The Ars Medica Collection at the Philadelphia Museum of Art

• Museums
• Art
• History of medicine
• Photography
• Paintings

Ever since its establishment in 1948, the Ars Medica Collection in the Department of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs at the Philadelphia Museum of Art has been carefully and continuously nurtured; it now ranks as a major resource of worldwide reputation. Numbering more than 2000 works on paper, its contents range from a French early 15th-century illuminated miniature on vellum of Saint Apollonia (to whom one prayed for toothache relief) to a 1980s AIDS poster. Its subject matter reflects the broadest spectrum of medical topics, including examples from pharmacy, dentistry, nursing, and even veterinary medicine.

Significant modern collections of medical images have been formed by private collectors as well as by public institutions, where they serve as resources for research and education. Representative holdings reside at numerous universities and medical libraries. The largest and most comprehensive include the Wellcome Library in London; the National Library of Medicine in Bethesda, Maryland; the Bouvet Collection at l'Ordre des Pharmaciens in Paris; and the Fry Collection at the Yale University School of Medicine in New Haven, Connecticut. The Ars Medica Collection at the Philadelphia Museum of Art differs from those at other institutions: It is the only collection of its kind to be housed in an art museum.

By the 1920s, the Philadelphia Museum of Art had begun to form a small general collection of old master and modern prints and drawings, some of which depicted medical subject matter. However, it was not until 1948 that a specialized collection devoted to medical themes was initiated with an opening grant of $10 000 from the Philadelphia-based pharmaceutical firm Smith, Kline and French. It was believed that Philadelphia offered an ideal home for such a collection because the study and practice of medicine were deeply rooted in the city's history and the region was home to …