Medicine in Great Britain from the Restoration to the nineteenth century, 1660-1800 : an annotated bibliography /

The period from 1660 to 1800 marked the beginning of the move of medicine from the "dark ages" to the beginning of scientific medicine. There was a veritable explosion of publications. This bibliography is one of the few attempts to bring order to the chaos of publications during this time. The more than 2,000 items included here are from England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. They represent the work of some of the pioneers of modern medicine (Jenner, Hunter, Smellie, Sloan) and lead us back to their original publications. Although the annotation in these entries is minimal, Rogal has provided birth and death dates, and often a sentence or two of biographical information about the author. In a few cases, the importance or content of the item is described. The organization of the book is perhaps too specific. For example, one chapter is titled "Gout, Rheumatism, Arthritis, Goiter, Back, Bones, Palsy." This specificity means difficulty in locating some items when the exact contents are not known; however, there is a name index that helps. The most nearly comparable previous book would appear to be John B. Blake's A Short Title Catalogue of Eighteenth-Century Printed Books in the National Library of Medicine (1979) but that work does not contain any annotations nor cover the 1660-1700 period. A useful addition to history of medicine or history of science collections.-G. Stein, University of Rhode Island