James Moores Ball: Ophthalmologist, medical historian, bibliophile.
James Moores Ball (1862-1929) was an ophthalmologist in St. Louis, Missouri, who excelled as a medical historian and collector of rare and historic books about the history of anatomy. During his lifetime, he was best known as the author of a comprehensive, authoritative, and popular textbook titled Modern Ophthalmology First published in 1904, there were five further editions. Ball was very interested in the history of anatomy and wrote two books on this subject, the first being a biography of Andreas Vesalius, one of the earliest in English, and the second a history of the resurrection men or grave robbers who sold corpses to professors of anatomy and surgery for teaching purposes. His legacy today is the 470 volumes of his personal library, which are now in the Archives and Rare Books department of the Becker Medical Library of the Washington University School of Medicine. These texts are one of their major collections, concentrating on the history of anatomy, beginning with a first edition of Vesalius's De Humani Corporis Fabrica and holding many important and beautiful landmark volumes of anatomical atlases.
Department of Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences, and the Center for History Of Medicine, Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis, MO, USA feibelr@gmail.com.
Robert M
RM
Feibel
D000715:Anatomy / Q000266:history*; D006663:Historiography; D049672:History, 19th Century; D049673:History, 20th Century; D008923:Missouri; D000072163:Ophthalmologists / Q000266:history*
Ball; James Moores; grave robbers; history of anatomy; history of ophthalmology; resurrectionists