The French pharmacist Nicolas Jean-Baptiste Gaston Guibourt (1790 1867) first published this work in two volumes in 1820. It provided methodical descriptions of mineral, plant and animal substances. In the following years, Guibourt became a member of the Academie nationale de medicine and a professor at the Ecole de pharmacie in Paris. Pharmaceutical knowledge also progressed considerably as new methods and classifications emerged. For this revised and enlarged four-volume fourth edition, published between 1849 and 1851, Guibourt followed the principles of modern scientific classification....

The physician and author John Ayrton Paris (1785 1856), several of whose other medical and popular works have been reissued in the Cambridge Library Collection, and his co-author J. S. M. Fonblanque (1787 1865), barrister and administrator, published this three-volume work in 1823. It remained almost the only work on the topic of medical jurisprudence for many years. The authors define the term as 'a science by which medicine, and its collateral branches, are made subservient to the construction, elucidation, and administration of the laws; and to the preservation of public health'. Volume 2...

The most famous nineteenth-century British reformer of care for the mentally ill and disabled was undoubtedly John Conolly, whose 1856 Treatment of the Insane without Mechanical Restraints is also reissued in this series. However, Conolly's work at the Hanwell Asylum near London was based in part on the pioneering efforts of Edward Parker Charlesworth (1781-1853) and his younger colleague Robert Gardiner Hill (1811-78), who had already (and controversially) abolished physical restraint in the Lincoln Asylum by 1838. Conolly is known to have visited and been impressed by the Lincoln hospital,...

The physician and botanist William Woodville (1752-1805), a proponent of inoculation against smallpox, was in 1791 appointed physician to the London Smallpox and Inoculation Hospital. Five years later, Edward Jenner announced his experiments with vaccination - inoculation with the much milder cowpox, which conveyed immunity to smallpox without the attendant risk of catching the often fatal disease. Woodville eagerly pursued trials using vaccination, and published the results in this 1799 work, which describes two hundred cases where patients (usually children) were vaccinated with matter...

When English surgeon William Blair (1766-1822) embarked on his career, he became familiar with the devastation caused by smallpox in urban areas. The virus was lethal to more than a fifth of the people infected, and the rest were at risk of long-term complications. The first effective vaccine against the disease had been developed by Edward Jenner, who had been made aware that smallpox infection was uncommon among milkmaids who had been exposed to a milder form of pox contracted from cows. Although Jenner's vaccine was made available soon after its public announcement in 1798, the objections...

Elizabeth Garrett Anderson (1836 1917), physician, feminist and champion of women's medical education, played a key role in advancing the position of women in British professional life. Elizabeth's determination to qualify as a doctor, despite the many obstacles put in her way by the all-male medical establishment, was characteristic of her strong sense of purpose. Eventually joining the medical register in 1865, she established the St Mary's Dispensary for Women and Children in 1866, adding ten beds five years later as it became the New Hospital for Women. Staffed only by women, the hospital...

Yorkshireman Henry Maudsley (1835-1918) studied and built his medical career in London. From 1860 he specialised in psychiatry, working at hospitals and in private practice, and from 1863 to 1878 he was joint editor of the Journal of Mental Science. As one of the leading European 'alienists', he treated high-profile patients and became sufficiently wealthy to contribute 30,000 in 1907 towards the foundation of a specialist psychiatric hospital. In his many publications, he developed ideas of heredity derived from Darwin. His lecturing style was famous; Body and Mind contains his 1870...

The surgeon and anatomist John Hunter (1728 93) left a famous legacy in the Hunterian Museum of medical specimens now in the Royal College of Surgeons, and in this collection of his writings, edited by James Palmer, with a biography by Drewry Ottley, published between 1835 and 1837. The first four volumes are of text, and the larger Volume 5 contains plates. Hunter had begun his career as a demonstrator in the anatomy classes of his brother William, before qualifying as a surgeon. He regarded surgery as evidence of failure - the mutilation of a patient who could not be cured by other means -...

The surgeon and anatomist John Hunter (1728 93) left a famous legacy in the Hunterian Museum of medical specimens now in the Royal College of Surgeons, and in this collection of his writings, edited by James Palmer, with a biography by Drewry Ottley, published between 1835 and 1837. The first four volumes are of text, and the larger Volume 5 contains plates. Hunter had begun his career as a demonstrator in the anatomy classes of his brother William, before qualifying as a surgeon. He regarded surgery as evidence of failure - the mutilation of a patient who could not be cured by other means -...

The surgeon and anatomist John Hunter (1728 93) left a famous legacy in the Hunterian Museum of medical specimens now in the Royal College of Surgeons, and in this collection of his writings, edited by James Palmer, with a biography by Drewry Ottley, published between 1835 and 1837. The first four volumes are of text, and the larger Volume 5 contains plates. Hunter had begun his career as a demonstrator in the anatomy classes of his brother William, before qualifying as a surgeon. He regarded surgery as evidence of failure - the mutilation of a patient who could not be cured by other means -...