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  • An Annotated Catalogue of the Edward C. Atwater Collection of American Popular Medicine and Health Reform
  • Toby A. Appel
Christopher Hoolihan. An Annotated Catalogue of the Edward C. Atwater Collection of American Popular Medicine and Health Reform. Rochester, University of Rochester Press, 2001–2004. Vol. I: A–L, xxi, 669 pp., illus. $125. Vol. II: M–Z, ix, 674 pp., illus. $125.

In the 1970s, before the current surge of historical interest, Edward C. Atwater, M.D., professor of medicine and the history of medicine at the University of Rochester, was a pioneer in collecting the obscure and ephemeral literature of popular medicine and health reform. In 1994, he generously donated his unique collection to the Edward G. Miner Library of the University of Rochester, and he has since continued to purchase items to enlarge it. This two-volume catalogue of the Atwater collection was compiled and annotated by Christopher Hoolihan, Head of Rare Books and Manuscripts of the Miner Library, with the assistance of Atwater. As a reference work, it is as useful to historians as to book collectors.

The catalogue covers a broad array of books and pamphlets published or available in America before 1918 and written for a popular audience. Authors represented in the 4,000 or so entries range from highly esteemed regular physicians to obscure hucksters with no formal medical training. Predominantly, however, the collection features the non-mainstream literature of health education and reform, works that informed the public about the functioning of their bodies and about health in relation to society. "It is hard to overestimate the influence of popular medical literature as an instrument of reform," wrote Atwater in his introductory survey of the varieties of popular medicine represented in the collection (p. xiv). Subjects include domestic medicine; irregular medicine for a popular audience; spas and water cures; phrenology; physiology and hygiene written for adults and for schoolchildren; popular anatomy museums; advice on diseases and care for the sick; marriage guides, sex education, and contraception; women's health; physical culture; diet; temperance; tobacco; proprietary medicines; and much more. These were topics often ignored by the leaders of the regular medical profession, and of little interest to most physicians who collected medical books before Atwater. A surprising number of works in the catalog are by women, laywomen as well as many early female graduates of medical schools.

What makes the catalogue especially useful for historians of medicine are the extensive scholarly annotations. Hoolihan, with the collaboration of Atwater, has combed scores of directories and a wide variety of primary and secondary sources in order to provide biographical information on [End Page 243] most of the authors represented. Some of the biographical entries are substantial and highly original, such as Atwater's for the Kahn and Jordan families associated with Dr. Kahn's Museum of Anatomy and Medical Science in New York. Many annotations include quotations from the books and summaries of the contents. Translations and confusing edition numbers are clarified. For some of the most reprinted titles, such as Buchan's Domestic Medicine or Margaret Sanger's pamphlet Family Limitation, there are tables listing all editions, whether in the Atwater collection or not. And finally, the volumes are enlivened by nearly a hundred illustrations. The arrangement is alphabetic by author. The single index lists the works under broad subject categories. A publisher index, promised in the first volume but decided against in the second volume, would have been helpful for identifying books from specific locations. A third planned volume will contain titles acquired since January 2001, as well as entries for almanacs.

Catalogues of medical book collections, of which there are many, have always been valuable guides for sellers and buyers of rare books and ephemera, not to mention heads of historical medical collections such as myself. When offering a relevant item for sale, booksellers now cite the APM (for American Popular Medicine) number and incorporate information from the catalogue into their descriptions. The Archivists and Librarians in the History of the Health Sciences awarded Hoolihan its semi-annual reference book award shortly after the first volume of the catalogue appeared. The Atwater catalogue, more so than other collection catalogues, is...

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