Announcement: The Hodgkinson Fellowship
About the Hodgkinson Collection of rare and special medical books
In 2025, the Library received a generous donation of over 150 books of historical, scientific and social importance.
Darryl and Katherine Hodgkinson spent decades acquiring these books together, sourcing them from antiquarian book shops, universities and medical institutions across the globe to create a comprehensive representation of the history of anatomy and surgery, with a particular focus on the development of plastic surgery.
Darryl graduated from the University of Sydney in 1972, with a Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery, before training at The Mayo Clinic in Minnesota. Darryl and Katherine met in the 1980s and bonded over their passion for art collecting, culture and travel.
Their passion for medicine has grown over the years – Darryl worked as a plastic surgeon until his retirement in 2023 and together they founded Operation Restore Hope Australia, which provides surgery for children in the Philippines with cleft lip, cleft palate and craniofacial deformities. Throughout the decades, Darryl and Katherine credit their book collection as providing inspiration and context for their medical work.
About the Hodgkinson Fellowship
This new fellowship will provide $45,000 for an early to mid-career University of Sydney postdoctoral researcher to work intensively with the Hodgkinson Collection for up to six months:
- undertake an original piece of research to generate new knowledge, deepening understanding of medical history and its many intersections (eg. art, culture, education, and surgical practice)
- disseminate the research through scholarly publication/s and academic presentation/s
- activate and promote engagement of the research, the Hodgkinson collection and the broader Rare Books and Special Collections through public-facing activities such as social media, exhibitions, seminars, educational activities, and digital resource development
- foster interdisciplinary collaboration between fields such as art history, medical history, plastic surgery, and medical education
Applications for the 2027 Hodgkinson Fellowship will open in late 2026 – stay tuned!
About Rare Books & Special Collections
The Hodgkinson Collection is held in the Library's Rare Books and Special Collections (RBSC), which consists of over 300,000 significant and historic items from the 21st century BCE to the present day. It is one of the largest collections of its kind in the Southern Hemisphere.
RBSC highlights include Medieval manuscripts and early printed books, Science Fiction and comics, and an East Asian Collection. It also holds a significant variety of medical texts, collected from diverse cultures and time periods, offering valuable insight into the history and communication of medicine, anatomy, and scientific discovery.
RBSC items can be requested to view in the Reading Room, located in Fisher Library. We welcome academics, students and the public to view and study our collections (a free Rare Books membership is available).
The collections can also be accessed online:
- Discover thousands of digitised RBSC books, manuscripts, illustrations, journals, photographs, and documents on the Library's Digital Collections, including medicine-related items
- Browse highlights from the collection
- Explore online exhibitions on Google Arts & Culture
Highlights from the Hodgkinson Collection
The Hodgkinson Collection consists of over 150 items. Highlights include:
- The 1685 first edition of Bidloo’s Anatomia Humani Corporis – one of the pioneering scientific observations which laid the foundation of forensic identification using fingerprints (Hodgkinson Folio 0005)
- The 1555 second edition of Vesalius’ monumental and groundbreaking work, De Humani Corporis Fabrica (Hodgkinson Folio 0001)
- Degli Innesti Animali by Giuseppe Baronio, 1804 – this work is an important contribution to plastic surgery as the first account of a successful skin graft in a ram, and one of the first examples of pure scientific surgical research. (Hodgkinson Folio 0064)
- Les Oeuvres de Ambroise Paré 1575 – Paré was regarded as the founding father of modern surgery, having served as surgeon to four kings of France. He was known for introducing the ligature for control of haemorrhage. (Hodgkinson 0004, digitised and available on Digital Collections)
- De curtorum chirurgia per insitionem by Gaspare Tagliacozzi (Hodgkinson 0003, digitised and available on Digital Collections)
- A compleat treatise of the muscles as they appear in humane body, and arise in dissection by John Browne (Hodgkinson 0008, digitised and available on Digital Collections)
- New elements of operative surgery by A. (Alfred) Velpeau (Hodgkinson 0022, digitised and available on Digital Collections)
- An account of two successful operations for restoring a lost nose from the integuments of the forehead by J. C. (Joseph Constantine) Carpue (Hodgkinson 0006, digitised and available on Digital Collections)
The full collection can be found in the Library catalogue.
Contact
For enquiries about the Hodgkinson Fellowship, please email
cultural.collections@usyd.libanswers.com.