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All posts tagged Rare Books

LSHTM Library celebrates South Asian Heritage Month July 18-August 17 2024. LSHTM Library Rare Book Blog Series No. 11. August 2024

South Asian Heritage Month takes place every year ending on the anniversary of Partition of the Indian Sub-Continent on 17 August 1947 by which the Indian subcontinent was divided into India, West Pakistan (now Pakistan) and East Pakistan (now Bangladesh).

In the LSHTM Library there are numerous books about…

Eleanor Anne Ormerod (1828-1901) : agricultural entomologist and an early authority on insect pest control. LSHTM Rare Book Blog series No. 10. June 2024

From the seventeenth century, women have played a small but significant role in exploring the world of insects by listing, drawing, and collecting them. Some women have also observed and recorded the extraordinary life histories of insects. Eleanor Anne Ormerod (1828-1901) did all this before becoming the first woman…

Indian medicinal plants : an early twentieth  century illustrated reference book by the Indian physicians K.R. Kirtikar and B.D. Basu LSHTM Rare Book Blog series No. 9. February 2024.

In those parts of the world with a written language, the first organisms in the natural world to be studied, documented and figured were plants in recognition of their economic value in agriculture, nutrition, health and well-being.  In Europe these herbals, as they are called, were hand-written in…

Understanding puerperal fever in the eighteenth century : the work of John Leake (1729-1792), man-midwife. LSHTM Rare Books Blog No. 8 January 2024.

In the 18th and 19th centuries and until the 20th Century the death of women in childbirth or shortly afterwards was a common occurrence. One early treatise on puerperal fever was written by John Leake, a physician and male midwife:  Practical observations on the child-bed fever, first published in…

Johann Gottfried Bremser’s early 19th century medical books on parasitic worms with hand-coloured plates. LSHTM Rare Books Blog Series No. 7. August 2023

The Austrian physician Johann Gottfried Bremser (1767-1827) was born in Wertheim am Main in present-day Germany. He studied medicine in Jena and Vienna where he obtained a licence to practice medicine in 1797. Bremser made a special study of parasitic worm infections in humans and travelled to Paris…

Octavia Hill and the Royal Commission on the Poor Law and the Unemployed (1905-09).  LSHTM Rare Books Blog Series No. 6. January 2023

The Royal Commission on the Poor Law and the Unemployed was set up in 1905 to review the system of poor relief provision and consider alternative ways to tackle unemployment. Twenty people were appointed to the Commission including Octavia Hill (1838-1912) and Beatrice Webb (1858-1943). However, after four…

Observations on Smallpox by the 9th Century Persian Physician Rhazes (865-925) : LSHTM Rare Books Blog series No. 3.

This is the latest in the LSHTM Rare Books Blog, featuring Rhazes (full-name: Muhammad ibn Zakariyā al-Rāzī). Rhazes made notable contributions to many areas of medicine. His manuscripts, carefully preserved down the centuries, were among the first medical books printed in Europe in the 15th century. After translation into Latin Rhazes’s writings became widely disseminated and were to influence the future direction of western medicine.