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It all started out innocently enough. On a family vacation, Benson Wilcox, MD, wandered into a local bookstore and found an old medical book in Latin by Boerhaave, a Dutch physician after whom "Boerhaave Syndrome" was named — a condition well known to Dr. Wilcox as a thoracic surgeon. And so he began to collect books, lots of them.
To keep the collection's size manageable, he decided to focus primarily on books in English about thoracic surgery, a relatively "new" field with about 100 years of literature. The collection began to grow with first editions of about 25 of the classic thoracic surgery texts, and it expanded to books about thoracic diseases, anatomy, and physiology which preceded the development of thoracic surgery as a specialty. "I intended to read all of them, "he says, "but before I knew it, the house was imploding with books."
Realizing the magnitude of his collection, the requirements for maintaining and organizing the material, and ultimately, the value it might have for others as well, Dr. Wilcox generously gave his collection to the Health Sciences Library, creating The Wilcox Collection. It is now accessible to the Library's thousands of users on campus and is browseable in the online catalog.
Dr. Wilcox, a native North Carolinian, received his AB ('53) and his MD ('57) from UNC. He is married to Patsy Davis, also an avid book collector with an extensive collection of poetry, both antiquarian and contemporary. Dr. Wilcox and his wife also support the Wilcox Rare Book Endowment for the purchase of rare and historic books, which has enabled the Library to expand its historical collections. The Endowment was started in 1980 with seed funding from colleagues who sought to honor Dr. Wilcox.
Over his fifty-plus years at Carolina, he has known each of the Library's Directors and many of the staff, and felt that their dedication to the development of a world-class collection was an asset to the campus and to his colleagues. As a medical student he participated in founding the Bullitt Club for the study of the history of medicine, and over the years since has contributed as a speaker to the group and encouraged the Library's growing interest in the history of medicine.
In 1984 Dr. Wilcox began presenting a rare book to the Library each year in honor of his senior resident-a practice he continued until his retirement as Chief of Cardiothoracic Surgery at UNC. He also gave the Library historical books on tuberculosis, ensuring that HSL's holdings rank among the best in the country. In 1998 and 1999, he donated most of his remaining historic material, including the collection of all major cardiothoracic texts from 1896 to 1966, and a collection of original and facsimiles of classic medical texts.
Some items needed a bit of TLC. Fortunately, the Library's preservationist had the skills to meet that need. This collection has now grown to over 1,400 books, journals, reprints, and other items, many of which are extremely rare. The major areas represented are cardiothoracic medicine and surgery, tuberculosis, military medicine, surgery, and history of medicine. The oldest book in the Wilcox Collection is a 1526 edition of the Works of Hippocrates.
Dr. Wilcox describes his family's commitment to education as "familial," as his mother and his grandparents were teachers, as are two of his daughters. He sees libraries as central to the mission of medical education. The pursuit of knowledge, the relationships of early discoveries to current practice, and the passage of wisdom from one generation to another are all reflected in antiquarian medical books.
Dr. Wilcox's specialties are congenital heart disease, pediatric cardiac morphology, pediatric chest disease, pulmonary circulation, and he is the author or editor of several books, including Surgical Anatomy of the Heart, which is published by Cambridge University Press and has been translated into Japanese and Chinese. Dr. Wilcox has also authored scores of articles in his research specialties; his curriculum vitae is available online.