Eugene Opie spent most of his career as a pathologist at the Rockefeller Institute engaged in research on the influenza, tuberculosis, blood diseases, poliomyelitis, and viruses. His work at Washington University, St. Louis, is documented, as are his efforts to alleviate tuberculosis in Jamaica, among Philadelphia schoolchildren, and in New York City. The Opie collection contains correspondence, notebooks, lab notes from his days at Rockefeller, articles, reprints, and photographs. Opie's long interest in China is reflected in material on the American Bureau for Medical Aid to China, the United China Relief, and Chinese medicine in general. There is also significant documentation on the International Health Division of the Rockefeller Foundation, the Henry Phipps Institute of the University of Pennsylvania, the Milbank Memorial Fund, and other institutions. There are also reports of approximately 300 clinical autopsies performed at the Base Hospital, Camp Pike, Ark., of soldiers who died in the flu epidemic of 1918. Also there are notes of Opie's course in pathology at the University of Pennsylvania.

Though the Miscellaneous Manuscripts collection is composed of items that do not fall readily into any other existing collection, the two dominant intellectual areas represented in the collection are Early American History and History of Science.