Library Follows Menninger To New Texas Home

One of the country’s leading repositories of rare and historical mental health publications—the Menninger Foundation’s Library of Psychiatry and Psychoanalysis—has found a new home.

The collection moved to Houston in June in conjunction with Menninger’s decision to leave its historic home in Topeka, Kan., and relocate its clinical, research, and training programs to the Texas city, where Menninger merged with Baylor College of Medicine and Methodist Hospital earlier this year (Psychiatric News, February 7).

The bounty of historic documents contains nearly 18,000 clinical monographs, 6,000 journal volumes, and 3,000 rare books and journals and will be housed at the Houston Academy of Medicine–Texas Medical Center Library.

The collection covers almost every aspect of the mental health field, including community mental health, pastoral couseling, and social work. It has a particularly extensive section devoted to the works of Sigmund Freud and commentaries about those works.

Among the library’s rare-book gems are hundreds of early German psychiatric texts and reports from dozens of U.S. state asylums documenting the history of the asylum movement in America beginning in the 1820s.

“These annual reports document in a vivid way the progress of mental health care from leather and canvas restraints to the many new therapies of the 20th century,” Elizabeth White told Psychiatric News. White is director of historical collections at the Houston Academy of Medicine–Texas Medical Center Library. “I am hopeful that some graduate students will discover this collection—after I get them all on the shelves in three or four months—and use it as the foundation for their research,” she added.

There are also multiple works written by Alfred Adler and a rare 1783 German edition of Vesalius’s anatomy. The oldest work is a book on criminal law written in 1494.

The collection also has a vast collection of Menninger publications dating from 1919, when the library began to bind the papers of faculty and staff. ▪