Illustrations from the Wellcome Institute Library. Some early medical contacts with the Kalmuck tribes of Siberia.

IN a recent article relating to early nineteenth-century Bible translation and printing in Mongolian, Professor Bawden mentions in the text of his article and again in a footnote,' a medical handbook translated from Russian into Kalmuck which was published in 1823. This book is now in the library of the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine. The Kalmuck tribes constituted one of the many peoples who occupied vast areas in Central Asia between the Altai and Tien Shan Mountains, the Gobi Desert, and Lake Balkash. They were nomadic, mongol by race, and their language related to Mongolian and other similar languages of Central Asia.2 By 1646, a large part of the Kalmuck tribes had submitted to Russian authority, although they retained their tribal system of government and their traditional khan or ruler. Some Kalmuck tribes settled under Chinese sovereignty around the Blue Lake, others migrated westwards during the eighteenth century and settled in the vicinity of the Volga. One Kalmuck tribe which was practically destroyed by the Chinese in the eighteenth century, emigrated to areas of Russian control, but found European tyranny even more oppressive and so returned to the rule of their old oppressors; other Kalmuck tribes lived successively by the side of the Volga, the Ural Mountains, and on the banks of the River Don.3 Today, they occupy a sparsely populated area of the Soviet Union, situated to the extreme south-east of European USSR, west of the lower Volga and adjacent to the Caspian sea. This book, one of the first printed in the Kalmuck language, witnesses the increasing European interest in the peoples of Siberia during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.' Many accounts describing Siberia survive from this period, but most of