Over 5,000 biographies, each with detailed bibliographies of primary and secondary sources. Medical biographies tend to be of physiologists and other researchers rather than clinicians. Includes an exhaustive index and some topical essays. The Concise dictionary of scientific biography (New York, Scribner’s, [1981]) contains in 1 vol. very useful abridged versions of all biographies found in the 16 vol. work without the bibliographies.

Besides the historographical consideration of the value of laboratory notebooks for studying the history of experimentation and discovery, this volume includes studies of notebooks by Galvani, Schwann, Pavlov, Carl Correns, and Hans Krebs and Kurt Henseleit, as well as notebooks of scientists who worked in the physical sciences, etc.