Book Notes

Lilla Wechsler, Christopher Hoolihan, and Mark F. Weiner, comps. The Bernard Becker Collection in Ophthalmology: An Annotated Catalog. 3d ed. St. Louis, Mo.: Washington University School of Medicine, 1996. xxiii + 180 pp. Ill. $45.00.

The Becker Collection is among the most important in its field, and earlier editions of this catalog have become standard bibliographic reference sources. This edition adds entries for a hundred items acquired since 1983, as well as sixty new cross-references. The heart of this catalog is the 140 pages of the “rare books” section, which lists more than five hundred Becker books with imprints from the fifteenth century through 1900; the listings give pagination, provenance (when known), useful annotations, and references to other bibliographies. The rest of the book includes excellent reproductions of sixteen prints, a listing of about 120 post-1900 books in the collection, and short entries for selected pre-1901 ophthalmology titles from elsewhere in the Washington University medical library (which, to confuse things, is now known as the Bernard Becker Medical Library). This is a very attractive book, with useful introductory materials and indexes.

Juhani Norri. Names of Sicknesses in English, 1400–1550: An Exploration of the Lexical Field. Annales Academiae Scientiarum Fennicae, Dissertationes Humanarum Litterarum, no. 63. Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia, 1992. 448 pp. $121.00 (paperbound).

In an expanded version of a doctoral thesis, Norri compares the names of illnesses found in nine academic treatises, nine surgical works, and fourteen remedybooks. The book concludes with a lexicon of the names of sicknesses, five appendices (including “Inventory of Terms Indicated as Foreign,” “Chronological Layers of Names of Sicknesses,” and “Instances of Explicatory Devices in Term-Presentation”), and lists of works consulted.

H. J. M. Symons and H. R. Denham, comps. A Catalogue of Printed Books in the Wellcome Historical Medical Library. Vol. 4, Books Printed from 1641 to 1850, M-R. London: Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, 1995. xiii + 603 pp. £45.00.

Much has happened since 1954, when the first catalog of printed books at the Wellcome Library—F. N. L. Poynter’s Catalogue of Incunabula—was published. In 1962, abbreviated versions of Poynter’s entries were incorporated into volume 1 of the present series, which covers pre-1641 printed books. The Wellcome then continued its catalog with a single multivolume alphabetic listing of all books in its collection published between 1641 and 1850 (with the exception of the Western Hemisphere imprints included in Robin Price’s An Annotated Catalogue of Medical Americana [1983]). Volume 2 (A–E) appeared in 1966, and volume 3 (F–L) a decade later. While it is not uncommon for multivolume bibliographies to be published over the course of several decades, this is an unusually long time to wait for the catalog of a single specialized library. The Wellcome might have been well advised to follow the example of the National Library of Medicine, whose catalog of rare books consists of self-contained volumes organized by century. The Wellcome catalog’s value is also diminished by the ubiquity of on-line catalogs, accessible—in theory—from anywhere in the world. One wonders whether there is need for a printed catalog, and whether resources would not be better devoted to ensuring that on-line records exist for the entire collection. This having been said, the Wellcome Catalogue of Printed Books remains a key reference source for historians and bibliographers. There are few comparable collections in the entire world, and none whose published catalog extends to 1850 and exhibits so much care in its preparation. It will be gratifying—no doubt to the Wellcome’s cataloging staff, but also to everyone interested in the historical medical literature—when this project is brought to its completion in, one hopes, the not-too-distant future.

Louise L. Lambrichs. La vérité médicale: Claude Bernard, Louis Pasteur, Sigmund Freud: Légendes et réalités de notre médecine. Preface by Mirko D. Grmek. Réponses. Paris: Robert Laffont, 1993. 467 pp. F 135.00.

The three personages of the title personify three aspects of medicine, according to the preface by Mirko Grmek: the body, the microbe, and...