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.

    19/352 (page XV)
    (separately catalogued and subject-indexed) from the collection of Dr. Nicolás León; and a recently re-classified and re-catalogued collection of 19th and early 20th century American travel literature, including much of classic ethnographical importance on the American Indians of North, Central, and South America, and their medical concepts and healing practices. All this interesting material falls outside the categories of date and origin laid down for this catalogue. Of considerable marginal interest, but for reasons of expense and time deliberately omitted from the present catalogue, are: (i) the small pamphlet invocations to saints in times of pestilence published primarily in the City of Mexico, of which there are 76 in the collection published from 1702 to 1821, and a further 28 items from 1822 to 1850; (ii) the 66 colonial imprints on hospitaller orders and Provincial Councils of the Church, which have some bearing on the practice of colonial medicine; and (iii) the 424 broadside theses of medical interest presented before the Royal and Pontifical University of Mexico from 1598 to 1820, all of which already appear in Francisco Guerra, Iconografía médica mexicana, Mexico, Imprenta del Diario Español, 1955. On the other hand it was thought appropriate in so specialized a catalogue to include, without format statement or bibliographical or other comment, brief entries for the 113 facsimiles of printed works deriving from the region, since the original material, particularly that from Saint Domingue (Haïti), is rare or otherwise difficult of access. Entries The cataloguing procedures follow those originally described in the first volume of the Catalogue of printed books in the Wellcome Historical Medical Library (1962) and reprinted with modifications appropriate to the later period in the introduction of Volume III (1976) of the same series. Further minor modifications were necessary for the present specialized catalogue. In transcribing titles for instance, the original spelling, punctuation, and accentuation (or lack of it) have been preserved, as far as possible, beyond the year 1800 (laid down as the limit for this particular method of transcription in the introduction to Volume III (1976) of the catalogue series) to 1821, the term of the catalogue; as much of the title has been transcribed as will indicate clearly the contents of the work. Circumflexes in the original text have been ignored and grave accents where they appear in the original text have been transcribed as the modern acute accent. An '&c.' is frequently inserted, particularly for the transcription of official documents whose title has often had to be used as the text of the entry. Items under the same entry have been placed in date order, as more meaningful for the purposes of this catalogue than the more usual alphabetical order of title. Family names remain in their original form; Christian names have been modernised and accented according to present usage. Annotations The annotations provide bibliographical citations, bibliographical comments,