Gift endows library post and pays tribute to “a nurturing treasure”

John Robinson Bumstead surely knew the story of how his father became the first physician to administer penicillin in the United States. He was 17 years old in March 1942 when his father, John Henry Bumstead, M.D., was caring for 33-year-old Anne Miller. Neither transfusions nor surgery nor sulfa drugs had cured Miller of a streptococcal infection. She was dying and Bumstead was desperate. His colleague, physiologist John F. Fulton, Ph.D., M.D., had befriended the Australian researcher Howard W. Florey, Ph.D., and helped him come to the United States to begin production of penicillin; Bumstead asked Fulton to obtain a sample of the still-experimental antibiotic. It worked, and Miller lived to be 90.

When he died in July 2003, the younger Bumstead remembered in his will the medical library, as well as Connecticut’s historic Mystic Seaport, where he was a librarian, and New Haven’s St. Thomas’ Episcopal Church, where he was a parishioner. Bumstead left $1.2 million to the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library. Director R. Kenny Marone, M.L.S., used the gift to endow a librarianship at what she calls “one of the premier medical historical libraries in the world.”

Built in 1940, the library was established by three men who donated their collections of tens of thousands of volumes of medical literature: neurosurgeon Harvey W. Cushing, M.D.; Swiss tuberculosis specialist Arnold C. Klebs, M.D.; and Fulton. Cushing, says librarian Toby Appel, Ph.D., M.L.S., saw the library as “the heart of the medical school,” a uniting force in an age of increasing specialization. Thanks to Bumstead’s gift, Appel is now the John Robinson Bumstead Librarian for Medical History.

The two-story room that holds much of the 125,000-volume historical collection has a vintage air, with a vaulted wooden ceiling, twin balconies and a fireplace. “There’s something special when you can walk in and see Volume One of The Lancet,” says Marone. “We just have marvelous resources.” Among those using the historical library now is medical historian Michael Bliss, Ph.D., at work on a biography of Cushing.

Surgeon, historian and writer Sherwin B. Nuland, M.D. ’55, HS ’61, is among those who have written about the room and its “treasured stacks.” In Doctors: The Biography of Medicine, he writes: “Of all the libraries in all the educational institutions of our world, there is none quite like this one. … a sanctum containing the lore and the collected reminiscences of the art of healing ... a nurturing spring for renewal and strengthening of purpose.”