The rare books and special collections of the Falk Library of the Health Sciences cover the history of medicine, dentistry, pharmacy, nursing, and the allied health sciences. SERVICES: interlibrary loan for most post-1930 works, reference questions, and courses in the history of medicine and history of public health at the pre-med, medical school, and graduate school levels. The Library sponsors the major history of medicine lecture series run by the C. F. Reynolds Medical History Society, and several courses in the history of medicine. The Library also maintains the international database on recent dissertations in the medical humanities, AIDS, public/international health, and women's health issues which can be found at: http://www.hsls.pitt.edu/about/rarebook/.

The historical collections are comprised of over 17,000 volumes of monographs and journals from 1496 to the present, both primary and secondary sources, covering the fields of medicine, dentistry, nursing, pharmacy, and the allied health sciences. The Rodnan Collection on the history of rheumatology is the second largest such collection in the world. The Ravitch history of surgery collection has over 500 titles on the history of hernia repair, from the end of the 16th century until the early 1940s. There are also major collections in the areas of the history of psychiatry, neurology, and public health.