Abstract
The paper presents the collection of manuscripts and early printed books of the Institute for History of Medicine of the First Faculty of Medicine of Charles University, as well as their cataloging and further information-processing at the Institute of Scientific Information of the First Faculty of Medicine of Charles University and General University Hospital in Prague. In this paper, we focused mainly on the manuscripts, taking into account that the provenance of a book can be considered a key to interpreting their personal and information connections.
Casting light into the history of individual books is - in this case - more crucial than it would seem because the physicians, who owned these objects, who were the authors of their texts or who used them in some way, often had a paramount influence on numerous people's lives, or even on the health of a whole population, subtly shaping the path of history. Our aim is to bring forward the added value of the books, which they provide besides the actual medical knowledge that is fixed in them in written form.
We thoroughly consider the people that crossed the path of said books. Here, employing the future perspectives of computer-processed models of networks (consisting of owners, scribes, authors, their colleagues etc.) is bound to bring new findings for the history of medicine, general history, as well as for historical linguistic research or for describing the structure of the library collection itself.