An annotated catalogue of medical Americana in the Library of the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine : books and printed documents, 1557-1821, from Latin America and the Caribbean Islands and manuscripts from the Americas, 1575-1927 / by Robin Price.

  • Price, Robin
Date:
1983
Catalogue details

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

Credit: An annotated catalogue of medical Americana in the Library of the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine : books and printed documents, 1557-1821, from Latin America and the Caribbean Islands and manuscripts from the Americas, 1575-1927 / by Robin Price. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    Tribunal del Protomedicato already abolished in 1831. The familiar and insoluble question of formal versus psychological dependence is, however, always likely to remain open. This apart, it was decided that the advantage for reference purposes of one final date for the whole catalogue of printed items far outweighed the more scholarly precision of strict adherence to the formal dates of secession for each of the eleven political units of the American colonial period represented in this collection. Medical works in the Institute published in those countries which remained under colonial domination after 1821 are easily retrievable either through the card catalogues housed with the collection, or in some cases on the shelves, since many of the works are arranged in chronological order of publication within their country of origin. In passing, it should be noted that where national independence brought about a change to a name now more familiar to us (e.g. the change from New Spain to Mexico), the colonial name is given in parenthesis in the contents list together with the dates during which it existed under the status relevant to this catalogue. Users needing to establish political status of a colony at any particular date will find a ready and reliable guide in Henige (1970); but they should be warned that detailed knowledge of the often surprisingly complex changes of political master and status (particularly in the Caribbean) is impossible to make clear within the confines of a handlist and requires careful search in a wider range of literature. The manuscripts (1575-1927) of the collection, whose scope in place and time is necessarily different from that of the printed items, are introduced separately in Section II below. The sources of the collectioti have already been described in the Preface to this catalogue ; it is here sufficient to add that the items which it contains are often of unusual rarity and interest and are found housed together only in the Wellcome Institute. These works, with the rich background collection of contemporary European imprints relating to the impact of American materia medica on European medicine (also from the original Wellcome collections); with the national histories of medicine and works on regional materia medica (primarily collected by Dr. Guerra) ; with the diverse array of modern secondary literature still in course of collection; with the many specialist and uncommon bibliographies; with the collection of rare and important colonial and post- colonial periodical titles (including the Gazeta de Mexico 1728-39, the Gazetas de Mexico 1784-1809, the Mercurio volante 1772-73 (the first medical periodical published in the Americas) ; and with the complete set of the Gaceta médica de Mexico from 1864; together make the collection a uniquely rich source of material for the study of the development of medicine in Latin America and the Caribbean. It should be added that the collection includes 303 Mexican theses, brief studies, and reprints (1862-1950) primarily on indigenous materia medica; about 2,000 reprints