Los Angeles County Medical Association collection of prints and ephemera

The Los Angeles County Medical Association (LACMA) collection of prints and ephemera contains over 200 printed items related to the medical profession. The materials include satirical prints, medical curiosities, significant figures in the history of medicine, architectural views of hospitals, and the early years of LACMA itself. Many of the prints are engravings, some are lithographs, and a small selection are reproductions printed during a later period. The collection also includes personal correspondence, medical certificates and photographs of members of LACMA. The materials date from 1644 to 1946, although the bulk of the material date from the late 18th to early 19th centuries. Noted artists from the collection include British caricaturists Isaac Cruikshank and Thomas Rowlandson, French engraver Pierre Roch Vigneron, German portrait artist Adolf Eckstein, and French anatomist, painter, and printmaker Jacques Fabian Gautier d'Agoty.

Materials are arranged by genre or item type, and prints are loosely grouped topically: British caricatures, medical curiosities, portraits, architectural prints, and general medical prints. Prints are described at the item-level, with artists, printers, and publishers indexed by name when available. Manuscripts, photographs, and ephemera are described at the folder level and include a variety of materials, including trade cards, medical advertisements, booklets, leaflets, periodicals, and printed billheads and letterheads (with and without manuscript text). Notable items include a series of obituaries (from approximately 1938) concerning the death of Dr. Joseph Pomeroy Widney, co-founder and second president of the University of Southern California (Box 4, folder 3); a 1789 manuscript import certificate regarding surgical instruments imported from London for the Pennsylvania Hospital (Box 4, folder 4); and an 1880 photo business card (printed in both English and Spanish) for physician and surgeon Dr. Tom She Ben, a Chinese doctor who practiced medicine in late 19th-century Los Angeles (Box 4, folder 6). A scrapbook assembled in approximately 1920 by members of LACMA contains print and manuscript material related to "Doctors and Specialists," as well as a specimen of human hair.

The collection offers information regarding medicine, health, pharmaceuticals, patent medicines, quacks and quackery spanning over five centuries, as well as social perspectives on both the practices and practitioners in these fields. Also of particular interest are the medical curiosities prints. The images document the history of medical practitioners, methods, and materials in Britain and the United States as well as ailments and illnesses common during this period. Several items also help document the professionalization of medicine in Southern California. As graphic materials, the collection highlights developing techniques and trends in printmaking while documenting the artists, engravers, lithographers, printers, and publishers involved in the creative process.