Printed catalogues and other Wellcome Library publications digitised

More than 30 books produced by the Wellcome Library have been digitised in a project that opens Phase 2 of the Library’s digital development programme. These publications, which include catalogues of the Library’s Asian and Western collections, as a well as a number of works on the history of medicine, are now available.

The project was initiated after a suggestion from a Library user that the Wellcome’s own published books be made available online, in particular Medicine and Science in the 1860s,  edited by former Director of the Wellcome Institute of the History of Medicine, Dr. F.N.L. Poynter. Medical and social historian Dr. Ruth Richardson noted that this text was neither available on Open Library, Google Books nor the Karlsruhe Virtual Catalog, amongst others – but it can now be accessed by anyone with an internet connection.

Highlights of this digitised content extend from the topical – The Origins of the National Health Service – to the niche – Medical Ceramics in the Wellcome Institute. They include the complete five-volume Catalogue of Printed Books in the Wellcome Historical Medical Library covering early printed books from incunabula to 1850 in the Library’s collections and catalogues of the Library’s non-European collections ranging from Persian and Arabic to Tibetan and Americana.

The project also digitised S.A.J. Moorat’s catalogue of the Wellcome Library’s Western manuscripts.