University of Pittsburgh Library System (ULS)
Archives & Special Collections (A&SC)
The department of Archives & Special Collections in the University of Pittsburgh Library System collects, describes, and preserves a global collection of rare books and archival materials. Our archival collections are strong in medicine; literary and performing arts, with an emphasis on Black artists; horror; labor unions; local history; science; philosophy; and music. Our rare books represent 19th c. children’s literature, early-modern natural philosophy, science fiction, and horror.
A&SC’s collections in medicine reflect a university with a history of innovative medical research and practice, which has continued to accelerate since the 1950s. The Archives of Scientific Philosophy contains the early history of the discipline of the philosophy of science, founded in a large part by philosophers who emigrated from Europe in the 1930s. A growing collection of rare books in natural philosophy and mathematics contains copies with contemporary annotations.
Medicine – The University of Pittsburgh has been a leader in clinical care and surgery since the middle of the 20th century. In the 1950s, Jonas Salk and his team in the Virus Research Laboratory created a safe and effective polio vaccine. In the 1960s, Peter Safar developed Cardio Pulmonary Resuscitation (CPR) and established the first ambulance service to treat patients before arriving at the hospital—all staffed by local Black trainees. Surgeons such as George Magovern devised a sutureless heart valve and Peter Jannetta created a novel treatment to cure trigeminal neuralgia. Transplant medicine was advanced by Henry Bahnson who performed one of the earliest heart transplants and Thomas Starzl, who represents our largest medical collection. Starzl not only pioneered liver transplantation and perfected immunosuppressant drugs, essentially making major organ transplants a reality, but also helped establish the national network for organ procurement.
Archives of Scientific Philosophy (ASP) – Scientific Philosophy was the name Hans Reichenbach gave to a form of philosophy which eschewed metaphysics, adopting logic and an empiricist perspective as the true norms for philosophy. Representatives of both the Vienna Circle and the Berlin Group which flourished in inter-war Germany are the chronological starting point of the collections in Pittsburgh. This includes the papers of Rudolf Carnap, Hans Reichenbach, Rose Rand, Herbert Feigl, and Carl Hempel. Other figures in ASP show how the discipline of the philosophy of science grew alongside American Pragmatism and diversified. Segments of many collections have been made available on ULS Digital Collections, our public facing portal to all digitized collection materials.
Astronomy – The Allegheny Observatory was founded in 1858 at the Western University of Pennsylvania (now the University of Pittsburgh). Research covered sunspots, astral spectrography, and the particulate nature of Saturn’s rings. Under director Samuel P. Langley, the observatory funded its research by selling time to the booming railroad industry and cities throughout the region. A part of this collection is being made available on ULS Digital Collections.
ULS Digital Collections – The ULS has so far digitized 200,000 unique objects (comprised of 2.4 million digital pages or images) and made them available online. They are discoverable both through this global search tool and through the finding aids for archival collections.
Archives of Scientific Philosophy – This portal provides a complete list of all collections of philosophers available. Finding aids exist for most of them, but if you are interested in an unprocessed collection, please contact the History of Science and Medicine Archivist.