Laboratory Books

From Anthony Norden and Michela Wrong's Guide to the Catalogue: "These 16 battered, sellotaped laboratory books, whose entries are all written by hand - and often in several hands -- are best taken as a group. They were located on top of Wrong's filing cabinets, hidden behind his reference books and covered in dust, an appear to have been a cherished memento of the laboratory work on which much of his subsequent career was based. Nos. I-XIV are titled 'Wrong and Associates' (sic). They are clinical and animal laboratory notebooks but do not seem always to be 'primary' data - that is the data such as 'urine titratable acidity' must have been first recorded elsewhere and then transcribed into the books. They are simply too neat to be all primary data. They are of immense value, with some of the volumes containing patient data included in Wrong's historic 'Citation Classic' paper on the 'Ammonium Chloride Loading Test', a paper probably now cited over 1,000 times. For example, page 62 has data on Patient xxxx (née xxx).; this is 'Subject 28' in that paper. It is likely that a lot of other data could, if wished, be mapped from Volumes I and II to that paper. A minor point is that although the books are often labelled as 'Postgraduate Medical School' on the cover, for many this is almost certainly not where the work was done - the chronology is incorrect. This may simply have been their source of origin. Given the mass of data in these books, only a cursory attempt was made to map the information to publications.

Volumex XV and XVI are different to the first fourteen in layout and seem to be more 'project focussed' than chronological."

1954 - 1998

16 Notebooks