referring to stars; mathematical tables of 1554; a 1604 new star discovery half a century later. Twenty of our science books are medical. Why? Some were the customary essential guides for any large community, from Gerardes’ Herball of 1636 with its plants for cures, to a scrubby limp vellum covered Enchiridion 1609 with horrific recipes for gutrot and ‘wounds of the privy partes’. Others, though, were for specialist use, such as Agricola on head operations, with woodcut plates showing brain surgery in nine easy stages, 1535 style. Indeed, medieval and later medicine “This was an age when men of learning knew both science and the arts and saw no conflict.” was often on what might be termed the ‘kill or cure basis’ and Belloste’s Hospital Surgeon , bought for the College in 1723, recommends a new trepanning (skull boring) device – presumably not intended for use on our twelve poor scholars…. Masters of the College can be a colourful lot and Joseph Allen, who reigned mid-18 th century enjoyed a doubtless bloody former career as a ship’s surgeon, sailing round the world on a voyage where a significant proportion of the crew died. Undaunted, he gave his medical books to the College, though it is difficult to imagine what use his Military and Domestic Surgery plates of amputation saws were to the College Fellows (90 seconds was reckoned effective for a leg off). Science was international in the 18 th century, often conveyed through Latin, so here is William Harvey’s De Mortu Cordis of 1628 in an edition of 1639 (the eve of the Civil War: College Fellows were resolutely royalist). Harvey was fresh from studying in Padua, where his defence of the circulation of the blood from the heart was stimulated. Other works going through many printings include our copy of Browne’s Myographia 1697 with a detailed engraving of human muscles in action (yes, all of them); while for full frontal nudity, an innocuous drawing book of the same era takes some beating, with red chalk expertly used to show a standing body (probably that of a criminal) with flesh stripped to expose
C ome on a short tour of 50 venerable but exhilarating volumes. These ‘Wondrous Books’, some of which have not seen the light of day for centuries, make a motley crew: many are rare, delicate and beautiful objects; some are finely illustrated, crisp copies; others grubby with schoolboy handling. Some were vital for survival in a brutal age of short life expectancy, others luxury objects of wonder for a select few. What they have in common, be you scientific boffin or passer-by, is that all are fascinating and have stories to tell. ‘Science’, after all, means ‘knowledge’; so, as they say, it’s not only what you know but who you know that matters, and here you will find both characters and controversies from the last 400 years. The century of the College’s Foundation, the 17 th , is claimed as the Golden Age of English Science, one that produced advances in Chemistry and Physics in particular. We have major names such as Boyle (he of the gas law) and Newton (a tortured soul who wrote as much on quirky religion as on science) represented in our antiquarian book collections, with four volumes of their writings and a plate of Trinity College Cambridge in 1695 from Loggan’s Cantabrigia Illustrata thrown in to show where exactly the latter’s experiments were done (by the chapel wall). This was an age when men of learning knew both science and the arts and saw no conflict. However, Early Science could still get you into trouble. Our edition of Galileo Galilei’s Systema Cosmicum (considering the tides and thus the moon’s gravity) looks safe enough in its later Latin form of 1663, but the original Italian version, which reinforced Copernican heliocentrism, was enough for him to receive a house jail sentence. A further small science connection generated by this text is that our copy was inscribed by a Cambridge student, possibly a future Dulwich teacher, studying at Trinity College at the same time as Newton. Alongside this Science Great lie humbler astronomical tracts: ‘stella’ in a medieval Durham manuscript,
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