According to bibliographer Charles Evans, a broadside is defined as a document with printed matter "on the recto, or face, of an unfolded sheet" (American bibliography [Chicago: Hollister Press, 1903-59] 5:xv). Evans defines the next most complex bibliographic form, the broadsheet, as a document in which the "the printed matter overruns the recto of an unfolded sheet, and the verso is also printed upon." He then defines the tract as "a single sheet imposed in pages in which the printed matter begins and ends on a single sheet." In addition to these bibliographic forms based on a single sheet, Evans provides definitions for printed materials composed of more than one sheet: the pamphlet (two to five sheets folded into pages) and the book (more than five sheets folded into pages). For numerous reasons Evans's exacting definitions are rarely followed in actual practice. Thus the broadside collection of the American Philosophical Society Library, like that of the Library of Congress, contains documents which Evans would consider broadsides, broadsheets, and tracts of no more than four pages (see Library of Congress, Rare Book Division, Catalog of the broadsides in the Rare Book Division [Boston: G. K. Hall & Co., 1972] 1:iii). Any time the word broadside is used in this present catalogue it is understood to mean the inclusive definition implicit in the collection organizations at the Library of Congress and at the American Philosophical Society Library and not the more restricted definition used by Evans. For other, more contemporary, terms for bibliographic forms and their definitions see Micheal Gorman and Paul Winkler, eds., Anglo-American cataloguing rules, 2 ed. (Chicago: American Library Association, 1978), especially pp. 564, 570.

Broadsides represent a largely untapped resource for historians of eighteenth- and nineteeth-century science, technology, and medicine. Issued as handbills, circular letters, book and journal prospectuses, bills of mortality, meteorological tables, announcements of prizes, notices of lectures, membership and subscription lists, meeting notification cards, certificates of membership, tickets to lectures, etc., the diverse group of documents in this catalogue are united only by their bibliographic format and general subject matter. Originally offering individuals and institutions a relatively inexpensive means of communication with a broad audience, these documents provide a wealth of valuable information to historical researchers that often is not otherwise readily available. The brief survey of the major categories of broadsides found in the collection of the American Philosophical Society Library which follows is offered as an attempt to point out the kinds of information contained in these invaluable documents and to place them in their historical context.

The largest single category of broadsides in the collection consists of documents which were originally issued by learned societies, especially scientific societies. These organizations began establishing extensive communications networks both with other institutions and with individuals outside their immediate circle in the eighteenth century. Broadsides issued as lists of members, copies of constitutions and bylaws, requests for donations, prize competition circulars, and various general announcements were an integral part in the formation of these vast, interlocking communications networks which McClellan has argued eventually came to constitute a virtual "linked system of institutions." By providing a relatively inexpensive means of producing multiple copies of a document and thereby avoiding the tedious and expensive task of individual manuscript reproduction, broadsides allowed the relatively rapid and efficient dissemination of timely information to a large number of recipients. Blank forms used by societies for such tasks as the acknowledgement of donations and the notification of upcoming meetings also aided in decreasing the time a society's secretary had to spend on these routine but necessary duties.

Bills of mortality represent the second largest group of documents contained in this catalogue and provide valuable data for demographers and historians of medicine especially. The practice of regularly issuing mortality statistics began in London in the early sixteenth century as an attempt to obtain an idea of the death toll inflicted by the plague, but by 1600 the weekly bills were expanded to include data on other diseases and causes of death. The idea reached American shores by the early 1700s when the few colonial newpapers then in existence began to irregulary publish weekly and annual summaries of local deaths. Soon mortality statistics began to appear in a variety of other periodical publications both here and abroad, including transactions issued by scientific societies and literary magazines.

In 1738 Christ Church of Philadelphia began to separately publish annual statistics of births and deaths, a practice which continued with few interuptions at least until 1817. These bills, based on the records kept by clerks and sextons of Philadelphia area churches, foreshadowed official vital statistics published by the Philadelphia Board of Health beginning in 1807 and by similar govermental bodies in other locales. In addition to those records published by institutions--churches and boards of health--bills of mortality were also issued by at least one individual, Lyman Spaulding, a physician from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, who at his own initiative, published that towns mortality statistics between 1800 and 1813.

While early bills of mortality only gave statistics on the number of deaths within a given period, later documents became increasingly sophisticated, providing weekly and monthly summations of births and deaths, as well as breakdowns by age, sex, diseases, and other causes of deaths. As an example of this trend toward increasing complexity, the first mortality bill issued in 1808 by the Philadelphia Board of Health (for the year 1807, included annual totals of death from 89 diseases and other causes broken down by age and sex and information on the number of deaths in each month, with separate totals for "adults and children," while the bill issued by that same agency in 1860 (for the year 1859, provides statistics on 106 disease and other causes of death broken down by age and sex, total deaths in each week broken down by age and sex, and births and deaths in each month broken down by sex. While historians must be cautious about drawing conclusions based on these records, especially the earlier statistics kept by church officials with little or no training in medicine, the long spans of time covered by the Philadelphia records in this catalogue, and the overlapping dates of records kept by two independent sources, the churches and the Philadelphia Board of Health (see entries for 1807, 1809, 1815, 1816, and 1817), provide unique opportunities for the historical researcher.

Related to bills of mortality in their Baconian approach and widespread interest and publication, meteorological records were assiduously kept by individuals working both independently and under the auspices of institutions. The recording of meteorological data provided a means for an individual with limited scientific training an opportunity to contribute to the body of scientific knowledge. Meteorological record keeping seems to have been especially popular in America where numerous individuals including Cotton Mather, John Winthrop, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, David Rittenhouse, Edward Holyoke, Edward Stiles, Benjamin Rush, and countless others established an enduring tradition of American meteorological observation. The data collected by these individuals was frequently circulated in manuscript form to scientific societies and published in the scientific press.

The raw data collected by individuals was used to construct general theories concerning the weather, establish relationships between climate and the growth of vegetation, and establish correlations between environment and disease. One individual, Peter Legaux, published a long series of meteorological tables around the turn of the eighteenth century in the popular Columbian Monthly and distributed separate copies of the same as part of his effort to show that the climate of Philadelphia was particularly suited for viticulture, thereby hoping to attract financial support for his vineyard just outside that city. Of more widespread interest, however, were efforts to correlate climate with disease.

The notion of such a correlation dates back to the Greek physician Hippocrates and was revived and revised by seventeenth- century neo-Hippocratics who attempted to inject a methodological exactitude into their studies in order to "escape the censure of the great Bacon." While studies linking mortality and morbidity to the environment had a long history in America, disease/environment investigations received a renewed impetus at the end of the eighteenth century when Georges-Louis Leclerc, compte de Buffon in the pages of his magisterial Natural history attributed what he considered the physical degeneracy of New World fauna to the cold, wet American environment. Publications by Americans refuting Buffon and his successors cited both meteorological tables and bills of mortality as evidence in their argument.

Although interest in the alleged degeneracy of New World creatures soon fell from the mainstream of consideration, interest in meteorology both here and abroad appears to have remain undiminished in the first half of the nineteenth century, as evidenced by the numerous meteorological broadsides in this catalogue from this period. There is also evidence of cooperation on the part of institutions and individuals in obtaining regular, simultaneous meteorological observations and an attempt in 1825 by the University of the State of New York to set up a state-wide meteorological network utilizing the 56 academic institutions under its jurisdiction. One broadside from this period issued by the Joint Committee of Meterorolgy of the American Philosophical Society and the Franklin Institute not only provides evidence of institutional cooperation but also the speed with which the print medium was capable of disseminating requests for information. That broadside is dated March 20 and requests information on a storm which struck the Philadelphia area on March 16 thru 19. The meteorologist James P. Espy's manuscript addition requests the recipient to forward the circular to those who might furnish the desired information.

While meteorological tables, bills of mortality, and most broadsides issued by learned societies were printed to convey data, requests, or general information, book and journal prospectuses were of a more commercial nature, advertising the proposed publication of a book or periodical. Due to their limited potential audience and the enormous cost of printing in general, most science, technology, and medicine publications were offered by subscription, a sales method whereby an individual signing his name to the bottom of a prospectus for a proposed work promised to purchase a copy of that work upon its completion. The practice of subscription publication began in England in the seventeenth century as a replacement for the system of individual patronage and, in effect, replaced the financial support of a single patron with that of numerous individuals.

The mechanics of subscription publication are relatively straightforward. A subscription could be initiated by any interested party--author, printer, or publisher. After a prospectus was composed it might appear in the newspaper or be separately printed and then mailed or hand delivered to individuals, circulated at scientific society meetings, or posted in a bookstore or printer's shop. Those interested in obtaining a copy of the proposed work would affix their signatures to the prospectus or inform the issuing party by other means. If enough subscribers were obtained, a work could then be printed and delivered. Payment by the subscriber would usually be made at the time of delivery.

Many famous works were published using this scheme. John James Audubon's monumental Birds of America (1826-38), featuring life-sized portraits of all 489 of the then known species of North America, was one of the most ambitious publishing ventures in the first half of the nineteenth century. Because of the enormous expense involved in its publication (the work cost $115,640 to complete ), no publisher in the United States or Europe would even consider taking on the project without some guarantee of payment. After locating a potential publisher in Edinburgh, Audubon himself was forced to widely circulate his prospectus along with samples of his work in order to obtain enough subscribers to guarantee financial success of the publication. However, in spite of their pledges, some individuals still allowed their subscriptions to lapse.

Of course, not every work for which a prospectus was issued came to be published. Among the prospectuses in this catalogue issued by individuals for which no known copies of the proposed work are known to have been printed are Silvain Godon's Elementary treatise of mineralogy and Benjamin Smith Barton's Elements of zoology and Historical and philosophical inquiry. Barton, in particular, though a respected and prolific science author, is known for proposing works which did not receive enough encouragement for publication. Prospectuses issued by printers often faired no better than those issued by individuals. A proposal to publish William Bartam's Travels issued by the Philadelphian Enoch Story, Jr., around 1786 was for some unknown reason unsuccessful, but the work was enthusiastically received some five years later when it was printed by the Philadelphia firm of James and Johnson.

Subscriptions were not limited to published works. Individuals and institutions who needed capital for a variety of projects frequently resorted to this method of financing. The American Philosophical Society raised a subscription in an effort to obtain funds for a new building around 1867, as did the Franklin Institute in an attempt to establish its School of Design for Women around 1850. Subscription funding was used in the mid-nineteenth century by the Lyceum of Natural History of New York and the Lyceum of Natural History of Williams College to finance expeditions to collect natural history specimens. In both cases subscribers were promised specimens in return for their financial support. And subscriptions were raised for diverse projects ranging form the erection of bridges to the establishment of vineyards .

Related to suscription broadsides in their request for the monetary support of the recipient were the numerous advertisements for lectures, museums, and menageries. These documents typically employed a variety of techniques to capture and hold a prospective patron's attention: bold headlines, ornate type faces, and graphic illustrations. While even honest lecturers and showmen published exhuberant advertisemnts in an effort to ply their wares, the less scrupulous often resorted to hyperbole or even outright deception to attract the dollars of an ever-curious public.

With few exceptions, public lectures, one of several elements in the popularization of science, were not in great demand until the second quarter of the nineteenth century, although a few documents from this early period survive in the collection. Rather, most of the lecture material in the collection from the period before 1830 relates to lectures delivered as part of a college curiculum. However, with increasing urbanization and industrialization, widespread interest in public education, and a desire toward self improvement, the requisite conditions for large-scale popularization of science fell into place. The opening years of the nineteenth century thus witnessed the emergence of the mechanic's institute movement in Englnad (which had spread to France by 1826) and the rise of the lyceum movement in the United States (which also began in 1826). Both movements began by offering practical instruction in science for the working classes as their keynote, but the American lyceums soon widened their idea to general instruction for the entire town.

One product of the factors which gave rise to the lyceum movement in the United States, the Lowell Institute in Boston, gives an indication of the enormous popularity which lecturers enjoyed in the mid-nineteenth century. In the early 1840s Benjamin Silliman was able to attract audiences of over 2000 people to hear his lecture series on chemistry delivered at the institute and at least that many more were denied tickets due to lack of space. Several other lecturers enjoyed nearly equal popularity there, and some, including Louis Agassiz, were able to take their lectures on tour. Also capitalizing on the quest for self improvement which helped promote the success of the Lowell Institute, in particular, and the lyceum movement, in general, were the numerous itinerants who offered their services, delivering lectures on astronomy , chemistry, geology, meteorology, mesmerism, and telegraphy to name just a few. Unfortunately there was not a positive correlation between the quantity of lecturers and the quality of their lectures, for as Bode points out, "everyone from the respectable Harvard professors to phrenologists or outright quacks could hire a hall, sell tickets, and hope to clear a profit."

Almost invariably lectures were supplemented with demonstrations, experiments, and illustrations, and for the popular audience these were often the most memorable portions of the event. One elaborate form of illustration, the panorama, probably even overshadowed the lecture itself. Panoramas, wide vistas of exotic landscapes painted on walls and canvases, originated in Scotland in 1788. By placing these views on a long canvas and thereby allowing it to be wound from one roller to another, portablity was added to this popular medium, and by the mid-ninteenth century panoramas offered by itinerant showmen proliferated on both sides of the Atlantic. Early in 1851 the Philadelphian Montroville W. Dickeson offered a series of lectures on Indian antiquities, illustrated with artifacts and drawings from his own hand. By December of that same year Dickeson had collaborated with the artist John J. (sometimes given as I. J.) Egan to produce a moving panorama eight feet high and 320 feet long. A second broadside advertising an Indian-related panorama is also in the collection.

In additions to lectures, museums and menageries were other important elements in the popularization of science in the eighteenth and nineteeth centuries for which advertising examples survive in the collection. Museums in the present sense of that word--institutions devoted to the acquistition, care, organization, and display of objects of lasting interest or value for research and/or public use--are a relatively recent phenomenon. Certainly Peale's Museum in Philadelphia, begun by the artist Charles Willson Peale, approaches that modern ideal, especially in its early years when Peale managed the institution himself. On the other hand most museums of the period contained a hodge podge of specimens which were often poorly maintained and organized and often of limited access to the general public. Those museums and menageries that were fully open to the public often fell way short of the credo expressed in one anonymous broadside in the collection: "amusement here with science is combin'd." In fact maintainting that delicate balance between entertainment and instruction was a recurrent problem in all efforts at popularization of science during the period, and, more often than not, amusement was stressed to the detriment of edification.

This brief survey suggesting numerous uses for broadsides in the history of science, technology, and medicine gives rise to the question, why have these documents not been better utilized as research tools? The major reason for the relative neglect of broadsides is related to the nature of the documents themselves. First, because the documents were usually ephemeral, they were often immediately discarded by their recipients, and thus they have generally not survived to find their way into the various repositories of manuscripts available to the historian. Second, because they are printed rather than manuscript documents, those few science, technology, and medicine broadsides which survived have often been physically separated from the manuscript collections in which they were originally contained and discarded or sold. And even those few documents which have remained with their original collections are frequently not adequately catalogued. The nearly eight-hundred entries of this catalogue of the science, technology, and medicine broadside holdings of the American Philosophical Society Library are offered as an attempt to help obviate this shortcoming and underline their value to historical research.

The nucleus and indeed even the idea of this broadside catalogue originated from the separately catalogued broadside collection in the library which contains approximately 1200 entries on subjects ranging from politics to post offices. Many of the documents catalogued there were received by the American Philosophical Society when they were originally issued, others have been removed from collections of papers purchased or donated, some remain with their original collections, and still others have been separately purchased.

Reflecting the library's traditionally recognized strength, the compiler's major interests and abilities, and the ever present constraint of time, a decision was made to limit this work to science, technology, and medicine broadsides. After viewing each of the separately catalogued broadsides, an effort was made to locate works not in this special file. This attempt was based on a combination of leads (and in some cases actual documents) provided by former Manuscript Librarians Murphy Smith and Stephen Catlett and the present Manuscript Librarian Elizabeth Carroll-Horrocks, scholarly intuition, systematic searching, and luck. Undoubtedly many more such documents remained to be discovered and appreciated within the rich collections contained in the American Philsophical Society Library. It is the sincere wish of the compilers that these as yet unrecognized documents may be brought to light in order that they too may become threads woven into the complex fabric we know as history.

The citations in this catalogue have been arranged by subject with documents generally entered in the most specific category appropriate.

The information in the citations is given in the following order:

Author:
Authors' names are placed on the first line of the citation and their dates, if known, are placed in parentheses immediately following the names. Documents issued by individuals acting on behalf of institutions are placed under the appropriate institution's name. In such cases the individual who actually wrote the broadside, if known, appears in the title portion of the citation or, more often, in the annotation and in either case in the index. No attempt to provide dates has been made for institutions.

Book and journal prospectus entries have been entered according to the following guidelines: 1) Book prospectuses are entered under the name of the author of the book being advertised even though in many cases the printer or publisher of the book is actually responsible for issuing the document. In such cases the printer or publisher's name, if known, appears in the citation or annotation as well as the index. 2) Journal editors are considered as the authors of journal prospectus broadsides unless the journal is issued by an institution, in which case the citation appears under the institution's name rather than that of the editor. If the editor's name appears anywhere on the document, it will be provided in the citation or in the annotation (as well as the index).

Multiple works by a single author which are entered within a single subject heading are arranged chronologically. If the author of a document is not given or known, the work is entered alphabetically under the first word of the title (initial articles excluded).

Title:
If no title appears on a work, or if the title does not give sufficient indication as to it contents, the first line (or a part thereof) and any other portions of the document which help to shed light on its contents are used in lieu of or addition to the title. Any omissions of the text quoted as part of the title are indicated with ellipsis points and any additions are indicated in brackets. No ellipsis points are used when the portion of the text of the document cited as a title ends with the end of a sentence. If a portion of a page following the first page is quoted in the title portion of the citation, it begins with "[Page x]" with x referring to the page from which the quotation has been taken. When "[Page x]" is used, ellipsis points are omitted.

Original punctuation has been used whenever possible in the citations. Deviations from this guideline are generally indicated in brackets. However, brackets appearing in the document itself have been rendered as parentheses in order to avoid giving the impression that this information has been added by the compilers of this catalogue. Capitalization, highly variable between the various documents and even within a given work, has been made as uniform as possible with initial words of sentences and proper names being capitalized in English-language works and the conventions of the language in which the document appears followed for non-English-language works. Blank spaces in the documents intended to be filled in manuscript are rendered as five-space underlines regardless of the size of the blank on the document unless the blank is obviously intended to be filled in with less than five letters (e.g., the date of a given month or the last two digits in a year).

Imprint information:
Broadsides, though they are printed, are unlike other printed materials, books and pamphlets, in that they usually do not contain publication information in a consistent or readily recognizable form. While locations and dates (without printer's or publisher's names) frequently appear at the in various locations throughout the broadsides, it is usually not clear exactly whether this information refers to the place and time the document was written or the place and time of its publication. Any such indications of place and time appearing on a document are usually placed in the title portion of the citation, in which case imprint portion appears in brackets. When a place, date, and publisher or printer appear together in close proximity in the document (in nearly all cases at the bottom of the last page of the work), the information is entered after the title and without brackets. Publisher and printer information has, in most cases, been entered exactly as it appears on the document, except for the capitalization which was made uniform according to the rules cited under the title information given above. Imprint locations supplied by the compilers have been Anglicized while those locations contained on the documents have been entered as they appear.

Pagination:
When the title of a document alone appears on a page that page is included in the page count of the document.

Size:
The size of the document, to the nearest half-centimeter, is given with its width appearing first and its height second. Any indication of a more precise measurement would be largely illusory: over the years some of the documents have been trimmed and bound as books (making exact measurement all but impossible), some of these have subsequently unbound (and sublect to further trimming thereby again reducing the original size of the document), and several of the broadsides have been printed on paper with rough edges and/or sides that do not form right angles with one another. Therefore, when comparing the sizes given in this catalogue with sizes of apparently identical documents elsewhere, caution must be exercised. In the case of documents which are reproductions of originals, much of the time the size of the original document is not discernable from the reproduction, in which case size information is not given.

Number of copies:
If several documents with the same text are in the collection, the number of copies is noted with the dimensions of the largest given in the size portion of the citation.

Reproduction format:
Fascimiles, photographs, and photocopies of original documents in the collections have been indicated in the citations as such. If the location of the original is known, it is entered in parentheses following the reproduction format information or in the annotation.

Illustration information:
Any illustration(s) appearing on the document are noted. If any portion of the caption appearing with an illustration is used in the description used in the citation, it is placed in quotation marks. All works with illustrations are underlined in the index to aid users in their location.

Bibliographic reference:
The following bibliographies have been consulted in preparing this portion of the citation:

If a work appears in one or more of these, its reference number has been noted. If no bibliographic reference information is given and the work falls within the parameters of a given bibiliography, the reader may correctly assume that compilers have been unable to locate the document in any of those works.

Call number:
The call number, in most cases based on the Dewey decimal system employed in arranging the holdings of the American Philosophical Society Library, has been given to aid in locating the documents cited. Some call numbers are not Dewey numbers, but rather are the names of the collections in which the documents may be found. In either case the last item found in the citation portion of the entry is the call number.

None.

Cite as: Broadside Collection, American Philosophical Society.

Roy Goodman and Mark Barrow assembled and annotated this collection of broadsides. Michael Miller converted the guide to EAD.

All of these broadsides have been digitized, transcribed, and added to ContentDM where they are full-text searchable. Links to individual objects are included in the inventory. An entry point to this digital collection may be found at cdm.amphilsoc.org/cdm4/browse.php?CISOROOT=/broadsides.