Catalogue of the printed books and manuscripts (1491–1900) in the library of St Thomas's Hospital Medical School

eye" (p. 25); "Neurology is a modern medical discipline .... Hippocratic writings... revealed only a rudimentary understanding of anatomy and physiology" (p. 208). McGrew may well be right, recently published biographical and conceptual dictionaries on the history of science and philosophy are all, however distinguished their editors and contributors, "Whiggish". Perhaps popularization, which is not the same thing as popular history, is a project fundamentally at variance with the historian's craft. Perhaps, however, it simply brings into focus the selective principles that the historian favours anyhow. Within the limits he has defined, McGrew has produced a useful work of reference. It contains comfortable summaries of the topics listed above and others of a similar sort. Although the subjects are limited in number, the large index makes access easy. In compiling a reference work, no two writers would ever come up with the same headings, but the choice of diseases seems unusual, for example, trypanosomiasis gets six pages, fever gets nothing. Those with interests in particular fields will no doubt have their own grievances; I did not recognize the description of Cullen's physiology. There are also the inevitable discrepancies which such a venture produces; oxygen was discovered by Priestley and Scheele in 1771 (p. 14), by Scheele in 1774 (p. 225) and again by Priestley in 1775 (p. 132). The real worry about these statements, however, is the way that they point back to the popularization problem. It is not simply the errors over dates or persons, but the fact that Priestley did not discover oxygen at all, Priestley isolated dephlogisticated air. The medical school library at St Thomas's has a significant collection of pre-twentieth-century printed and unpublished works, much of it formerly hidden away in cupboards. The contents of these cupboards have now been restored, catalogued, and properly housed. A list of the library's pre-1900 holdings has been published. It begins with a brief history of the hospital, the medical school, and its library; there is evidence that the library was in existence by the mid-eighteenth century, but purchases for it were infrequent until a librarian was appointed in 1842. The catalogue consists of three thousand entries of printed works on medicine and science, about a hundred series or individual copies of journals, and a list of pre-1901 manuscripts and autographed letters. There is a series of exceptional anatomical atlases, chemistry and pharmacology are well represented, the collections in surgery …