Instruments of Medical Information: The Rise of the Medical Trade Catalog in Britain, 1750-1914

Recent interest in our current information age has provided scholars in a wide range of disciplines with increasing impetus to study the origins and development of a variety of forms of printed and non-printed media. This article addresses the rise of a largely neglected but significant non-literary form of print within the medical trade between 1750 and 1914: the mail-order catalog. It focuses on the development of the physical form of the publication – from attractive book of display to commercial mail-order catalog – to highlight economic, technological and professional changes within and beyond the field of medicine. As a result of such changes, catalogs became an increasingly important technology of medical information used by medical and surgical instrument makers to access and control markets of late-eighteenth, nineteenth and early-twentieth century medical practitioners on a local, national and international scale.