Bücher der Reihe Cambridge Library Collection - History of Medicine

Henry Maudsley (1835-1918) practised psychiatry in London. He developed ideas of heredity derived from Darwin, aiming to 'bring man, both in his physical and mental relations, as much as possible within the scope of scientific enquiry'. Body and Mind contains his 1870 Gulstonian lectures and two earlier articles.

When Jenner announced his experiments with vaccination against smallpox, William Woodville pursued similar trials, and in 1799 published the results: 200 cases where patients were vaccinated with matter obtained from cows or other cowpox sufferers. This demonstration of the safety and efficacy of vaccination led to its much wider adoption.

Smallpox was once a common disease ruining the lives of many people across Britain. In this 1806 pamphlet, English surgeon William Blair (1766-1822) challenges the opponents of the first effective vaccine against smallpox. His publication, aimed at a broad audience, also includes a report from the Royal Jennerian Society.

William Carpenter (1813-85) was trained as a doctor; he was apprenticed to an eye surgeon, and later attended University College London and the University of Edinburgh, obtaining his M. D. in 1839. Rather than practising medicine, he became a teacher, specialising in neurology, and it was his work as a zoologist on marine invertebrates that brought him wide scientific recognition. His Principles of Mental Physiology, published in 1874, developed the ideas he had first expounded in the 1850s, and expounds the arguments for and against the two models of psychology then current - automatism, which assumed that the mind operates under the control of the physiology of the body for all human activity, and free will, 'an independent power, controlling and directing that activity.' Drawing on animal as well as human examples, his arguments, especially on the acquisition of mental traits in the individual, are much influenced by Darwin.

Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802) is remembered not only as the grandfather of Charles but as a pioneering scientist in his own right. A friend and correspondent of Josiah Wedgwood, Joseph Priestley and Matthew Boulton, he practised medicine in Lichfield, but also wrote prolifically on scientific subjects. He organised the translation of Linnaeus from Latin into English prose, coining many plant names in the process, and also wrote a version in verse, The Loves of Plants. The aim of his Zoonomia, published in two volumes (1794-6), is to 'reduce the facts belonging to animal life into classes, orders, genera, and species; and by comparing them with each other, to unravel the theory of diseases'. The first volume describes human physiology, especially importance of motion, both voluntary and involuntary; the second is a detailed description of the symptoms of, and the cures for, diseases, categorised according to his physiological classes.