Just after it absorbed the Boston Medical Library, the Athenaeum issued a published catalogue of its holdings. In this copy, owned by Dr. John Orne Green in 1835, faint pencil notations can be discerned next to most of the entries for the Boston…
From the 1877 physician's catalogue and price current of homœopathic medicines and books, surgical instruments, and other articles pertaining to a physician's outfit for sale by Boericke & Tafel, this engraving shows the Boericke and Tafel…
1880 physician's catalogue and price current of homœopathic medicines and books, surgical instruments, and other articles pertaining to a physician's outfit for sale by Boericke & Tafel
Designed for students and a testament to the enduring interest in phrenology, this manual attempts to reconcile phrenology with anatomy and "to demonstrate the possibility of the accurate localisation of the phrenological organs in the brain, upon…
Lucius M. Sargent, an 1857 graduate of Harvard Medical School, was an accomplished draughtsman and was appointed the first artist of the Massachusetts General Hospital. At the beginning of the war, he became a surgeon with the 2nd Massachusetts…
In reaction to the harsh practices of regular physicians and also the sweating and purging regimens of Thomsonianism, Wooster Beach developed his own botanical medical system which evolved into medical eclecticism, one of the most popular sectarian…
William P. C. Barton's Vegetable materia medica of the United States, along with Jacob Bigelow's contemporary American medical botany, are the first two American botanical publications with colored illustrations. Barton's contains hand-colored…
The Canon medicinae, a compendium of medical knowledge and a guide to clinical teaching, was derived from Galenic and Hippocratic writings and infused by Avicenna with Arabic medical lore. The Canon includes detailed disquisitions on pathology,…
The Soncino family was originally from Speyer, one of the German towns in which printing had an early impact. After a decree of expulsion in 1435, the family moved to the Italian town that lent the family its name. Soncino printed the first Hebrew…
The 1906 annual meeting of the American Medical Association was held in early June and provided an occasion for the first public opening of the Quad buildings. Dr. Walter L. Burrage, of the Sub-Committee on Printing and Programmes, edited this guide…
As the directory entries for homeopaths in Boston testify, the number of practitioners was on the decline by the mid-1920s, with only 126 listed. Roughly one in every five of these physicians was female. This is just a small fraction of the over…
The本草原始 [Ben cao yuan shi] ("Origins of the materia medica") describes medicinal plants and herbal substances with their uses and manner of preparation. Like many Chinese medical texts, this early 17th century work was reprinted in Japan during the…
"Promulgated for the purpose of spreading medical light and information in America," Samuel Stearns' herbal is the first to be printed in the United States and incorporates information from the traditions of American Indians.
This colored plate appears in the first edition of Edward Jenner's An Inquiry into the Causes and Effects of Variolæ Vaccinæ and depicts the cowpox pustules on the hand of dairymaid Sarah Nelmes. Cowpox matter from these pustules was used…
Thucydides was a fifth-century Greek and eyewitness to the long struggle (431-404 B.C.) for dominance between the warring city-states of Athens and Sparta. De bello Peloponnesiaco, or The History of the Peloponnesian War, his contemporary account of…