In 1935, the Vanderbilt medical library acquired a unique, 840-item collection of books, pamphlets and newspaper clippings on hypnotism from the personal library of the prominent German psychiatrist Dr. Albert Moll (1862–1939). Offered sight unseen by a German bookseller for the equivalent of $208 ($4,900 adjusted for inflation), the multilingual collection offered a unique perspective on the history of hypnosis as well as related subjects such as animal magnetism, psychotherapy, mesmerism, sleepwalking, criminology, and even yoga. Most of the books are marked with Moll’s personal bookplate, which carries the Latin motto Cogniti veri fortiter tenax, or “strongly clinging to the knowledge of the truth.”
Despite its extraordinary character and promise, the Moll collection remained largely forgotten over the next few decades after the library tried unsuccessfully to sell it. In the early 1970s, the collection was rediscovered and minimally cataloged before eventually making its way to the shelves of the History of Medicine Collections. In recent years, the Moll collection became a higher priority, and in spring 2023, the library’s Cataloging and Metadata department began a yearlong project to fully catalog each volume, making the collection accessible through modern discovery tools for the first time.
The oldest item in the collection is a rare Latin work on sleep from 1556 by Italian physician Giovanni Argenterio. Other highlights include a 1671 English translation of the French philosopher Jean-Francois Senault’s The Use of Passions; works by Scottish surgeon James Braid, who coined the term “hypnotism” in the mid-19th century; titles by Thomas Fienus (1658) and Clément-Joseph Tissot (1799); and a monograph on sleep (1911) by Moll’s professional rival, Sigmund Freud.
Along with his research in hypnotism, Moll had interests in medical ethics, medical psychology, parapsychology and the occult, and eugenics. He was perhaps best remembered as a sexologist, but his reputation suffered after disagreements and conflicts with Freud and others. Moll, who was Jewish, was living in Nazi Germany when Vanderbilt purchased his collection, but it’s still unclear why he sold it for such a low price.
For more on the history of the collection, see: Shelley HS, Teloh MH. The Moll collection on hypnotism at Vanderbilt. Bull Med Libr Assoc. 1977 Jan;65(1):65-6. PMID: 831890; PMCID: PMC199302. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/831890/
Special thanks to Zora Breeding, Alicia Zalusky and Jim Thweatt for their hard work on this important collection.