The article attempts to present the functioning of the Gdansk Library under the patronage of the Polish Academy of Sciences. As of 1 January 1955, the scientific department of the Municipal Library in Gdansk was taken over by the Polish Academy of Sciences, and the thus established separate institution received new statutes regulating the activity of the Library and the scope of the development of its collections. Until the four-hundredth anniversary of the Gdansk Library (the establishment of Bibliotheca Senatus Gedanensis), descriptions of the history of the Gdansk PAS Library were mainly based on reports drawn up by the heads of the institution. It is on their basis that one may trace the difficult space and storage and warehouse conditions in which employees of the Library carried out their statutory tasks, with the constantly growing collections and the increasing load of services. The paper also reports the scientific works of employees of the Library as well as the editorial activity of the institution, including works documenting the collections of the Library. An important way of familiarising the general public with knowledge on the Gdansk Library and its collections was through exhibitions and displays organized by employees of the information and special collections departments.

The article presents a selection of 15th century printed matters on the topic of broadly understood medicine, which are currently kept by the Gdansk PAS Library. They testify to the Gdansk culture in the area of the knowledge on health and hygiene in the 15th century and in a slightly later period. The majority of the said printed matters originate from the collections of Gdansk church libraries, while the presence of items of other origin (private owners) makes it possible to trace the road medical incunabula came to Gdansk to finally find their way to the resources of the Gdansk library.
The author of the article explains the modesty of the Gdansk medical literature resources with the fact that there was not a single university functioning in the city by the River Motlawa in the early modern period. The presence of this kind of incunabula in church libraries and private collections of books indicates that the knowledge they contained was applied for personal use rather than in professional medical practice, although some of the items in question originate from book collections belonging to doctors.