The collection consists of 223 late 19th and early 20th century photographs of national and international figures in medicine and public health. It was digitized by the Metropolitan New York Library Council's (METRO) Culture in Transit project and is part of the Digital Culture of Metropolitan New York (DCMNY) website.
This collection contains portraits both of lesser known individuals and of famous New York physicians, such as Abraham Jacobi, Lewis Albert Sayre, Willard Parker, Stephen Smith, Emily Blackwell, and Valentine Mott, as well as of many with international reputations: Robert Koch, Louis Pasteur, Hermann von Helmholtz, Rudolf Virchow, and others. New York photographers took a number of the photographs; others were created by the New York offices of such establishments as Mathew Brady, as well as by photographers in Paris, Berlin, and London.