With the publication of The Treatment of Poisoning in 1888, Robert Saundby, Professor of Medicine at the University of Birmingham, and Philip Harris & Co. Ltd, a Birmingham-based pharmaceutical and medical instrument manufacturer, revealed the results of their long and fruitful business partnership. True to its name, the booklet aimed to instruct medical professionals in suitable treatments for cases of poisoning and yet its collaborative authorship, between an elite physician and a medical trade company, meant that it was neither solely a medical work of reference nor an advertising pamphlet. While outlining Saundby's, extensive research findings on effective antidotes, the publication also functioned as a sixteen-page endorsement of Harris's, pharmaceutical products and formed a part of the company's, growing advertising output. More broadly, The Treatment of Poisoning was one edition among many thousands in an increasingly prevalent genre of publication: the medical trade catalogue.

It is the purpose of this book to explore the rise and development of the medical trade catalogue in late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century Britain. The medical trade catalogue, a book-like publication of between 10 and 1,000 pages, was one of the most prominent forms of advertising aimed at medical professionals in this era. With circulation figures reaching 30,000 copies peredition by 1914, the catalogue was employed by medical companies across the country and beyond to provide medical practitioners with a comprehensive promotional guide to medical instruments, pharmaceuticals and appliances (see Figures I.1. and I.2).