A Preexisting Condition

Photo by Bonnie Arbittier

Amassing a centuries-spanning collection of medical artifacts and foiling a long-running art forgery scheme are among the symptoms.


By the time he was 15 years old, Douglas Arbittier C’87 M’91 GM’95 knew he wanted to be a doctor—and so did everyone in his family. His second great passion in life emerged around the same age, when his mother brought home a white metal examining chair, with a swivel seat that went up and down, that she and a friend had spotted at a garage sale.

“Look what we got you,” his mother said proudly. “It’s medicine and history, and just interesting.” He remembers politely thanking her—and privately thinking, What would I want with that? But that soon changed. “I was hooked,” he says. The chair would become the first item in a collection of more than 3,000 medical artifacts that Arbittier has acquired over the years documenting innovations in medicine.

The Arbittier Museum of Medical History encompasses surgical kits, diagnostic instruments, and other tools used in a wide variety of medical specialties; related historical records; and drawings, paintings, sculptures, and decorative objects that depict physicians at work or were owned by or presented to famous physicians. The oldest items are Persian cupping glasses dating from the ninth to 11th centuries. The collection cuts off in the late 1800s, when sterilization of surgical instruments began—after which, he says, “the tools are all metal and less appealing to the eye.”

“If you’re a collector, once the gene turns on it doesn’t turn off, and it usually is out of control,” says Arbittier, a self-described compulsive. Determined to unravel the history behind his mother’s gift, he traced the label on the chair’s seat bottom to the company’s 1920 medical catalogue, which he obtained from the library. His mother had paid five dollars; the original sold for 80 cents.

He began frequenting flea markets and garage sales in his quest for old medical things, usually vials or drug bottles. In those early days, he was more focused on quantity than quality; five dollars was his limit. “I had no budget whatsoever for this.” He bought a set of stackable barrister bookcases and began displaying his wares. He wrote to the Medical Collectors Association to ask for a free membership because he couldn’t afford the fee, and they granted him one.

And then he went to Penn.

As an undergraduate, he took a few courses in the history of medicine and more in archaeology. “Taking those certainly expanded my horizons, but I had a preexisting condition,” he jokes. As a history minor, he spent a lot of time in the Penn Museum and also discovered Philadelphia’s famed Mütter Museum at the College of Physicians, which specializes in medical history and science [“Museum Men,” Sep|Oct 2022]. “The Mütter was like my second home for a while,” he says. “I loved going there and doing research.”

He continued collecting during his undergraduate years, gradually “upping the ante” on what he was willing to pay while forming relationships with other collectors and dealers. By and by he started following auctions of medical and scientific items at Christie’s and Sotheby’s. “I generally couldn’t afford what was coming up at auction, but I was learning,” he says.

Somewhere between medical school and residency, he began to cull his finds, realizing that “the junk never goes up in value,” he says. “It’s much smarter to sell or trade 10 of those pieces for one middle-of-the-road or nicer piece. And that’s what I started doing.” He also began to zero in on bloodletting and leeching and eventually surgical sets, very early instruments from the 1600s and 1700s, and Civil War–related medical objects in his acquisitions.

Anna N. Dhody, the founder and executive director of the Dhody Research Institute, a nonprofit that focuses on historical medical collections, says she was “blown away” when she visited Arbittier’s collection in its former location in a dedicated structure in York, Pennsylvania. (The collection has since been moved to Arbittier’s current home in New Jersey, where he is a vice president with Atlantic Health System.) “It is an absolutely amazing collection not only in terms of its breadth but also its diversity,” says Dhody. “Doug’s collection is a testimony to his passion for the subject and how wonderful that passion can be.”

The collection includes a vast array of bloodletting instruments, including several hundred bleeders (also known as scarificators or fleems) that were used in the 1700s and 1800s. Resembling cigarette lighters or match cases, they’re made of sterling silver, shagreen, tortoiseshell, mother of pearl, and gold, and each holds a set of thumb lancets used for bloodletting. They are quite striking objets d’art whose intricate workmanship often has a way of disguising their true purpose. The same goes for leech jars—china vessels in different shapes and styles that are attractive even with the word “leeches” hand painted on the fronts. There are also Delft tiles and plates depicting medical procedures, and a 1763 Delft tobacco jar.

Arbittier’s collection includes a vast array of bloodletting instruments, including this English cupping set
(circa 1860).

Arbittier also collects exhibition instrument sets—the finest examples of the instrument maker’s craft—and presentation pieces, gifts given to doctors by grateful patients or citizens. A magnificent brain surgery set includes a gold brain drill that was displayed at the International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts in Paris in 1925. Other highlights include a mother of pearl ophthalmology set with retractors and scissors and a dental case in mother of pearl owned by James Butner, who graduated from the Philadelphia College of Dental Surgery, predecessor of the Penn Dental School, in 1853. (Arbittier has Butner’s diploma.) The set has drawers full of the original instruments, all in perfect condition.

Other Penn-related items include admission tickets to lectures given by famed physicians Joseph Leidy M1844 and D. Hayes Agnew M1838 of the Agnew Clinic, and the sword presented by the citizens of Philadelphia to Arctic explorer Elisha Kent Kane M1842 [“Explorer in a Hurry,” Mar|Apr 2008].

Presentation pieces include a Colt pistol embellished by Tiffany & Co. that was given to D. Willard Bliss, head surgeon of Armory Square Hospital, the largest Army hospital in Washington, DC, by patients and staff in the early 1860s. As Arbittier tells the story, Bliss was also famed as a surgeon to presidents, and while treating President James A. Garfield for a gunshot injury in July 1881, “kept sticking his finger in the wound to try and find the path of the bullet.” He did this for two and a half months before the president ultimately died of an infection. “So that’s where the saying ‘Ignorance is Bliss’ comes from,’” Arbittier jokes. “In fact, during his trial the man who shot Garfield, Charles J. Guiteau, said, ‘I just shot him. The doctor killed him.’”

Among Arbittier’s most prized displays are artifacts related to the death of Abraham Lincoln, including handwritten notes by physician Charles Leale—who had just graduated from medical school and was the first person in the president’s box after he was shot—describing what he found and what he did, both on the night that Lincoln was shot on April 14, 1865, and the next day.

Arbittier also has Leale’s handwritten speech on “Lincoln’s Last Hours,” delivered in February 1909 during the centenary of Lincoln’s birth at the Military Order of the Loyal Legion’s Commandery of the State of New York, and published in Harper’s Weekly that month. “It’s just extremely unique to have all these notes pertaining to Lincoln’s medical care,” he says. The collection even includes the opera glasses Mary Todd Lincoln was holding when her husband was shot, which Arbittier purchased from a British auction house. “The story is they just found them in a drawer when they were cleaning out an estate,” he says.

Arbittier’s Civil War surgical instrument collection includes the surgical set used in the first amputation of the Civil War in the Capitol Rotunda on April 26, 1861, and the amputation set that was handed over at Appomattox in 1865. “I call them my bookends, the before and after,” he says.

All of his surgical sets are meticulously documented on his website, which contains information on how he determined their authenticity and the back stories of some of the doctors to whom they belonged. He also includes cautionary notes about purchasing sets without what he calls “serious documentation,” with links to Civil War manufacturers’ catalogs. “I cannot let something go,” he told the New York Times in an article published last July. “It has to be figured out, investigated to death.”

That story—a fascinating one—recounted Arbittier’s crucial role in exposing a long-running case of art forgery. After realizing that he had been duped in a purchase of 120 woodblock and prints ostensibly from the 16th and 17th centuries starting in 2013, Arbittier compiled almost 300 pages of incriminating evidence for use by the FBI in investigating the case. Last year, the forger was caught in a sting operation and is currently serving a 52-month sentence at a federal prison in Florida.

The experience has not deterred Arbittier from collecting, but he is very vigilant with every purchase. “One must always be careful as a collector because forgers take advantage of your passion,” he says. He continues to purchase items of note—“It’s hard to know what I’m missing until I find it”—and his hope is to one day house the collection in a more public space. “I’ve seen collections like his get put into storage,” Dhody says. “So much knowledge would be lost.”

—Kathryn Levy Feldman LPS’09

The Arbittier Museum of Medical History can be found at www.medicalantiques.com.

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