By the late nineteenth century, producers of medical instruments and pharmaceuticals came to view a standardized and uniformly designed catalogue as an effective way of maintaining and expanding their share of medical professional markets. Yet, despite its mid-nineteenth-century formal unification, historians have long acknowledged that in reality the medical profession remained disparate, continued to grow in size and experienced a great deal of flux well into the twentieth century. While elite and classically educated physicians and surgeons continued to dominate British hospitals, numbers of specialists were growing and general practitioners found gainful employment in all manner of places, from asylums to private insurance firms. So, how did medical companies ensure that their catalogues appealed to this wide variety of doctors? Seemingly, there was no ‘typical’ practitioner in this period, so could there be such a thing as a ‘typical’ catalogue?

Within existing catalogue bibliographies and handlists, the question ‘what is a catalogue?’ is easily answered: an alphabetical product list with illustrations, which seemingly appealed to all practitioners. Yet, the publication's, chronological development from eighteenth-century list to nineteenth-century book, as explored in the previous chapter, suggests that this characterization is overly simplistic. The catalogue was clearly more than an illustrated price list by the late 1800s; it listed products with their price, often with an accompanying illustration, but also contained descriptive product text, advertising techniques such as referencing relevant literature, testimonials and branding, all held together within a suitably shaped exterior.