History of instruments and technology in the clinical neurosciences: 2. Selected historical sources.

Abstract

Sources of information on the history of instruments and technology in the clinical neurosciences, particularly before 1900, are unfortunately arcane and fragmented. Therefore, a description of some of the resources available is provided to assist historians who wish to pursue studies of neurologic or neurosurgical instruments or technologies. Historical primary sources concerning medical instrumentation and technology are much richer than those provided through the standard sources used in medical historiography and include advertisements, patents, testimonials of physicians, museum collections, and ephemera such as trade catalogs. Trade catalogs were an important source of information on medical instruments for practitioners and remain an important source of information on these instruments for historians; however, because these were intended to be ephemera, their preservation has been haphazard and largely accidental. Unlike the restrictions on advertising for nineteenth-century physicians, medical trade catalogs were under no ethical constraints about advertising. Consequently, trade catalogs often listed the names of physician inventors for different instruments, occasionally reprinted original citations concerning the instruments or even portions of the original publications that described the instruments (i.e. either a medical journal article or a medical textbook), and occasionally printed testimonials from physicians who had invented or perfected medical instruments.