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This library was founded in 1786 as part of the military medical academy established by Giovanni Alessandro Brambilla (1728-1800) and Joseph II. In the course of over 225 years, but particularly since World War II, the stocks of this part of our collection have been continually expanded as historic volumes have been added.

The Josephina Library now contains a total of 6,377 titles (around 11,500 volumes) published before 1900. The collection can be divided chronologically into 12 incunabula, 444 16th century works, 629 17th century titles and 2,759 18th century books. The remaining 2,495 titles are predominantly from the first half of the 19th century.

In contents, the Josephina Library focuses on surgical specialties. Besides surgery in the narrow sense, it contains a large stock of works on anatomy, ophthalmology and obstetrics. Other key areas of the collection are the most important works of their day on subjects relevant to the faculty of medicine: mineralogy, chemistry, botany and zoology.

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