An Interactive Annotated World Bibliography of Printed and Digital Works in the History of Medicine and the Life Sciences from Circa 2000 BCE to 2022 by Fielding H. Garrison (1870-1935), Leslie T. Morton (1907-2004), and Jeremy M. Norman (1945- ) Traditionally Known as “Garrison-Morton”

15961 entries, 13944 authors and 1935 subjects. Updated: March 22, 2024

BIGELOW, Jacob

3 entries
  • 1842

American medical botany, being a collection of the native medicinal plants of the United States, containing their botanical history and chemical analysis, and properties and uses in medicine, diet and the arts. 3 vols.

Boston, MA: Cummings & Hilliard, 18171820.

Bigelow was professor of materia medica and botany at Harvard. This work included native American remedies. It was the first book printed in the United States to include color plates printed in color. See R.J. Wolfe, Jacob Bigelow's American medical botany, 1817-1821 …Boston: Boston Medical Library, 1979. Digital facsimile from the Biodiversity Heritage Library at this link.



Subjects: BOTANY › Botanical Illustration, BOTANY › Ethnobotany, BOTANY › Medical Botany, COUNTRIES, CONTINENTS AND REGIONS › United States , NATIVE AMERICANS & Medicine, PHARMACOLOGY › PHARMACEUTICALS › Materia medica / Herbals / Herbal Medicines
  • 10068

A treatise on the materia medica, intended as a sequel to the Pharmacopoeia of the United States: Being an account of the origin, qualities and medical uses of the articles and compounds, which constitute that work, with their modes of prescription and administration.

Boston, MA: Charles Ewer, 1822.

Bigelow, who with Lyman Spalding, was largely responsible for the creation and publication in 1820 of the first U.S. pharmacopeia, published this valuable explanatory and supplementary volume two years later. It was probably essential reading for most users of the first U.S. pharamcopeia. Digital facsimile from the Internet Archive at this link.



Subjects: COUNTRIES, CONTINENTS AND REGIONS › United States , PHARMACOLOGY › Pharmacopeias
  • 2212

A discourse on self-limited diseases.

Boston, MA: N. Hale, 1835.

Bigelow was attached to the Massachusetts General Hospital. The above “did more than any other work or essay in our own language to rescue the practice of medicine from the slavery of the drugging system which was part of the inheritance of the profession” (Oliver Wendell Holmes).



Subjects: Medicine: General Works