Jerome Pierce Webster was one of the leading American plastic surgeons of his time and the founder of the Division of Plastic Surgery in the Department of Surgery at the Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center. He received his medical degree from Johns Hopkins in 1914, served in the US Army Medical Corps in France during World War I and was the first surgical resident at Peking Union Medical College upon its opening in 1921. He came to Columbia in 1928 at the urging of department chair Allen O. Whipple and remained until his death in 1974.

Webster was a historian and bibliophile as well as surgeon. He was co-author, with Martha Teach Gnudi, of The Life and Times of Gaspare Tagliacozzi, Surgeon of Bologna, 1545-1599 (1950), the only full-length biography of this Renaissance plastic surgeon in any language. The work won the Welch Medal of the American Association for the History of Medicine in 1951. To aid him in his research, Webster created what is perhaps the most comprehensive library in existence on the history of plastic surgery. This reprint collection formed part of it and was maintained in the Webster Library of Plastic Surgery, located in the Dept. of Surgery, until it came to Archives and Special Collections in the late 1970s.