Bibliotheca Osleriana Osler Library History of Medicine Bibliography McGill 1969 For Sale

Bibliotheca Osleriana: A Catalogue of Books Illustrating the History of Medicine and Science
by Sir William Osler

Published by McGill-Queen's University Press, Montreal and London, 1969. Reprint, with new prologue, addenda, and corrigenda. Very good hardcover, no dust jacket as issued. Tight binding, solid spine, light scratches to rear board, clean unmarked text. Large 4to, 792 pages.

During his tenure as the Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford, Sir William Osler amassed a considerable library on the history of medicine and science, a Canadian native who had studied at McGill University and decided to leave his collection of some 7,600 items to its Faculty of Medicine. The catalogue that resulted, the Bibliotheca Osleriana, was compiled as a labour of love that took ten years to complete and involved W. W. Francis, R. H. Hill, and Archibald Malloch, with Osler himself laying down the broad outlines of the work and writing many of its annotations. The first edition was published by the Clarendon Press ten years after Osler's death in 1929, and this McGill-Queen's University Press printing reproduces that landmark text with a new prologue by Lloyd Stevenson together with addenda and corrigenda accumulated over the following four decades.

Osler wrote that a library represents the mind of its collector, his fancies and foibles, his strength and weakness, his prejudices and preferences, and the Bibliotheca Osleriana remains the fullest realization of that idea in the field of medical history. He organized his nearly eight thousand volumes into eight sections, beginning with the Bibliotheca Prima devoted to the figures he considered most important to the history of medicine and science, followed by further divisions covering literary works, incunabula, biography, bibliography, and manuscripts. That collection, presented to the Faculty of Medicine of McGill University, became the nucleus of the Osler Library of the History of Medicine, and the catalogue itself remains the primary descriptive gateway into its holdings.

Osler's example as a discerning, historically literate collector shaped an entire generation of physician-bibliophiles, including Harvey Cushing, John F. Fulton, Arnold Klebs, Sir Geoffrey Keynes, and K. Garth Huston, each of whom built major medical-history collections in his wake. Individual entries are still cited today by their "B.O." numbers by historians, dealers, and institutions researching provenance in early medical and scientific texts, keeping the Bibliotheca Osleriana in active use as a working reference rather than a static bibliographic curiosity. As interest in the history of science, medical humanities, and physician book-collecting continues to grow among institutional and private collectors, the Bibliotheca Osleriana endures as a foundational and frequently consulted reference work in the field.

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