and collected a library that eventually included numerous early medical books, including works published in classical languages.

Prior to Dr. Lane's arrival in San Francisco, Dr. Lane's uncle, the controversial and extremely enterprising surgeon, Elias Samuel Cooper (1820-1862), established himself in medical practice in San Francisco. Cooper received his M.D. from the University of St. Louis in 1841, and established a highly controversial practice of medicine in Danville, Illinois. There he lectured on anatomy, and was accused of robbing graves to obtain cadavers for dissection. After Cooper's enemies circulated handbills reading, "Rally to the rescue of the graves of your friends," Cooper decided leave Illinois for points west. However, Cooper also had many supporters. When he left Danville for the west coast the town's newspaper editorialized, "We know few men of his profession more worthy of the high reputation he has acquired by his ability. We congratulate our friends of Oregon and California at the happy advantage they have of receiving among them a medical man of such capacity."(1) In 1854, prior to his arrival in the Golden State, Cooper wrote to his friend Hugh Keenan expressing his ambition to found a medical school.

When Cooper reached San Francisco in 1855, only a few years after the gold rush, San Francisco was, of course, still very much a frontier community. Its population was 56,000, and the population the entire state was 360,000. In San Francisco Cooper established Dr. Cooper's Eye, Ear and Feet Clinic, which he advertised extensively. He built up a very successful medical practice, and incurred the animosity of certain other physicians.(2) A year later Cooper was offering to free lectures in anatomy and surgery.

On September 22, 1858 Cooper formed the first medical school on the Pacific Coast, calling it the Medical Department of the College of the Pacific.(3) The first course of lectures at the new school in San Francisco commenced in May, 1859.

While his uncle was pioneering the development of medical education in San Francisco, Dr. Lane continued his education in Europe.

Following his resignation from the Navy, and in order to prepare himself for professorial duties in the Medical Department of the University of the Pacific, Lane spent over a year in Europe. At the University of Göttingen in Germany he took a Special Course of Vivisections with Rudolph Wagner; and also a Practical Course of Physiological and Toxicological Chemistry in the Laboratory there, under the supervision of Professors Boedeker and Woehler. At Paris, besides attending some of the principal hospitals, he attended a Course of Vivisections with Flourens; and also a Course of Chemical Lectures by Fremy and Chevreul.(4)

Upon returning to the United States in 1861, Dr. Lane traveled to San Francisco to join his uncle on the faculty of the Medical Department of the University of the Pacific as professor of physiology. We have no evidence that this first California medical school owned a significant library but Dr. Cooper rapidly became involved with publishing, helping to finance the Pacific Medical & Surgical Journal when it was first issued in 1858. After his relationship with that journal became controversial Dr. Cooper established and edited the San Francisco Medical Press, the first issue of which appeared in 1860.

Tragically, Elias Cooper died in 1862, probably from renal failure, at the age of only 42. In his short life Cooper had not only trained a lot of physicians but had written numerous significant medical papers and numerous editorials. Upon Cooper's death Lane inherited Cooper's lucrative surgical practice and also succeeded him as editor of the San Francisco Medical Press, publishing an outstanding eulogy of his uncle in that pioneering journal in 1862. Lane, who had assisted his uncle in many operations, reminded his readers that even though Cooper was largely self-taught as a surgeon, Cooper's surgical skills were extraordinary:

As an operator, he manifested, in a pre-eminent degree, that cool daring, that deliberate self-possession, - which the most untoward circumstance, so far from disturbing, seemed only to increase, - that instant comprehension of the difficulties which happen to arise during an operation, and that intuitive readiness to surmount them, which are the essential elements of great and original surgical genius. Not only was he self-possessed himself, but his manner was such as to thoroughly inspire his patient with the most perfect confidence that he was wholly secure in his hands; and of his spectator, no one who saw with what perfect ease the chisel and drill moved in his hand during his exsections, and the use of the silver ligature for ununited fractures, or with what rapidity, at one bold sweep, he deeply divided the structures of those regions of the body which most surgeons approach with caution, but who, in the one case, were thoroughly impressed with the superiority of his mechanical talent, and in the other, that his daring celerity could only be founded upon that accuracy of anatomical knowledge, which rendered the tissues, as it were, transparent under his eye. I think that no one, who ever stood by his side at such a time, feared for a moment, that the operation would not end successfully.(5)

But after the death of Cooper in 1862, the Medical Department of the College of the Pacific "languished." Historians have provided no explanation for this; perhaps it was because Dr. Lane was too young to assume responsibility for administration. In any event, the school was re-organized in November 1864 as the Toland Medical School under the direction of Dr. Hugh Huger Toland. From 1865 to 1870 Toland's school was the only medical school in California.

In 1870 Dr. Lane and several of the original faculty of Toland Medical School resigned from the Toland Medical School and opened their own school on Stockton Street south of Geary in San Francisco, calling it the Medical College of the Pacific. About the same time the University of California approached Dr. Toland concerning the transfer of the Toland Medical School to the University of California. This was accomplished in 1872.

Like his deceased uncle, Dr. Lane became professor of surgery at the new Medical College of the Pacific.

In 1882 Dr. Lane, who had by this time built up a significant fortune by investing in real estate, paid for the construction of a spectacular new building to house the Medical College of the Pacific at the corner of Sacramento and Webster Streets in San Francisco. The entire fourth floor was devoted to the library, periodical room, and museum. That building remained in continuous use as a medical school for 76 years (1883-1959). At this time the name of the medical school was changed to Cooper Medical College in honor of Dr. Lane's uncle.

The relationship between Dr. Lane and Dr. Cooper was extraordinarily close.

According to Wilson, As a token of high regard for his uncle, Dr. Lane arranged for Dr. Cooper's brain and heart each to be preserved in a separate glass jar. The jars were then mounted side by side in a sturdy framework that allowed for clear display of the organs. . . . These were originally kept in an inner sanctum of the college museum.(6)

In 1890 Cooper Medical College expanded when Dr. Lane paid for a second building of equal size for lecture halls and laboratories. When Lane Hospital was constructed during 1893 and 1894 at Clay and Webster Streets adjacent to the medical school the major contributor was again Dr. Lane, who also the Lane Hospital Training School for Nurses at this time. By 1890 the library at Cooper Medical College contained 776 volumes, of which 413 were in locked cases and 320 were on open shelves.

In addition to his surgical practice Dr. Lane taught extensively and wrote numerous erudite and scholarly papers. To augment his medical education received at Jefferson Medical College Dr. and Mrs. Lane spent the years 1874 through 1876 in England, France, and Germany. In England Dr. Lane was examined concerning his medical knowledge and elected to the Royal College of Surgeons. In France Dr. Lane kept his notes in French, in which he was fluent. In Germany Lane entered the medical school at Wilhelms Universität of Berlin. His principle faculty advisor was Bernhard von Langenbeck, and he also studied under Rudolf Virchow. Lane, who was also fluent in German, received the degree of Doctor of Medicine and Surgery, magna cum laude, from Berlin University on March 7, 1876.(7)

Wilson quotes Dr. Lane's assistant surgeon, Dr. Rixford, concerning Dr. Lane's intellectual attainments and unusual habits of study:

Dr. Lane was a highly educated man. With a fair preliminary education, he continued to be a student throughout his long life. Never robust, it was by sheer force of will and self-discipline, and by dividing his sleep, that he formed the habit of using six or seven hours in the middle of the night for study. Six nights in the week he read medicine and did his writing, the seventh night he read in general literature. Thus he was widely read, especially in the literature of surgery in the nineteenth century. He was fond of the classics, read Greek and Latin, also French, German and Spanish. He translated Billroth's Surgical Pathology for his students, laboriously writing it out in longhand in blank books, finishing this or that chapter at three or four in the morning. He read Hippocrates once a year in the Greek.(8)

In 1896 Dr. Lane published a large surgical textbook on the Surgery of the Head and Neck. This was the first textbook on the subject published in the United States. Lane had intended this to be part of a three-volume encyclopedia of surgery; however, he did not live to complete it. For his reading, study and research Dr. Lane also collected a library of about 2000 volumes, including many early and classic works in Latin and Greek which he was fond of reading. This library would become the core of the Lane Medical Library.

Upon the deaths of Dr. and Mrs. Lane in 1902 one third of the Lane estate went toward purchase of land and construction of a building for a Lane Medical Library to be built in Dr. Lane's honor. The Cooper Medical College trustees purchased a building site and established a Lane Medical Library Fund, but did not initially break ground for a new library building. At this time the historical collections received their foundation from the donation of Dr. Lane's library of about 2000 books. Various rare volumes from Dr. Lane's original donation remain in the historical collections. As his friend Dr. Adolph Barkan would write in 1923,

The very first book treasures. . . came to Stanford. . . after the death of that never yet sufficiently appreciated scholar, surgeon and staunch upholder of medical honor: Dr. Levi C. Lane. They were a goodly number of old medical classics: Hippocrates, Galen, Celsus and other with which the founder of Cooper Medical College had studied and annotated diligently and intelligently.