Located at 2395 Sacramento Street, the Health Sciences Library at the Pacific Campus became a designated historic landmark of the City of San Francisco on October 5, 1980. It was the original Lane Medical Library of Stanford University, School of Medicine and was established in 1906 by the directors of Cooper Medical College of San Francisco and an endowment from Dr Levi Cooper Lane. Cooper Medical College became part of Stanford University in 1908.

Lane Medical Library was Dedicated on November 3, 1912. It was the seventh medical library built in the United States, and at the time the 24th largest in the world.

The four-story classic revival building was designed by the San Francisco architect Albert Pissis, and was completed in 1912 at a cost of $150,000. The building materials were of local origin as much as possible. The library was built of Colusa sandstone, local cement and steel from a San Francisco steelworks. Its interior featured large brass and stained glass chandeliers, oak archways, Columbia marble, a four-story oval spiral staircase and three murals by the California artist Arthur F. Mathews.


Reading Room circa 1950s

Professor Ray Lyman Wilbur, Executive Head of the Department of Medicine of Stanford University wrote an account describing the building and murals for the Trustees' Series report No. 22 on the occasion of the dedication of Lane Medical Library on November 3, 1912:

"The general reading room, with its open shelves of reference volumes, its broad reading tables and its quiet green walls, is particularly fortunate. To this room is added beauty and dignity, also by the mural paintings from the brush of Arthur F. Mathews, of San Francisco. These pictures are the gift of Mrs. Henrietta Zeile. They occupy three large panels on the east side of the Reading Room, adding a fine touch of color to the somewhat somber green wall.

One shows beneath a spreading oak an Indian medicine man- the primitive art of healing. Another is a mediaeval towered city with a red robed doctor reassuring a group of frightened people who cower before a woman with the "evil eye". In the central panel Urania, in starry blue kneels, with her hand upon a sphere, Terpsichore with dancing girls embroidered on her cloak, ivy-crowned Thalia, dark draped Melpomene and their sister muses surround a white clad woman, Hygeia, and a child.

The work is in Mathews' best style, the flesh tones of the life size figures wonderful, the landscapes beautiful with purple shadows, rolling hills and sunlit clouds."

The building was vacated in 1959 when Stanford moved the School of Medicine to Palo Alto.

On October 8, 1970, the library was rededicated as the Pacific Medical Center Health Sciences Library. Already housed in the structure were the Ernest G. Sloman Memorial Library of the University of the Pacific School of Dentisty, the Dohrman K. Pischel Library of Ophthalmology of Pacific Medical Center and the Arthur E. Guedel Memorial Anesthesia Center.

At the dedication ceremonies, Dr Robert Burns, president of the Board of Trustees of Pacific Medical Center, paid tribute to the group of physisicans and dentists to whom the building is now dedicated -- men who have played significant roles in the history and growth of Pacific Medical Center and University of the Pacific, School of Dentistry, formerly known as the College of Physicians and Surgeons.

Today the Health Sciences Library at the Pacific Campus serves both California Pacific Medical Center and the University of the Pacific Arthur A. Dugoni School of Dentistry. The Pischel Library of Ophthalmology, the Guedel Memorial Anesthesia Center, continue to be components of the Health Sciences library at this campus.

• Dr. Levi Cooper Lane
• Albert Pissis, architect who designed the building
• "Health and the Arts", murals by Arthur F. Mathews