Volume 5

A catalogue of printed books in the Wellcome Historical Medical Library / with a foreword by Sir Henry Hallett Dale.

  • Wellcome Historical Medical Library
Date:
1962-2006
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: A catalogue of printed books in the Wellcome Historical Medical Library / with a foreword by Sir Henry Hallett Dale. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    12/552 (page VIII)
    INTRODUCTION records were supplied by a variety of libraries, mostly in the USA and UK, including the Wellcome Library, and are far from homogeneous. They differ considerably in fullness and in their bibliographical standard, and were created to be read on screen, not on the printed page. There are many divergences in the transcriptions of titles, and in the treatment of imprints, collations, etc. The resulting text is, it is hoped, no worse than (e.g.) the National Union Catalog, 2 which is similarly dependent on entries supplied by contributing libraries, and the OCLC descriptions sometimes improve upon the original Wellcome entries. The cataloguing follows the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules (AACR2), so that forms of names, dates of birth and death, etc., are not necessarily consistent with those found in earlier Wellcome volumes. (Sanctorius, Sebizius and Tabernaemontanus, for example, are now Santorio, Sebisch and Theodorus.) Differences in cataloguing practice have meant that some works, which would have appeared in the original volume V, now have their main access point in another part of the alphabet. A few headings have been adapted to conform with earlier practice (e.g. Leonardo da Vinci appears under Vinci, and François Boissier de Sauvages under Sauvages), but it was not possible to do this comprehensively or to provide comprehensive cross-references. Works which have already appeared under other headings in earlier volumes have sometimes been retained, if the new record seemed to provide improved information. Previous volumes attempted to provide accurate collation statements for pagination and illustrations based on the Wellcome copies. In the present volume this data has normally been accepted as found in the OCLC records. In some cases, where Wellcome records were without pagination at the time of retroconversion, this has been represented as [1 v.]. Despite these differences, it is hoped that the volume will fulfil the original purpose of the series, to record most of the Wellcome Library’s holdings of printed books published between 1641 and 1850 S-Z. Whilst it is understood that a published catalogue is soon out of date, it should be noted that the online catalogue is updated constantly. Authors to be found here include Santorio Santorio, François de Sauvages, Antonio Scarpa, Michael Servetus, Georg Ernst Stahl, Thomas Sydenham, Samuel Auguste Tissot, and Thomas Willis. There are late editions of the works of Andreas Vesalius. The volume also bears witness to the wide range of subject-matter in the Wellcome collections. The Library’s holdings are continually growing, and there is still material not yet recorded in the online catalogue and therefore not included here. In some respects this catalogue’s coverage is superior to that of its predecessors, as it includes the early Americana (Latin American pre-1822, 3 and North American pre-1821), which was mostly excluded from previous volumes, and likewise books acquired from the Medical Society of London in 1984. Books from the collections deposited on loan by the Royal Army Medical Corps and the Hunterian Society of London are included, if there was no Wellcome copy. The presence of a few photocopies in volume I ‘worried’ one reviewer, 4 and they were excluded from later volumes; their absence was deplored by a reviewer of volume IF. They are now included. The catalogue contains main entries only. Added entries for editors, translators, etc. (MARC fields 700, etc.) must be sought in the online catalogue; the labour of converting them to a form usable for the present volume would have been prohibitive. Analytical entries also have been lost, some of which will have references pointing to them in earlier volumes, e.g. theses in the collections compiled by Albrecht von Haller and others. Theses are normally entered under the name of the respondent as principal author (MARC field 100), rather than the praeses, contrary to AACR2 practice, a modification adopted in the retroconversion of the catalogue, to conform with earlier Wellcome practice; an unfortunate and unforeseen result is that in this volume the name of the praeses is generally omitted, as is sometimes the name of the graduand in congratulatory addresses. They are, of course, to be