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The papers of the lawyer and educator William Righter Fisher and the journalist Mary Wager Fisher consist primarily of correspondence, but also include photographs (several of them tintypes and cartes-de-visite), financial papers, diaries, clippings, printed material, and writings and speeches. Among correspondents are many journalists, physicians, educators, and other notable figures of the late nineteenth century including Lucy Abbott, Mercy Baker, Jennie Chapin, Mary L. Booth, W.S. Burke, James Gowdy Clark, M.E. Dodge, Weston Flint, P. Girard, S. D. Harris, Albert Leffingwell, Henry C. Olney, W. Trickett, George Boyer Vashon, and Frank J. Webb. The collection also includes letters from James B. Hazelton of the First Regiment, New York Artillery. Hazelton's letters describe battles and political events of the Civil War, including Lincoln's re-election campaign and the anti-draft riots. The papers are particularly rich in documentation of women in medicine and women's medical education in the second half of the nineteenth century; the Freedmen's schools in the Reconstruction South; the movement for women's rights; and friendship among American women in the late Victorian era.

Judge William Robertson Perkins (1875-1945), counsel for James Buchanan Duke, executor of his will, and Trustee of the Duke Endowment, is represented by a letter on the relation of a university (Duke) and its president (W. P. Few) to students. This copy comes from an original letter to Judge Perkins to be found in the William Preston Few Papers.