Illustrations from the Wellcome Institute Library. Some recently acquired papers of Robert Whytt (1714-1766), FRS.

In November 1991, the Western Manuscripts Department of the Wellcome Institute was offered, and subsequently purchased, a collection of manuscripts which had belonged to the eighteenth-century Scottish physiologist and clinician Robert Whytt. The contents of a single cardboard box were unpacked and examined with some excitement. Here were primary materials on all aspects ofWhytt's career, where before researchers had been limited to the study ofprinted volumes and some scattered letters and papers. It quickly became clear that this was the largest group ofWhytt documents to have emerged to date.' Born in Edinburgh, Robert Whytt had a lifelong association with the city and its medical establishment. He made the progression from the university and into general practice after rounding off his education in London, Paris and Leyden, gaining his MD, in 1737. Ten years later, he was elected to the chair of Institutes of Medicine at Edinburgh Medical School, a post he held for the rest of his working life. Whytt's professional expertise was recognised by election to the Fellowship of the Royal Society of London (1752) and to the Presidency of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh (1763). This steady record of achievement disguises an uneasy character: variously accused of hypochondria and irritability in his lifetime,2 Whytt could be a ready and persistent controversialist, most famously with Albrecht von Haller (1708-1777).3 Whytt's reputation as a leading physician rests on his original researches on nervous diseases and vital motions, resulting in the publication ofAn essay on the vital and other