Sometimes, for one reason or the other, the works of scholars get lost. In some cases, they're lost forever. This happened to many books during the fire of the library of Alexandria, for instance.
Luckily, it can also happen that these works resurface after a while. I am interested in these cases. Below, I list five examples:
- Oskar Fischer was a Czech neuropathologist. His work on what we now call Alzheimer's disease predates Alois Alzheimer's studies. It was published in a series of papers dating from 1907, 1910, and 1912, and was arguably even more important than his. Being of Jewish descent, he was murdered by the nazis during the Second World War. Moreover, he was part of the Prague School of neuropathology, which at the time was a rival of the Munich School, which consisted of the influential academic Emil Kraepelin, Alzheimer himself, and others. Kraepelin made sure Alzheimer's name was associated with the disease in an important book on psychiatry. These factors contributed to the obscurity of Fischer's contributions. It was only in 2008 when Michel Goedert brought his contributions to light, after visiting the Archives of Charles University in Prague, and having spoken to Fischer's relatives.
- When Carl Jung's relationship broke with his close colleague Sigmund Freud in 1913, it had profound consequences on his life. One of them was his work on the Red Book or Liber Novus. He wrote it between 1914 and c. 1930. It records the author's experiments and observations on himself between the years 1913 and 1916. The book was read by just a few people at the time. It was only by 2009 that it was made open to publication by Jung's estate.
- In 1885, a new mathematical competition was initiated by editors of the journal Acta Mathematica to honour the 60th birthday of Oscar II, the king of Sweden at the time. The deadline for submission was June 1888. One of the submissions was by Henri Poincaré. He submitted a manuscript in which he proposed a novel way to approach the n-body problem. The judges of the competition had difficulties with understanding the work, however, so after lengthy discussions Poincaré submitted a revised memoir on the 5th of January, 1890. The original manuscript was long thought to be lost, but it turned up again by a lucky coincidence in 2011.
- The English philosopher and social reformer Jeremy Bentham wrote an essay entitled "Paedarasty (Offences Against One's Self)" around 1785. In this work, he argued for the liberalisation of laws prohibiting homosexual sex. The essay remained unpublished during his lifetime, however, for fear of offending public morality. It was only in 1978 that it was published.
- The French-German mathematician Wolfgang Doeblin was an expert in probability theory. When the war broke out in 1939, he refused to be exempted from military service, and was stationed as a telephone operator in Givet, in the Ardennes. While he worked there, he wrote on what are now known as the Chapman-Kolmogorov equations. He incorporated his findings in a letter, which he sealed and sent to the French Academy of Sciences. In the year 2000, the sealed enveloppe was opened.
Please note that this question is specifically aimed at the physical information objects themselves that were lost and found again later. Other questions, including this MO question, are geared towards the rediscovery of the ideas contained within these works. This question is focussed on the books, letters, essays, and other written documents that were once lost but later resurfaced.
Question which works by scientists, philosophers, and mathematicians (re)surfaced after a long time?
