A celebration of medical history

LLOYD G. STEVENSON (editor), A celebration of medical history, Baltimore, Md., and London, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982, 8vo, pp. vi, 228, illus., £12.75. The fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Institute and Library for the History of Medicine at the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, was appropriately marked by festivities, academic as well as gastronomic. Distinguished scholars were invited from Europe and the USA to lecture, and their offerings, together with the formal comments on them by Hopkins alumni, form the basis of this elegant and enjoyable volume. The range is wide, from the historiography of diseases and medical metaphors, to sixteenth-century England, Glisson and Wepfer, pre-revolutionary France, and nineteenth-century Italy. There is much here to admire, and indeed to stimulate thought. Friends of the Institute will be especially glad to have the varied assessments of the value and importance of its Library, not just in the context of other American medical schools and libraries, but internationally as one of the joint creators of the indispensable MEDLARS. The wittiest revelation of all is reserved until last: the birth of the Institute owed far more to W. H. Welch than he ever knew or suspected. Medical History salutes the Institute on its golden jubilee, and expresses the confident hope that it will continue to meet and surpass the expectations of its founding fathers as a model worthy of worldwide emulation. Vivian Nutton Wellcome Institute