How the Cabinet Came to Be
What started with a few dusty old medical books turned into something much bigger. From antique apothecary bottles to forgotten prescriptions, my collection has grown into what I now call Dr. Bebout’s Cabinet of Medical Curiosities. This is the story of how it all began — and why it keeps expanding.
I’ve always been a collector. I can’t tell you when it really started, or even where some of the earliest things came from, but one day I looked at a shelf in my office and realized I had the beginnings of something unusual.
Sitting there, gathering dust, were a few old medical books. My oldest at the time was an 1830s treatise on the hand, followed by an 1865 edition of Gray’s Anatomy. I don’t remember where I got them, but I pulled them down and thought, Wow, this is pretty neat. That was the first spark.
I started categorizing and cataloging, and before I knew it, the books led to other finds — large apothecary bottles labeled with things like sulfathiazole and ammonium chloride. Then came old medical tins, prescriptions, and pharmaceutical curiosities. Friends began dropping things off. One friend, a realtor, brought me a whole box of old medicines he’d found in his basement. Patients would bring bottles they discovered in barns. It just kept growing.
And then I discovered eBay. Lord help me. I could probably spend my mortgage just scrolling through listings for rare bottles and books. You do have to watch it — people will ask nine thousand dollars for an empty vial that once held pharmaceutical cocaine. (No thanks.) But the thrill of the hunt is always there.
From there, the idea of documenting all of this started to take shape. If I was going to collect it, I needed a way to catalog it — something searchable, indexable, referenceable. That’s how the website began. Instead of building a whole new site, I linked it to my medical practice site and created a page called Dr. Bebout’s Cabinet of Medical Curiosities.
The Cabinet grew, but it also branched. I realized I had stories of medicine — things I’d seen, things that had happened, things worth remembering. That became another section: Dr. Bebout’s Morbid Curiosity. It’s a mix of memoir, reflection, and the odd things that rattle around in my head.
The Cabinet isn’t just books and bottles. It’s become a whole project. I’ve been working at it for months, learning as I go, realizing that building a quality site is harder than it looks. I’ve spun it out onto Reddit (my own subreddit, r/DrBsCabinet), onto Facebook, TikTok, and even YouTube. TikTok did surprisingly well for a while — I covered phobias and rare medical conditions — but when I ran out of phobias, I lost interest. The Cabinet itself feels more lasting, more permanent.
I also spend plenty of time hunting in antique malls. That’s a treasure hunt in itself. Most people don’t realize what they’re looking at — an old bottle turns out to be a patent medicine from 1895, an unmarked book turns out to be a first edition obstetrics text from the 1850s. Sometimes you find a bargain. Sometimes you find sellers who are wildly overconfident and way overpriced.
Everyone who collects has a “Holy Grail.” Mine would be a first edition Gray’s Anatomy from 1858. I’ve seen one on eBay — for $28,000. I’ll have to pass for now.
I’ve tried to build connections outside of eBay, too. I’ve reached out to medical museums, historical societies, podcasts, and universities. Some leads have been promising — a lady in Lexington sent me a physician’s working handbook, a contact at Boston University mailed me some older textbooks, and she even tried to connect me with a doctor donating his entire medical library. Nothing panned out yet, but you never know.
And so the Cabinet grows. It’s a hobby, sure, but it’s also something more — a record of where medicine has been, and a way to preserve it for the future. History doesn’t stop. And neither does collecting.
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If you enjoy the history, the oddities, and the effort, help keep this cabinet open. Every little bit helps preserve and share the strange wonders of medicine's past.
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