Book contents
- Frontmatter
- 1 Introduction: the changing world of libraries – from cloister to hearth
- PART ONE THE EXPANSION OF BOOK COLLECTIONS 1640–1750
- 2 Ancients and moderns: cross-currents in early modern intellectual life
- 3 Libraries, books and learning, from bacon to the enlightenment
- 4 Opportunities for building collections and libraries
- 5 Libraries for school education and personal devotion
- 6 Libraries for the parish: individual donors and charitable societies
- 7 Endowed libraries for towns
- 8 Libraries in university towns
- 9 Ecclesiastical libraries: libraries for the higher clergy
- 10 Libraries for antiquaries and heralds
- 11 Professional collections: libraries for scientists and doctors
- 12 Personal owners of books
- 13 Library buildings and fittings
- 14 Baroque librarianship
- PART TWO LIBRARY DEVELOPMENT AT A LOCAL LEVEL
- PART THREE PROVINCIAL AND METROPOLITAN LIBRARIES 1750–1850
- Select bibliography
- Index
- References
11 - Professional collections: libraries for scientists and doctors
from PART ONE - THE EXPANSION OF BOOK COLLECTIONS 1640–1750
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2008
Book contents
- Frontmatter
- 1 Introduction: the changing world of libraries – from cloister to hearth
- PART ONE THE EXPANSION OF BOOK COLLECTIONS 1640–1750
- 2 Ancients and moderns: cross-currents in early modern intellectual life
- 3 Libraries, books and learning, from bacon to the enlightenment
- 4 Opportunities for building collections and libraries
- 5 Libraries for school education and personal devotion
- 6 Libraries for the parish: individual donors and charitable societies
- 7 Endowed libraries for towns
- 8 Libraries in university towns
- 9 Ecclesiastical libraries: libraries for the higher clergy
- 10 Libraries for antiquaries and heralds
- 11 Professional collections: libraries for scientists and doctors
- 12 Personal owners of books
- 13 Library buildings and fittings
- 14 Baroque librarianship
- PART TWO LIBRARY DEVELOPMENT AT A LOCAL LEVEL
- PART THREE PROVINCIAL AND METROPOLITAN LIBRARIES 1750–1850
- Select bibliography
- Index
- References
Summary
For Meric Casaubon (1599–1671), the study of spirits, including the soul, devils and angels, was properly a part of physics, a discipline treating natural entities. This formed part of the arts curriculum, whose purpose was the inculcation of the general learning that Casaubon, an early critic of the Royal Society of London, applauded. To conduct his own investigations into the activity of spirits, Casaubon drew on what he called ‘converse with books’. This exchange took place in part within his own library, but to a greater extent through reading carried out in those of others, notably that of Sir Thomas Cotton in London, where Casaubon gained access to the manuscripts of the Elizabethan magus John Dee.
During the century or so after 1640, the use of collections of books and manuscripts was unquestionably part of the work of scholars such as Casaubon, active in the disciplines of natural philosophy. But those disciplines embraced a great deal that would currently surprise practitioners of ‘science and medicine’. Debates about the content and form of natural philosophy often pitted knowledge that could be obtained from experiment and practice against wisdom derived from books.
Francis Bacon (1561–1626), the philosopher on whose ideas many of the proponents of intellectual reform based their programmes, did not make explicit mention of libraries in his scientific utopia, The new Atlantis (1626), although the descriptions of several of the categories of employees with whom Bacon peopled ‘Salomon’s House’ suggested some of the uses to which he believed libraries could be put. ‘The Merchants of Light’ thus ‘bring us the books, and abstracts, and patterns of experiment of all other parts’; the ‘Depredators’ also ‘collect the experiments which are in all books’; finally, the ‘Compilers’ were supposed to ‘draw the experiments … into titles and tables’.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland , pp. 158 - 172Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2006
References
, The wild and the sown: botany and agriculture in western Europe, 1350–1850, trans. M. M. Salvatorelli (Cambridge, 1997)Google Scholar
, ‘Hume and the culture of science in the early eighteenth century’, in (ed.), Studies in the philosophy of the Scottish Enlightenment (Oxford, 1990).Google Scholar
and , A catalogue of the library, antiquities, & c. of the late learned Dr Woodward ([London], 1728).Google Scholar
‘The library of Sir Edward Sherburne (1616–1702)’, in , and (eds.), The book trade and its customers 1450–1900 (Winchester, 1997).Google Scholar
‘The reconstruction of the library of Isaac Casaubon’, in (ed.), Hellinga Festschrift (Amsterdam, 1980).Google Scholar
and , A catalogue of the curious and valuable library of Thomas Pellet, M.D. (London, 1745), especially 35Google Scholar
, Acatalogue of the library of the learned and eminent physician Dr Chamberlen ([London, 1718])Google Scholar
‘The books presented to the Royal Society by John Aubrey, F. R. S.’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 28 (1974).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, An account of the herbaria of the Department of Botany in the University of Oxford (Oxford, 1964), 54–89Google Scholar
, The scholastic curriculum at early seventeenth-century Cambridge (Cambridge, MA, 1958)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
‘The poet as reader: Thomas Gray’s borrowings from Cambridge college libraries’, Library, 7th ser., 3 (2002).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, ‘Sir Robert Sibbald, Kt, the Royal Society of Scotland and the origins of the Scottish Enlightenment’, Annals of Science 45 (1988)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, ‘Isaac Barrow’s library’, in (ed.), Before Newton: the life and times of Isaac Barrow (Cambridge, 1990).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, ‘Mathematicians and naturalists: Sir Isaac Newton and the Royal Society’, in and (eds.), Isaac Newton’s natural philosophy (Cambridge, MA, 2001).Google Scholar
, ‘The humanities’ and ‘The mathematical sciences and new philosophies’, both in (ed.), The history of the University of Oxford, vol. 4: Seventeenth-century Oxford (Oxford, 1997), 359–448Google Scholar
, ‘Gedanken zu Isaac Newtons Studium von Georg Agricolas Werken’, in and (eds.), Arithmos-Arrythmos: Skizzen aus der Wissenschafts-geschichte (Munich, 1979)Google Scholar
‘The library of the Rev John Flamsteed, F. R. S., first Astronomer Royal’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 28 (1973).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, ‘Eighteenth-century scientific publishing’, in (ed.), Thornton and Tully’s scientific books, libraries and collectors, 4th edn (Aldershot, 2000).Google Scholar
, ‘“Ingenious and learned gentlemen”: social perceptions and self-fashioning among parish elites in Essex, 1680–1740’, Social History 25 (2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, Science, politics and universities in Europe, 1600–1800 (Aldershot, 1998), chapter 3Google Scholar
, ‘Samuel Hartlib and the Commonwealth of Learning’, in , and (eds.), The Cambridge history of the book in Britain, vol. 4: 1557–1695 (Cambridge, 2002).Google Scholar
‘Hobbes’s study and the Hardwick library’, Journal of the History of Philosophy 16 (1978).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, The common scientist in the seventeenth century: a study of the Dublin Philosophical Society 1683–1708 (London, 1970).Google Scholar
, Jr., ‘The English virtuoso in the seventeenth century’, Journal of the History of Ideas 3 (1942), 190–219Google Scholar
, Establishing the new science: the experience of the Royal Society (Woodbridge, 1989)Google Scholar
Thornton and Tully’s scientific books, libraries and collectors, 4th edn (Aldershot, 2000).Google Scholar
, ‘Medical libraries and medical Latin 1400–1700’, in and (eds.), Medical Latin from the late middle ages to the eighteenth century (Brussels, 2000).Google Scholar
, ‘Reading for the philosophers’ stone’, in and (eds.), Books and the sciences in history (Cambridge, 2000).Google Scholar
, ‘“As if none understood the art that cannot understand Greek”: the education of midwives in seventeenth-century England’, and M. Pelling, ‘Knowledge common and acquired: the education of unlicensed practitioners in early modern London’, both in and (eds.), The history of medical education in Britain (Amsterdam, 1995)Google Scholar
(ed.). Catalogue of the Pepys Library at Magdalene College, Cambridge, 7 vols. (Cambridge, 1978–94).Google Scholar
, ‘John Evelynand his books’, in and (eds.), John Evelyn and his milieu (London, 2003)Google Scholar
Cambridge University Library: a history, vol. 2, The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Cambridge, 1986).Google Scholar
, Catalogus librorum, instrumentorum chirurgicorum, rerum curiosarum, exoticarumque Coll. Med. Lond. quae habentur in Musaeo Harveano (London, 1660)Google Scholar
‘Hans Sloane, book collector and cataloguer, 1682–1698’, British Library Journal 14 (1988).Google Scholar
, and . ‘The history of the College library: the Dorchester Library’, Journal of the Royal College of Physicians of London 4 (1970); [and eight further articles], ibid., 5–18 (1971–84).Google ScholarPubMed
‘Uncovering the Arundel Library at the Royal Society: changing meanings of science and the fate of the Norfolk donation’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 52 (1998).CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
, ‘Libraries and the University Press’, in and (eds.), The history of the University of Oxford, vol. 5: The eighteenth century (Oxford, 1986).Google Scholar
, ‘The Helmontian–Galenist controversy in Restoration England’, Ambix 12 (1964).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, ‘An unpublished letter of Dr Seth Ward relating to the early meetings of the Oxford Philosophical Society’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 7 (1949–50).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, ‘Medical secrets and the book trade: ownership of the copy to the College of Physicians’ Pharmacopoeia (1618–1650)’, in and (eds.), The human face of the book trade (Winchester, 1999).Google Scholar
and , Jr., English scientific virtuosi in the 16th and 17th centuries (Los Angeles, 1979)Google Scholar
, ‘The inter-relationship between the library and teaching in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries’, in and (eds.), Edinburgh University Library, 1580–1980 (Edinburgh, 1982).Google Scholar
A catalogue of the library of the Revd James Nairn (1629–1678), bequeathed by him to Edinburgh University Library (Edinburgh, 1990).Google Scholar
, The early history of veterinary literature and its British development (London, 1919), vol. 1 (here 312–20)Google Scholar
, Curiosities and texts: the culture of collecting in early modern England (Philadelphia, 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, ‘Themedical college fromits origins to the end of the nineteenth century’, in and (eds.), The Royal Hospital of Saint Bartholomew 1123–1973 (London, 1974) (here 45).Google Scholar
, ‘Mathematical instruments and the education of gentlemen’, Annals of Science 30 (1973).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
, ‘Traditional natural philosophy’, in and others (eds.), The Cambridge history of Renaissance philosophy (Cambridge, 1988).Google Scholar
‘A Cambridge college library in the eighteenth century: Christopher Smart’s borrowings at Pembroke’, Library, 6th ser., 12 (1990).Google Scholar
, ‘The College of Physicians: “Solomon’s House” in Commonwealth England’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine 41 (1967)Google ScholarPubMed
, ‘Francis Willughby of Middleton, Warwickshire and Wollaton, Nottinghamshire: a seventeenth century naturalist’, Transactions of the Thoroton Society of Nottinghamshire 81 (1977)Google Scholar
, Sir Jonas Moore: practical mathematics and Restoration science (Woodbridge, 1993), 174, 211–12Google Scholar
, ‘“Occasional specimens, not compleate systemes”: John Evelyn’s culture of collecting’, Bodleian Library Record 17 (2000–1).Google Scholar