Trove of ancient and rare medical textbooks goes up for auction

A neurosurgeon’s trove of early medical textbooks is going up for auction.

The star item in the six-decade-old collection is a 1476 Italian first edition of Pliny the Elder’s Historia naturalis, which spans medicine, zoology, mathematics, and physics, and is expected to fetch up to $150,000.

Rare medical books are soaring in popularity — and value, The Wall Street Journal reported, suggesting readers “brush off those old guides to bloodletting and treating a gunshot wound with boiling oil.”

One cardiac surgeon-collector even bid on a text while performing a surgery, he told the Journal: “I can look at these books and I feel like I’m enveloped by their wisdom, like part of their spirit is in the room with me.”