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The Yale Alumni Magazine is owned and operated by Yale Alumni Publications, Inc., a nonprofit corporation independent of Yale University. The content of the magazine and its website is the responsibility of the editors and does not necessarily reflect the views of Yale or its officers. |
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Medical mystery On the storage shelves of the Medical Historical Library, among the antique syringes, the dolls with anatomically correct goiters, and a scrap of gray mosaic labeled "Fragment of the house of the surgeon of Pompeii," there is a box the size of a pack of cards. On its hinged lid is the inscription Chasse a l'hippopotame et au crocrodile and a reproduction, in bas-relief, of a 1615 Peter Paul Rubens painting. Inside the box are two small white pills; nobody knows what they are. "It's a calling-card case, mid- to late nineteenth century," says David Barquist, acting curator of the Art Gallery's American decorative arts collection. Barquist believes it was molded from gutta-percha, a tropical resin first used in Europe in the 1840s. The faux-wood box is part of the medical instruments collection, a repository of all sorts of stuff, some priceless, some not, donated to the medical school by alumni and faculty. Yale's libraries don't have the staff to catalogue every item; in the case of this box, says librarian Toby Appel, "we don't know where it came from.
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