Tag: early printed books

This is one of the first images of the unborn child printed in Europe. Produced in the early 16th century in a book on midwifery, it offered readers a fascinating peek at the child hidden in the belly, and instituted… Continue reading

Welcome to Early Medicine, the Wellcome Library’s blog channel on medicine and health in Europe in the ancient, medieval and early modern periods. Our new blog was born from a wish to exploit our growing body of early digitised content… Continue reading

We have recently finished cataloguing a small collection of 18 royal proclamations dating from the reigns of King Charles II (1662), through William and Mary to Anne (1702). Part of the Library’s ephemera collection, the proclamations have a similar overall… Continue reading

Jacques Auguste de Thou (1553-1617) was a man who evidently took great pride in his library. In his will he forbade his descendants to sell or otherwise dispose of any part of a collection that “for fully forty years he… Continue reading

The Sweating Sickness was a new phenomenon in later 15th and 16th century Europe, recognised by contemporaries as being distinctively different from the plague and other epidemic diseases. The illness was almost exclusively confined to England, and was soon known… Continue reading

The Library holds a rare copy of one of the earliest books printed in India. The Colóquios dos simples is remarkable both as an example of the emergence of printing in India, and for its descriptions of over eighty Indian… Continue reading

Two years on from the start of our early European printed books digitisation with ProQuest, we’re one third of the way through the project, with 4,649 volumes imaged as of today, and 2,447 books available to view for free from… Continue reading

  At first glance, this image might look familiar. It’s a coded text that uses raised dots to be read by the fingertips. But one group of people who won’t find the code easy to understand are readers of Braille.… Continue reading

As the Olympic Games move ever nearer and as swimming is a sport for which Team GB has high hopes of medal success, we’ve dived into our collections and pulled from their depths one of the most influential works on… Continue reading

As part of the Wellcome Digital Library pilot project, we’re joining forces with ProQuest to digitise over fifteen thousand volumes from our rare book collection. They will be made available through ProQuest’s new Early European Books (EEB) database – a… Continue reading