The collection consists of correspondence, research files, manuscripts, journals, and ephemera created and accumulated by writer and scholar Leon Edel, who was notably the editor and biographer of Henry James as well as Edmund Wilson.

Fonds consists of contemporary manuscript copies of various legal records and instruments relating to the Capacci family. Includes one manuscript written on parchment in pale brown ink, ruled in pale brown ink, and bound in full contemporary blind tooled calf with laid paper endpapers and remnants of ties on covers, as well as a smaller booklet, written on parchment glued into a laid paper wrapper. Documents appear to be dated between 1556 and 1583 and are written in Latin and Italian (sometimes alternating within document). The legal instruments appear chiefly related to the dowry of Orietta Capacci (the dowry is also referenced in an Italian note in a later hand (1650?) inside front cover). Some names found throughout the documents include Orietta Capacci (or Orietta de Capacci) and Annibale (or Anibal) Camillo de Capacci.

Fonds consists of a manuscript translation by Dr. Gruner of volume II of the Canon of Medicine of Avicenna dated 1957 and vocabulary indexes of Arabic names of Materia Medica, Latin-English names, Latin-Arabic equivalents, native names and others. These vocabularies were done in 1929-1930. It also contains three volumes of Dr. Gruner's research on cancer. This work was done through the Archibald Cancer Research Fund, from 1932 to 1946. In volume III, a printed address "A Vagabond Cruise Round Cancer" (1950) is inserted in the cover.

Fonds shows Thomas Gibson's interest in history of medicine. It contains papers on John Palmer Litchfield and on the General Council of Medical Education and Registration of Upper Canada. Dr. Gibson's notes on the translation of Theodore Turquet de Mayerne of the Opera Medica of Joseph Brown, ed. 1700. Correspondence.

Fonds shows Herbert Frederick Moseley's relations with his editor for his book "Shoulder Lesions". It contains an original manuscript with the publisher's annotations for the 1945 edition and another complete copy.

Fonds contains the manuscript of Dr. William Rees on the treatment of malaria, a lecture given before the Natural History Society of Montreal in the 1860s

Fonds contains a manuscript, entitled "Remarks on the Osteology of Alexander Monro by himself", written by Dr. John George Bethune who transcribed an old damaged manuscript found in a trunk in the garret of the steam factory of Bethune's father in August 1848. The damaged manuscript was, according to Bethune, from one of three famous physicians, three successive generations of an Edinburgh family, who all bore the name Alexander Monro.

Fonds documents a portion of the literary activities of Sir Andrew Macphail with the typescript of In Flanders Fields and Other Poems by Lieut.-Col. John McCrae M.D. with the Essay in Character by Sir Andrew Macphail, originally published in 1919. The typescript is accompanied by a signed letter from Macphail. The fonds also contains a letter from John McCrae while on active duty in France to Carleton Noyes, Cambridge, MA, with an envelope postmarked 31 May 1916. Enclosed with the letter is an autographed signed copy of McCrae's poem, In Flanders Fields.

Fonds contains William Wood Squire's manuscript of his thesis "Pathology and Treatment of some forms of Partial Paralysis" which won a prize as best thesis in medicine at McGill in 1864. The fonds includes a bound notebook and one loose illustration.

The fonds includes Dr. Archibald’s correspondence and reports pertaining to the Ministry of National Defence, 1940-1945; certificates and diplomas; and a photograph. The correspondents include family members, Dr. John McCrae and Sir William Osler. There is also a draft of a book on wound ballistics and gas gangrene; an Army Field Service book, 1916 and two notebooks on internal and external pathology, “matiere medicale et therapeutique,” and “medecine legale et toxicologie,” 1895.