125 biographical essays, with portraits and bibliographies, documenting the history of child neurology from the 17th century to the present.

A highly useful work, originally published by John L. Thornton (b. 1913) in 1949. This new edition includes the following fully-documented historical essays: P. Jones, Medical books before the invention of printing. D.E. Rhodes, Medical incunabula; Y. Hibbott, Medical books of the sixteenth century. C.R. English, Seventeenth century medical books, P.C. Want, Medical books from 1701-1800, G. Davenport, Medical books of the nineteenth century, L.T. Morton, The growth of medical periodical literature,; J. Symonds, Medical bibliographies and bibliographers, A. Besson, Private medical libraries, R.B. Tabor, Medical libraries of today.

The first comprehensive listing of primary instructional or "how to draw" books, and non-scientific iconographical "pattern" books, published for artists and designers in the widest range of subjects concerning plants, animals and human anatomy.

Reproduces many of Diamond's photographs of psychiatric patients. Diamond was fascinated by the possible use of photography in the treatment of mental disorders; some of his many photographs depicting the expressions of people suffering from mental disorders are particularly moving. These were used not only for record purposes, but also, he claimed in the treatment of patients - although there was little evidence of success.

Though several researchers developed the procedures for using an excimer laser to perform in situ karatomileusis (LASIK), "Pallikaris also independently conceived of a hinged flap using a microkeratome he had specifically designed for rabbit studies and performed the ablation with an excimer laser on the exposed bed followed by replacement of the flap without sutures. The term LASIK was first used to describe this procedure in his 1990 paper. Pallikaris treated his first patients in October 1990 and published his results on 10 high myopic human eyes with one year-follow-up in 1994" (Reinstein, Archer, Gobbe, "Birth of Lasik" IN: Goes (ed.) The eye in history [2013] 436).

Between 1785 and 1812 a midwife and healer named Martha Ballard kept a diary that recorded her arduous work (in 27 years she attended 816 births) as well as her domestic life in Hallowell, Maine.

"In addition to digitizing texts, the TLG developed the Canon of Greek Authors and Works, originally a "registry" of all works included or about to be included in the corpus. Over time the Canon developed into an indispensable tool for the study of Greek literature. Luci Berkowitz and Karl Squitier produced the bulk of these bibliographies until the early 1990s, when they retired from the University. The last printed version of the Canon was published by Oxford University Press in 1990. Today the Canon database is is searchable on-line."

The author was a noted explorer.

With Friesen, Stanley R.; Johnston, Ivan D.A.;  and Sellwood, Ronald A.

One of the most emblematic treatises of the Hippocratic Collection. The author, a physician presumably associated with Hippocrates but otherwise unidentified, illustrates the value of scientific medicine sometime between 420 and 380 BCE.

Shamanism may have originated among the Turkic peoples of Siberia. English translations of studies by Russian scholars with an introduction and a thorough bibliography.

An extensively annotated bibliography of all of Virchow's medical writings, but not including his many contributions to anthropology

To identify an uncultured and unidentified pathogen that was often visualized in tissue sections of lesions of bacillary angiomatosis with Warthin-Starry staining, the authors utilized two different techniques that were innovative at the time: 16S ribosomal RNA analysis and PCR. This was seen as a milestone in the molecular identification of pathogens that could be "seen" but not cultured. The authors indicated in their abstract that "this bacillus may also cause cat scratch disease." They concluded that "The cause of bacillary angiomatosis is a previously uncharacterized rickettsia-like organism, closedly related to R. quintana. This method for the identification of an cultured pathogen may be applicable to other infectious diseases of unknown cause." Digital facsimile from nejm.org at this link.

(Thanks to Juan Weiss for this reference and its interpretation.)

Order of authorship in the original publication: Slater, Welch, Hensel.... Hensel, a medical technologist working in the clinical microbiology laboratory, University Hospitals, Oklahoma City, used innovative culture methods to discover a previously unknown gram negative bacillus in blood cultures of two HIV patients with persistent fever and bacteremia. They stated that the organism most closely resembled "Rochalimaea quintana" (now named Bartonella quintana).

(Thanks to Juan Weiss for this reference and its interpretation.)

Second edition by Weir and Albert Mudrey, Otorhinolarygngology: An illustrated history, Ashford, UK: Headley Brothers, 2013.

(Order of authorship in the original publication: Woese, Kandler, Wheelis.) Introduction of the three-domain biological classification system that divides cellular life into three forms or domains: Archaea, Bacteria, and Eukarya.  Archaea and bacteria are prokaryotic microorganisms, or single-celled organisms, the cells of which have no nucleus. The  Eukarya domain includes all life that has a nucleus and membrane-bound organelles, and multicellular organisms

(Thanks to Juan Weiss for this reference and its interpretation.)

Digital facsimile from pnas.org at this link.

Translated into English as The "abortion pill": RU-486 - a woman's choice by Étienne-Émile Baulieu with Mort Rosenblum. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991.

"Sleepless Souls is a social and cultural history of suicide in early modern England. It traces the rise and fall of the crime of self-murder and explores why suicide came to be harshly punished in the sixteenth century, and why it was subsequently gradually decriminalized, tolerated, and even sentimentalized. It is a readable, detailed, and scholarly examination of the changing meaning of self-destruction, which provides an illuminating perspective of the sweep of cultural and social change in England over three centuries" (publisher)

https://www.yumpu.com/en/document/read/33597385/casey-a-wood-collection-osler-library-archives-mcgill-university

"This is a guide to one of the collections held by the Osler Library of the History of Medicine, McGill University."

Kornberg discovered that transmission of gene regulatory signals to the RNA polymerase machinery is accomplished by an additional protein complex dubbed the Mediator. As noted by the Nobel Prize committee, "the great complexity of eukaryotic organisms is actually enabled by the fine interplay between tissue-specific substances, enhancers in the DNA and Mediator. The discovery of Mediator is therefore a true milestone in the understanding of the transcription process."

King showed that breast cancer can be inherited due to mutations in the Breast cancer type 1 susceptibility protein, a protein that in humans is encoded by the BRAC1 gene. BRCA1 is a human tumor suppressor gene (also known as a caretaker gene) that is responsible for repairing DNA.

Describes with detailed historical notes over 2300 books in the John Martin Rare Book Room, chiefly donated to the library by John Martin (1904-1996). The books are arranged chronologically by date of the author’s birth. Numerous illustrations, including some in color. Many of the annotations were written by the collector, John Martin.

Fully annotated descriptions, mostly with complete collations, paginations, and plate counts, of 2600 classics covering the spectrum of the sciences, emphasizing medicine, from circa 1470 to 1950, in the library of Haskell F. Norman (1915-1996). The introductions discuss the place of this library in history of book collecting by physicians and scientists, and Haskell Norman's approach to building this library over four decades.

Expressed Sequence Tags (ESTs) for DNA sequencing. By Adams, M.D., Kelley, J.M., Gocayne, J.D., Dubnick, M., Polymeropoulos, M.H., Xiao, H., Merril, C.R., Wu, A., Olde, B., Moreno, R., Kerlavage, A.R., McCombie, W.R., and Venter, J.C.

Vol. 1: Primitive and Ancient Medicine (1991/1995), Vol. 2: Greek Medicine (1996), Vol. 3: Roman Medicine (1998), Vol. 4: Byzantine and Islamic Medicine (2001), Vol. 5: Medieval Medicine (2003), Vol. 6: Renaissance Medicine (2007).

Vol. 1 contains discussion of Egyptian, Chinese,  Hindu, Mesopotamian, and well as primitive and naturalistic medicine.

A collection of essays by various scholars. Editors also included M.E. van Opstall and F. Vos.

Available as a PDF from www.history.army.mil at this link.

The first teleoperated surgery. Funded by the U.S. Dept. of Defense, the first prototype of a telesurgery robot was developed at Stanford Research International (SRI) (Menlo Park, CA) and called the Green Telepresence System. It was primarily developed for open surgery.

This pre-Galenic astrological text by an unknown author from the later part of the 13th century concerns astrological prognostication. It was based upon Book III of Galen's De diebus criticis, but provided a "handy shortcut" to Galen's more convoluted text. Using it a skilled astrologer-physician could in theory calculate the critical days of an illness according to the length of the phases of the moon.

"... the authors review all the ancient treatises, ranged in chronological order, that cite Nicander at greater or lesser length, from Celsus up to Paul of Aegina - not less than thirteen authors. . . . Next follows a section . . . . on Nicander as scientist, physician, and poet. Happily brief, this part is followed by another, more ample, on Nicander's poetic heritage, which starts with Virgil and ends with Keats, and includes ten authors, among them Dante, Ronsard, and Shakespeare. . . . there follow nineteen plates referring to snakes, derived from sculpture, manuscripts, paintings, and prints of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and copious appendices that risk constituting the most interesting part of the work..." - Society for Ancient Medicine

East Coast fever (theileriosis) is an animal disease in Africa caused by the protozoan parasite Theileria parva.

Freireich was part of the team that first introduced combined-drug cancer chemotherapy in 1965.

First translation into a modern language of Books ! and II of De methodo medendi.  Very extensive introduction, commentary and bibliography.

This is an ongoing project with many volumes and many editors and several publishers. The number of volumes already published, and planned volumes was unclear in May 2017 when I wrote this entry. Further information is available from vallisneri.it at this link.

"This is the first book to examine and compare the history and contemporary problems of education for public health in Britain and the United States. In Britain, education for public health has been directed solely toward the medical profession; in the United States, independent schools of public health are open to physicians, engineers, nurses, lawyers, administrators and other professional groups. Despite their differences, these two systems continue to serve as models for public health schools and training programs throughout the world. This unique study provides a lucid view of the political, economic, and social forces which shape public health patterns. It will provoke and inform policy decisions about the future directions of education in all countries interested in building stronger and more effective public health systems" (publisher).

Horvitz and colleagues identified several key components in the molecular pathway of programmed cell death, including: EGL-1, a protein which activates apoptosis by inhibiting CED-9.

In the late 1890s, Brödel was brought to the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine  to illustrate for Harvey Cushing, William Halsted, Howard Kelly, and other notable clinicians. Besides creating a prolific amount of work Brödel developed new artistic techniques, such as the carbon dust technique, that helped advance the quality and accuracy of medical illustrations. In 1911 he presided over the creation of the first Department of Art as Applied to Medicine for training other medical illustrators at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, remaining director of this department until 1939.

Reprints Reeds, "Publishing scholarly books in the sixteenth century,"  Scholarly Publishing (April, 1983), 259-274.

The first history of bioethics.

"We were impressed with the magnitude and depth of the work by Eycleshymer and Schoemaker, A Cross-Section Anatomy, published by D. Appleton Company in 1911, and now out of print. As a consequence, our goal was to produce an "in-depth" reference book to fill the gap left by Eycleshymer and Schoemaker, thereby extending the important contribution made by these authors." (Preface).

Digital edition from anatomyatlases.org at this link.

"Social welfare policy in the United States has gone from controversy in the 1930s, to consensus at mid-century, and back to controversy and confusion in the late twentieth century. In America's Welfare State, Edward Berkowitz offers a concise and informative historical overview of this costly and often frustrating area of domestic policy" (publisher).

"In the nineteenth century, major developments in internal surgery were due to operations on ovaries. Women bore the brunt of surgical experimentation and also reaped its rewards. Their need was great, but so was their compliance. From the first operation in America in 1809, much suffering was relieved at the expense of prolonged surgery endured by both black slaves and prosperous whites. Later, in the Victorian era, many surgeons looked at certain types of behavior as reasons for mutilating operations. Such procedures as "spaying" and clitoridectomies were performed to "cure" hysteria and masturbation, as well as questionable interventionalist surgery in pregnancy and childbirth which still continue today" (publisher).

Limited to 200 copies.

Pages 42-46 are an extremely detailed, briefly annotated bibliography.

A summary of the international impact of the 1918 pandemic, its movement around the globe, and mortality estimates for various countries.

Probably the first ophthalmic textbook devoted exclusively to parasitic infections, discussing diseases caused by protozoa, nematodes, cestodes, trematodes, and arthropods.

The digital edition is available from nap.edu at this link.

Based on the collection of the late K. Garth Huston, Sr., this is the first complete annotated bibliographical study of the writings of Sir Kenelm Digby (1603-1665), one of the most celebrated figures in 17th-century English court life, politics, diplomacy naval warfare, science, and bibliophily.

"In their landmark paper published in 1991, Buck and Axel cloned olfactory receptors, showing that they belong to the family of G protein coupled receptors. By analyzing rat DNA, they estimated that there were approximately one thousand different genes for olfactory receptors in the mammalian genome. This research opened the door to the genetic and molecular analysis of the mechanisms of olfaction" (Wikipedia article on Richard Axel, accessed 7-22).

In 2004 Axel and Buck received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine "for their discoveries of odorant receptors and the organization of the olfactory system."

Eleven years after publication of No. 14207, Alan Hildebrand, working with Luis and Walter Alvarez, proposed that the Chicxulub Crater, discovered by Antonio-Camargo-Zanoguera and Glen T. Penfield during the 1970s, was the C-T boundary impact crater posited in No. 14207.

"ABSTRACT: We suggest that a buried 180-km-diameter circular structure on the Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico, is an impact crater. Its size and shape are revealed by magnetic and gravity-field anomalies, as well as by oil wells drilled inside and near the structure. The stratigraphy of the crater includes a sequence of andesitic igneous rocks and glass interbedded with, and overlain by, breccias that contain evidence of shock metamorphism. The andesitic rocks have chemical and isotopic compositions similar to those of tektites found in Cretaceous/Tertiary (K/T) ejecta. A 90-m-thick K/T boundary breccia, also containing evidence of shock metamorphism, is present 50 km outside the crater's edge. This breccia probably represents the crater's ejecta blanket. The age of the crater is not precisely known, but a K/T boundary age is indicated. Because the crater is in a thick carbonate sequence, shock-produced CO 2 from the impact may have caused a severe greenhouse warming."

Order of authorship in the original publication: Hildebrand, Penfield, Kring...Camargo et al.

(Thanks to Juan Weiss for this reference and its interpretation.)

An essential reinterpretation of the classics in the history of anatomical illustration, with many fine plates.

Riddle argued that the ancient world possessed effective and safe contraceptives and abortifacients; however this knowledge about fertility control, widely held in the ancient world, was gradually lost over the course of the Middle Ages, becoming nearly unavailable by the early modern period. The reasons for this, Riddle argued, was that this knowledge was passed down through the oral and folk tradition, mainly by midwives, and belonged to a distinctly female-centered culture, removed from the male dominated and orientated knowledge of professionally trained physicians.

Reproduction of 51 drawings from Trinity College, Cambridge, MS 0.1.20 of the surgery of Roger of Parma, best known as Roger of Salerno, with detailed explanation of each drawing by Tony Hunt.

The first computer graphics atlas of the brain of any species, with the illustration files also available separately (1993). The work included a complete and systematic, hierarchically organized set of annotated nomenclature tables, the first of its kind. It also presented a bilateral flatmap of the rat central nervous system, displaying the gray matter regions outlined in the atlas and presented in the annotated nomenclature tables. The first edition was followed by the following: 

1. Swanson, Brain maps: computer graphics files, professional version 1.0, with 4 floppy discs (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1993).
2. Swanson,  Brain maps: structure of the rat brain. A laboratory guide with printed and electronic templates for data, models and schematics , 2nd revised edition (Amsterdam: Elsevier) with double CD-ROM, Brain maps: labeling toolkit & graphics files, including Computer graphics files 2.0, with Interactive brain maps 2.0 (the instruction booklet dated 1998/1999).
3. Swanson. Brain maps: structure of the rat brain. A laboratory guide with printed and electronic templates for data, models and schematics, 3rd revised edition (Amsterdam: Elsevier. 2004)  with CD-ROM, Brain maps: computer graphics files 3.0 and including Interactive brain maps 3.0. 

A spectacular book on eight medical and natural history museums: text by Gould, superbly reproduced dramatic photographs by Purcell. Chapter 1: "Dutch treat: Peter the Great and Frederik Ruysch".

The only known early health guide for the pilgrim to Mecca, by the Syrian Melkite Christian physician, scientist and translator.

The first conference on the medical applications of virtual reality.

The essays in this book concern disease, health and healing practices on the African continent. The contributors all emphasize the social conditions linked to ill health and the development of local healing traditions, from Morocco to South Africa and from the precolonial era to the present. The editors provide introductory overviews explaining why and how health and disease are related to historical, economic and political phenomena. Several chapters illustrate how the most basic facts of everday life encourage the spread of disease and shape the possibilities of survival. Others discuss a variety of healing practices: drums of affliction in Bantu-speaking societies, Muslim humoral medicine and bio-medicine as practiced in hospitals and dispensaries.

Digital facsimile of the original manuscript with the transcription and translation by Ulrich Stoll from Staatsbibliothek Bamberg at this link.

The first comprehensive treatment of plant biomechanics. "Niklas analyzes plant form and provides a far deeper understanding of how form is a response to basic physical laws. He examines the ways in which these laws constrain the organic expression of form, size, and growth in a variety of plant structures, and in plants as whole organisms, and he draws on the fossil record as well as on studies of extant species to present a genuinely evolutionary view of the response of plants to abiotic as well as biotic constraints" (Publisher).

English translation as A history of child psychoanalysis (London and New York: Routledge, 1998).

Chapter 1. "Out of eugenics: The historical politics of the human genome" by D. J. Kevles.

Chapter 2. "A history of the science and technology behind gene mapping and sequencing" by Horace Freeland Judson.

Chapter 7. "A personal view of the project" by James D. Watson.

Translated into English by M. B. DeBevoise as Hippocrates (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1999).

Translated in English by David Madell (excluding the notes) as The fight against cancer France 1890-1940. London & New York: Routledge, 2002.

From the number of volumes planned we may conclude that Virchow was one of the most prolific of all physicians. According to the Wikipedia article on Christian Andree, to which I have linked, volumes in this set were published by Peter Lang from 1992 to 1997, by Blackwell from 1999 to 2001, by Langen Müller in 2002, by Königshausen & Neuman in 2002, by Blackwell in 2003, and by Olms from 2005 to 2015. An Olms brochure which was available online when I wrote this entry in January 2020 indicated that Vols.1-29 would concern Medicine, Vols. 30-41 Politics, Vols. 42-58 Anthropology including Prehistory, Vols. 55 to 71 letters between Virchow and his contemporaries. In January 2020 it appeared that most, but not all, of the planned volumes were published.

Third edition with Oliver J. Kim, Baton Rouge, FL: CRC Press, 2018.

Laboratory medicine developed in the nineteenth century, principally in Germany, France, Britain, and the United States. While a number of scholars have studied various aspects of laboratory medicine in the nineteenth century, no attempts have hitherto been made to synthesise such work and to present a view of the whole subject. 

Translated into English by Marjorie Grene as The mechanization of the heart: Harvey and Descartes. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2001.

Explores the various manifestations of eating disorders in literature, including cannibalism, the magic attributes of food, religiously motivated fasting, and children's eating problems, from the classical period to Toni Morrison, in American, British, and European texts.

Order of authorship in the original publication: Regnery, Anderson, Clarridge....The authors paid homage to the innovative work of medical technologist Diane Hensel by naming the species after her. It was initially grouped into the Rochalimea genus, later reclassified to Bartonella.

The abstract read:

"Isolation of a Rochalimaea-like organism from a febrile patient infected with human immunodeficiency virus was confirmed. Analysis of 16S rRNA gene sequences, together with polymerase chain reaction and restriction endonuclease length polymorphism analysis of a portion of the citrate synthase gene, demonstrated that the agent is closely related to members of the genus Rochalimaea and that the isolate is genotypically identical to the presumptive etiologic agent of bacillary angiomatosis. However, the same genotypic analyses readily differentiated the new isolate from isolates of other recognized Rochalimaea species as well as other genera of bacteria previously suggested as putative etiologic agents of bacillary angiomatosis and related syndromes. We propose that the novel species be referred to as Rochalimaea henselae sp. nov."

(Thanks to Juan Weiss for this reference and its interpretation.)

"All too often ancient herbal and other remedies have been dismissed as ’simply’ folklore, of no relevance to medical science. John Riddle’s approach, however, has been to explore the history of drugs with the hypothesis that ancient and medieval medicines were effective - a methodology that he expounds in the final essay (hitherto unpublished). Indeed, he shows, both from detailed case-studies and from the comparison of the listings given by classical and medieval authorities with those in modern pharmacopoeias, that our ancestors had discovered and made effective use of many of the drugs used in medicine today, from antiseptics and analgesics to oral contraceptives, even chemotherapy for cancer. There is the suggestion, therefore, that more careful examination and identification of the drugs used in the past may reveal chemicals that can be exploited anew. Central to these studies is the investigation of how a drug was used and how knowledge about it was transmitted - and perhaps also distorted in the process - from the Classical world through the Middle Ages" (publisher).

Iconographic reconstruction and original size facsimile in color of 127 sheets, including 97 preserved in Istanbul and 30 sheets dispersed in different institutional collections in Europe and the U.S., of this illuminated manuscript of the Arabic text of Dioscorides that was completed in 1224 in Baghdad, and preserved in Byzantium. For each plate Touwaide provided a commentary. He also provided an historical introduction in the first volume. 

Order of authorship in the original publication: Relman, Schmidt, MacDermott....The authors used 16S ribosomal RNA sequencing to identify the bacillus associated with Whipple's disease that had resisted culturing methods for more than 80 years. Based on its unique characteristics and its association with an illness that leads to emaciation by interferring with intestinal absorption of nutrients they named it "Tropheryma whippelii gen. nov. sp. nov."  Digital facsimile from nejm.org at this link.

(Thanks to Juan Weiss for this reference and its interpretation.)

Reprints several dozen classic papers with commentary.

"The coal-company doctors of Appalachia fought the health hazards of the coal fields, arguably the most dangerous and diseased working environment of the modern world. Often the doctors were held accountable for evils that persisted despite their best efforts. Claude A. Frazier - a coal-camp doctor's son and a doctor himself - draws on the memories of health workers, miners, and their families to convey the horrific problems in the coal camps, the resourcefulness of the doctors and nurses, and the struggle to raise health standards in and around the mines.
"Doctor Frazier tells how, from the Civil War to World War II, Appalachian mountain folk were exploited in a feudal system ruled by the coal companies. The miners, always in debt to the company, paid for a doctor's services with a checkoff from wages. The company doctor, like the company store, school, and church, was a consequence of the poor transportation and poverty in the wild mountains and narrow valleys where King Coal reigned.
"Miners and Medicine recalls not only the coal-camp doctors who were incompetent but the many others who performed valiant service in conditions that seem impossible by today's standards - in tiny, polluted communities with no nearby hospital or pharmacy, precious few nurses, and nonexistent sanitary facilities. Often the miners' wives and children, whose stories are told here, went hungry in drafty, pest-ridden company housing, from which they were expelled if they had no family member working in the mine. Boys went to work as teen-agers until child-labor laws finally were enforced in the 1950s. Black lung shortened the lives of virtually all miners" (publisher).

Translated into English by M. B. DeBevoise as Hippocrates, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999.

Andersen and colleagues invented percutaneous aortic valve replacement (PAVR), also known as percutaneous aortic valve implantation (PAVI), transcatheter aortic valve implantation (TAVI) or transcatheter aortic valve replacement (TAVR). This procedure replaces the aortic valve of the heart through the blood vessels, instead of by open heart surgery.  See Andersen, H.R. "How transcatheter aortic valve implantation (TAVI) was born: The struggle for a new invention," Cardiovasc. Med., 29 September 2021 | https://doi.org/10.3389/fcvm.2021.722693.

Noller demonstrated that the ribosome is a ribozyme, a critical step in understanding how ribosomes translate the genetic information in DNA into the language of proteins.
 

Includes an extensive bibliography of printed and online sources.


https://web.archive.org/web/20070520063824/http://www.symposion.com/ijt/pfaefflin/1000.htm

Honjo discovered the programmed cell death protein 1 (PD-1). This discovery significantly contributed to the establishment of cancer immunotherapy principle by PD-1 blockade.  Order of authorship in the original publication: Ishida, Agata, Shibahara, Honjo.

In 2018 Honjo shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with James P. Allison “for their discovery of cancer therapy by inhibition of negative immune regulation.”

An encyclopedic world history of disease, incorporating a geographic approach. 

Text written by Ira Rutkow; captions to illustrations written by Jeremy Norman.

Describes elements of the Waller Collection not covered in Sallander's 2-volume catalogue of the books. Erik Waller assembled the largest library of the history of medicine and science of any 20th century collector. The Waller Library consists of the following components, totaling over 108,000 items. 

Books: 21,000

Uncatalogued pamphlets, booklets & offprints: 4000

Autographs & Letters: 30,000

Alba Amicorum: 36

Bookplates: 200

Iconography (Prints, etc.): 40,000

Manuscripts & Diplomas: 300

Medals: 600

Estimated total: 108,100

The edition also provides invaluable information regarding Hunter's life and work, and a discussion of the existing Hunterian manuscripts and the record of their survival or loss. As an account of the unique story of the partial survival and partial destruction of John Hunter's manuscripts I quote from the summary provided by the SurgiCat website of the Royal College of Surgeons as accessed in August 2016 at this link:

"The Destruction of the Hunterian Manuscripts:

John Hunter kept many manuscript notes of his dissections, cases, and research. Hunter employed a number of amanuenses so that fair copies of his rough manuscripts could be taken, the rough manuscripts often being destroyed after this had been done. Hunter published two major works on the teeth in 1771 and 1778, as well as many papers on a variety of topics. However there still remained a great deal of unpublished material after Hunter’s death in 1793. These manuscripts were kept at Hunter’s house in Castle Street under the care of William Clift. Over the next six years, William Clift copied many of the manuscripts for his own reference.

John Hunter wished his collection of specimens should be offered to the British Government. In 1799 the collections were offered to The Company of Surgeons, which became The Royal College of Surgeons of England in 1800. A museum was purpose built to incorporate these collections in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. In December 1799, Sir Everard Home ordered that all the Hunterian manuscripts should be transferred to his own house.

Sir Everard Home, a Hunterian Trustee and one of John Hunter’s executors, was entrusted by the Board of Trustees for the Hunterian Collections, to use the manuscripts to compile a catalogue of the specimens. However, this catalogue never appeared. In 1823, Sir Everard Home spoke to William Clift of a fire at his home resulting in the fire brigade being called, which was caused by his burning of John Hunter’s manuscripts in the fireplace.

The Hunterian Trustees began to worry about the catalogue being completed and elected a committee to consider the catalogue at their meeting in February 1824. The Board of Curators of the Museum requested on the 5th March 1824 that the Hunter manuscripts be transferred to the College as soon as possible. Sir Everard Home responded that John Hunter did not consider his manuscripts to be seen by the public due to their imperfect state and that they should instead be destroyed. Home claimed that he had spent the last 30 years using the papers for the benefit of the museum, but due to his own ill health could not continue this, and ended his executorship by destroying them.

The Board of Trustees were astonished and correspondence followed between the Trustees, the Board of Curators, and Sir Everard Home. This resulted in Sir Everard Home presenting the Board of Trustees with a sealed parcel containing some of John Hunter’s descriptions of specimens, on the 27th November 1824. Sir Everard Home claimed these were all the records of Morbid Anatomy of John Hunter. The Board of Curators reported that the records were incomplete and William Clift revealed that the records when he had looked after them between 1793 and 1799 had been much more numerous. Sir Everard Home did not respond to the questions asked of him about these records, but presented the Cases in Surgery manuscripts to the Board of Trustees at the meeting on 19th February 1825.

The reasons behind Sir Everard Home’s destruction of the Hunterian Manuscripts has been discussed on numerous occasions, with several theories being proposed. Sir Arthur Keith suggested for example that Home destroyed the manuscripts out of piety due to the heretical content of some the papers. This explanation has been considered limited due to minority of papers that might be considered of a heretical nature. The theory now more generally accepted to explain the destruction of the majority of the Hunterian manuscripts is that Home was using the contents of the manuscripts in his own publications.

Evidence used to back up this argument includes comparisons between some of John Hunter’s works and those of Sir Everard Home, which contain striking similarities; the extent of publications produced by Home between 1793 and 1823 including an incredible amount of original work for such a short time period; and the fact that Home destroyed the Hunterian manuscripts a few days after receiving the final proofs of his work Lectures on Comparative Anatomy.

Following the presentation by Home of the manuscripts of records in morbid anatomy and cases in surgery, William Clift began to transcribe them. These transcriptions were completed by 1825, and were added to the transcriptions of other Hunterian Manuscripts undertaken by William Clift before the originals were destroyed. Other Hunterian manuscripts have been added to the collections over the years from various sources.

[Source: Elizabeth Allen, JL Turk, Sir Reginald Murley (eds) The Case Books of John Hunter FRS, London: Royal Society of Medicine Services Limited, 1993.]"

http://medhum.med.nyu.edu/

"The Literature, Arts and Medicine Database (LitMed) is a collection of literature, fine art, visual art and performing art annotations created as a dynamic, comprehensive resource for scholars, educators, students, patients, and others interested in medical humanities. It was created by faculty of the New York University School of Medicine in 1993. The annotations are written by an invited editorial board of scholars from all over North America.

"We define the term "medical humanities" broadly to include an interdisciplinary field of humanities (literature, philosophy, ethics, history and religion), social science (anthropology, cultural studies, psychology, sociology), and the arts (literature, theater, film, multimedia and visual arts) and their application to healthcare education and practice. The humanities and arts provide insight into the human condition, suffering, personhood, and our responsibility to each other. They also offer a historical perspective on healthcare. Attention to literature and the arts helps to develop and nurture skills of observation, analysis, empathy, and self-reflection -- skills that are essential for humane healthcare. The social sciences help us to understand how bioscience and medicine take place within cultural and social contexts and how culture interacts with the individual experience of illness and the way healthcare is practiced.

"The site also includes a blog and resource section. Readers are also invited to join a LitMed list serve for those interested in posting resources related to the field" (http://medhum.med.nyu.edu/about, accessed 01-2017).

An authoritative account of the way that medicine was practiced in India in adaptation to the situation faced by physicians and the state in India, focusing on three major epidemic diseases: smallpox, cholera plague.

A comprehensive ethnography of magico-religious, medicinal, and recreational tobacco use among native South American societies, based on a survey of nearly three hundred societies.

The Nuaulu or Naulu are a tribe located in Seram, Maluku, Indonesia.

A bibliography of publications, including those on medical subjects, issued from the Imprimerie national in Cairo established by Napoleon during the campaign, and also publications issued from Paris documenting information gathered during the campaign. 

Order of authorship in the original publication: Dolan, Wong, Regnery....The authors demonstrated that Rochalimea henselae (now Bartonella henselae) is the infectious agent causing cat scratch fever.

(Thanks to Juan Weiss for this reference and its interpretation.)

Ortega and colleagues identified a novel parasite resembling C. muris in the feces of Peruvian patients and 2 U.S. patients, with symptoms resembling those of infections with Cryptosporidium. The parasite infected both immunocompetent and immunocompromised hosts, but stained parasitic photos and electron microscope images revealed a parasite distinct from Cryptosporidium. (Order of authorship in the original publication: Ortega, Sterling, Gilman...) Available from nejm.org at this link.

(Thanks to Juan Weiss for this reference and its interpretation.)

Treats the most prominent issues in medical ethics in the twentieth century, such as abortion, artificial insemination, organ transplantation, euthanasia, as discussed by Muslim religious scholars, physicians and jurists.

In 1993 Rose and Bona revised Witebsky's postulates "based on direct evidence from transfer of pathogenic antibody or pathogenic T-cells, indirect evidence based on reproduction of the autoimmune disease in experimental animals and circumstantial evidence from clinical clues.:^[5]

• Auto-antibodies detectable in all cases of disease.
• Experimentally reproducible by immunization with antigen.
• Experimental disease must show immunopathological lesions that parallel those in the natural disease.
• Transferable by serum or lymphoid cells." (Wikipedia article on Ernst Witebsky, accessed 8-2021).

Identification by the many scientists in The Huntington's Disease Collaborative Research Group, including Gusella, of the single defective gene on chromosome 4 that causes the progressive brain disorder, Huntington's disease. The defect is dominant, meaning that anyone who inherits it from a parent with Huntington's will eventually develop the disease. The defective gene codes for a protein called huntingtin. Since identification of the defective gene, a diagnostic genetic test has been developed that can detect the defective gene in people who do not yet have symptoms of the disease.

Ambros and colleagues discovered the first known microRNA (miRNA), a small single-stranded non-coding RNA molecule (containing about 22 nucleotides) found in plants, animals and some viruses, that functions in RNA silencing and post-transcriptional regulation of gene expression. The human genome may encode over 1900 miRNAs, although more recent analysis suggests that the number is closer to 2,300.

The first human disease associated with deregulation of miRNAs was chronic lymphocytic leukemia. In this disorder, the miRNAs work as both tumor suppressors and oncogenes.

In 2024 Victor Ambros shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine Gary Ruvkun for "the discovery of microRNA and its role in post-transcriptional gene regulation."

Order of authorship in the original publication: Lee, Feinbaum, Ambros.

The authors cloned and generated the sequence of the lin-14 gene. They discovered that a
segment in lin-14 mRNA (messenger RNA), was necessary for its inhibition by lin-4.

Ruvkun and Ambros (No. 14010) then compared results and shared the sequences of lin-4 and lin-14 genes and noticed that the short lin-4 mRNA matched complementarity sequences in the critical segment of the lin-14 mRNA. Both performed further experiments showing that the lin-4 microRNA turns off the lin-14 by binding to the complementary sequences of its mRNA thus blocking the production of lin-14 protein.

Ambros and Ruvkun concurrently discovered a novel principle of gene regulation,
mediated by a previously unknown type of RNA that they named "microRNA."
Initially the scientific community considered their data a peculiarity of the C.
elegans worm and likely irrelevant to humans and other more complex animals. 

In 2024 Ruvkun and Ambros shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for "the discovery of microRNA and its role in post-transcriptional gene regulation."

Order authorship in the original publication: Wightman, Ha, Ruvkun.

(Thanks to Juan Weiss for this reference and its interpretation.)

Discovery of the hormone leptin and its role in regulating body weight. Friedman and associates subsequently found that injections of the encoded protein, leptin, decrease body weight of mice by reducing food intake and increasing energy expenditure. With Ricardo Proenca, Margherita Maffei, Marissa Barone, and Lori Leopold.

Between 1992 and 1994 White and his team discovered the first Ardipithecus ramidus fossils in the Middle Awash area of Ethiopia. They named their discovery Ardipithecus ramidus (‘ramid’ means ‘root’ in the Afar language of Ethiopia and refers to the closeness of this new species to the roots of humanity, while ‘Ardi’ means ‘ground’ or ‘floor’). White devised the genus name Ardipithecus to distinguish this new genus from Australopithecus. 

The first Ardipithecus ramidus fossil found was dated to 4.4 million years BP on the basis of its stratigraphic position between two volcanic strata. 

Translated into English by John Tedeschi and Anne C. Tedeschi as Books of the body: Anatomical ritual and Renaissance learning, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. 

Includes a section on the development of tomography and computed tomography (CT). Translated into English by Peter F. Winter as Radiology in medical diagnostics: Evolution of X-ray applications 1895-1995 (Oxford: Blackwell Science, 1995).

Edited by Wolfe and Menczer. Includes a reproduction of Wells's casebook.

Translated into English by Aileen Porter as African ethnobotany: Poisons and drugs. Chemistry - Pharmacology - Toxicology (Chapman & Hall, 1996).

The beginning of image-guided surgery. Abstract: "The NeuroStation is an image-guided neurosurgery workstation designed to deliver frameless stereotaxy within an ergonomic, integrated surgical environment. Generally, stereotaxy can provide the neurosurgeon with important intra-operative localization information using diagnostic images such as computerized tomography (CT) or magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). To date, however, stereotaxy has not been widely accepted by neurosurgeons due to the procedural difficulties of incorporating conventional stereotaxy. The NeuroStation addresses the problems of conventional stereotaxy through the use of frameless stereotactic methods wherein state-of-the-art instrumentation and computer innovations allow: a) standard surgical instruments to be used as the localization device; b) multipoint registration methods in place of frame-based registration; and c) real-time interactive surgical localization. The NeuroStation can thus be transparently integrated into the neurosurgical procedure providing the neurosurgeon with image-guidance for surgical planning, biopsies, craniotomies, endoscopy, intra-operative ultrasound, radiation therapy, etc."