Page:Early History of Medicine in Philadelphia - George W Norris.djvu/138



In colonial times books were expensive luxuries, yet many of the professional men mentioned in the foregoing pages possessed choice collections of the standard works of the day, and the best editions of the older authors, and for a long period previous to the Revolution there existed in our city a public library, the Loganian, affording ample means for acquiring all that was known upon anatomy, surgery, and the kindred sciences in the English as well as in foreign languages.

As might be expected, the original productions published here were few, the only ones issued in the last century, of which I am aware, being the tracts of Cadwalader, Thompson, Kearsley, Hamilton, Redman, and Macleane, and the works of Morgan, Jones, Rush, Currie, Cathrall, and Deveze, which have already been mentioned. The reprints of English works up to the period of the war embraced about an equal number of volumes. The first of these was an edition of "Short's Medicina Brittanica," with notes showing the places where many of the plants are to be found in these parts of America, their differences in name, appearance, and virtue, from those