Jeremy Norman: The Making of Sir William Osler’s Bibliotheca Osleriana Catalogue and its Influence.

March 15 @ 6:00 pm PDT
Sponsored by the Bay Area History of Medicine Society (BAHMS) and the Grolier Club

Annual Joint Dinner Meeting of BAHMS and Grolier Club
Time: Wednesday, March 15, 2023, 6:00 pm PT
Speaker: Jeremy Norman. NB: the previously announced speaker, Dr. Steven Lomazow, is unable to attend.
Location: Hong Kong Lounge, 5322 Geary Boulevard, San Francisco, CA

TO REGISTER and receive a link for livestreaming, contact Sally Kaufmann, M.D., at sallykaufmanncowan@gmail.com

Emphasizing the Biographical Approach to History and Bibliography: The Making of Sir William Osler’s Bibliotheca Osleriana Catalogue and its Influence.

Jeremy Norman is an antiquarian bookseller, appraiser, bibliographer, writer, collector, and publisher specializing in the history of medicine, science, and technology. He was introduced to the history of medicine about the age of ten, if not earlier, by his father, a physician book collector in the Oslerian tradition, Haskell Norman, who never believing that children should be limited to reading children’s books, put a copy of Osler’s The Evolution of Modern Medicine in his hand, and suggested that would be a good way to learn something about medical history. Jeremy recalls writing a paper on trephination among the Incas in Peru in the sixth grade.

Jeremy came under the spell of antiquarian bookselling when he took a year off from college, and took a job as the assistant to the packing clerk at Warren Howell’s John Howell-Books, a then-famous antiquarian shop in San Francisco that had been founded by Warren’s father in 1912. After graduating from the packing room to the sales floor, and working at Howell’s during the completion of his bachelor’s degree at UC Berkeley, Jeremy set off in business on his own. Since then, Jeremy has written or co-authored the following books: Morton’s Medical Bibliography (1991), The Haskell F. Norman Library of Science and Medicine (1991), Origins of Cyberspace (2002), From Gutenberg to the Internet (2005), Scientist, Scholar & Scoundrel (2013). His interactive database of over 5000 entries on the history of information and media from the beginning of records to the present is online at www.historyofinformation.com. His bibliography of the history of medicine and the life sciences that evolved from Fielding Garrison’s original listing in 1912, and currently includes around 15,800 entries, indexed to over 1900 subjects, is available at www.historyofmedicine.com. His commercial antiquarian bookselling site, which also contains many articles on the history of book-collecting and book-collectors, is www.historyofscience.com.

Currently Jeremy’s main collecting interests are The Discovery of Human Origins (the history of paleoanthropology around the world), and Book Production in the Industrial Revolution: The Beginnings of the Mechanization of Papermaking, Printing and Binding.