Illustrations from the Wellcome Institute Library. Nicholas Gainsford: his book.

One of the largest and most varied acquisitions ofWestern Manuscripts in 1992 came as a result of the generosity of the British Medical Association, when fourteen miscellaneous volumes and some loose papers were transferred to the Wellcome Institute from the BMA Library in Tavistock House.' Many of these manuscript books contained lecture notes by medical students-taken from John and James Gregory, William Hunter, Percivall Pott and others-supplementing the great number of this type of document already held in the Institute. The series also provided diaries, case notes, research papers and post-mortem reports, the latter of recent enough production to be placed in the Contemporary Medical Archives Centre.2 The single most intriguing manuscript turned out to be the oldest. This was catalogued as Western MS. 6919, a notebook written by a rather different student to those of the great eighteenth-century teachers of the Edinburgh and London medical schools. Nicholas Gainsford (or Gaynsford) of Hartfield, East Sussex, kept his notebook between 18 January 1711/12 and 18 November 1713. The volume is a small but closely-written working document of 38 folios, originally vellum-bound, but now lacking its cover and end papers; that aside, it is complete and well preserved. The contents of the manuscript may reasonably be divided into two parts: the first half being Gainsford's case notes on patients treated by George Willett (d. 1729), a medical man living at Groombridge and operating on the East Sussex-Kent county divide;3 the remainder is a list of medical recipes. The whole is indexed to provide a neatly self-contained reference work, but with no distinct note as to its purpose, or to the status of Gainsford and Willett, or to their relationship.