One Hundred Books Famous in Medicine (review)

This beautifully printed folio volume is a catalogue of books, reprints, and journal articles that appeared in an exhibit of medical classics mounted at the Grolier Club in the autumn of 1994. The exhibit was conceived and curated by Haskell F. Norman, M.D., who also selected and coordinated the committee that recommended the titles for inclusion. The expected titles can be found here: the Aldine Editions of Hippocrates, Galen, and Dioscorides; Ketham’s Fasciculus medicinae; Vesalius, Bartisch, and so forth. Bright, Beaumont, and Nightingale appear here, as they do in other lists of medicine’s “greatest hits.” The temptation to label this publication “The Same 100 Books” (to paraphrase G. S. T. Cavanagh) is alleviated somewhat by numerous entries for the twentieth century, culminating in G. N. Hounsfield’s 1973 article on computed tomography.

The bibliographic descriptions for each entry are models of completeness and accuracy, as might be expected. The catalog’s real value, however, lies in the essays that accompany each entry: commissioned from a wide variety of experts, they provide extensive commentary on each item’s significance and publishing history.

Whether such a catalogue will be of much utility to those who read this journal is perhaps beside the point. It is the kind of publication whose appeal (and price) is limited to that most peculiar of beings: the bibliophile, an individual whose passion for history goes beyond ideas to possession of the objects in which they appear.