Special collections in the ZB MED

Ongoing collections

The ZB MED is the World Health Organisation’s Documentation Center in Germany and the depository library for publications of the FAO (Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations). 

Complete collections

Nutrition. Environment. Agriculture.

We hold the most extensive, systematically arranged collections on every aspect of agricultural science in Europe, including:

• Collection of German ‘Hausväterliteratur’ (a genre of literature providing advice on household and estate management and their social structures), primarily from the 17th and 18th centuries
• The Freiherr von der Goltz Collection (1907)
• Prussian statistics and statistics of the German Reich
• Special geological maps and reports issued by the Prussian Geological Institute
• The complete publications of the German social policy association ‘Verein für Sozialpolitik’
• Virtually all German theses on agricultural science, as well as theses on the same topic from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (since 1910) and from the ‘Landbouwhogeschool Wageningen’ (since 1918; later became Wageningen University)
• Library of the former Rhineland Chamber of Agriculture
• The Theodor Brinkmann Collection
• DFG-funded collection of East German literature 1963-1989
• Extensive archives collected in its role as a depository library for the publications of the USDA (United States Department of Agriculture) and for serial publications of the Agricultural Experiment Stations of the U.S. federal states Since 2004, the USDA has made its reports available exclusively over the Internet (http://bookstore.gpo.gov).

Medicine. Health.

• Collection of monographs by the anatomist Wilhelm Waldeyer (1909)
• Reference collection of the physiologist Hugo Seemann (1913)
• Book collection of the Cologne surgeon Bernhard Bardenheuer (1933)
• Medical sections of the Wallraf Library (1930)
• Cologne Grammar School Library
• Library of the Lower Rhine Association of Public Health
• Library of the Cologne General Medical Association of 1871
• Friedrich Moritz (internal medicine, 1925)
• Wirz (practical medicine, 1929)
• Karl Hubert Sattler (ophthalmology, 1930)
• Bequest of the Coblenz Privy Councillor Albrecht Erlenmeyer (psychiatric-neurological works, 1920)
• Professor Ferdinand Zinsser (works on dermatology and venereology, 1931)
• Robert Hauf (older theses, 1931 - 33)
• Library bequest of Prof. Erich Hoffmann, who discovered the bacterium responsible for syphilis (1978)
• American patient reference materials – holdings of the former "Special Services Library Bismarck Kaserne", Schwäbisch-Gmünd (works published up to 1990, location: 1998 A 10325 - 1998 A 10604)

You can find more information on our special collections in the "Handbuch der historischen Buchbestände" (Handbook of historical book holdings) – published by Berhard Fabian – by looking up the respective cities and searching for the former names of what is now known as the ZB MED (Bonn: “Zentralbibliothek der Landbauwissenschaft” // Cologne: “Zentralbibliothek der Medizin”).