Friends of the Wellcome Library & Centre for the History of Medicine Newsletter 32 (Spring 2004), p. 10

Tracts and pamphlets in the Royal College of Surgeons of England
by Owen Massey, Project Cataloguer
omassey@rcseng.ac.uk

The library of the Royal College of Surgeons of England has recently benefited from a generous grant from the Research Resources in Medical History programme, administered jointly by the Wellcome Trust and the British Library. The grant has made possible a two-year project to begin the cataloguing and conservation of the library's collection of tracts and pamphlets. This collection contains over 20,000 publications spanning the nineteenth century.

At first sight, pamphlets can appear marginal to research, and this may be why the library staff of the 1890s chose to bind them in an undifferentiated sequence without a subject index. In fact, pamphlets on medical subjects have a similar value to political and religious tracts.

Like articles in contemporary journals, they allow more immediate access to the prevailing intellectual climate than the considered words printed as monographs. Unlike periodical literature, they are independent of editorial intervention, often published at the author's expense for distribution to friends, colleagues and libraries.

Pamphlets can be particularly useful for understanding controversies as they appeared to those participating in the debates, rather than to subsequent observers. The College's tracts range over such contentious topics as homoeopathy, vaccination, hypnosis, the Contagious Diseases Acts and medical reform.

As well as controversy, the collection is rich in discursive addresses to medical societies, university dissertations and reprints of specialist journal articles and case reports. These reprints have often never been indexed separately and in any case often incorporate revisions from their publication in journals.

It appears that the library in the nineteenth century practised complete retention (except for some industrious clipping of signatures!), a luxury few libraries enjoy today. This undiscriminating policy has accumulated a collection as broad in its conception of medicine as Henry Wellcome's. In particular, this benign neglect has preserved ephemeral and non-surgical material which would have otherwise been discarded.

A single volume can contain such unrelated topics as scurvy in Afghanistan, bilharzia in Africa, typhoid in Australia and an anonymous polemic on cholera in India. There are many provincial, continental and subcontinental imprints.

The wider reach of public health touches upon food adulteration, sewerage, overcrowding, health insurance, industrial disease, prostitution, cremation and temperance.

There are even entirely non-medical tracts ranging from sports to Shakespeare and bearing the presentation inscriptions of their proud surgeon authors. Evidence of provenance is being recorded and indexed by name.

The existing catalogue of cramped index cards is barely adequate for researching themes, let alone provenance and publication, so the library is taking the opportunity to catalogue the tracts from scratch to modern standards.

The project is already bearing fruit in increased use of the collection. Initial figures suggest that as many as half the items are not listed in the catalogues of other research libraries in Britain. For more information, including conditions of access and the online catalogue, visit the project website at
http://www.rcseng.ac.uk/services/library/external_fund/