New York : William Wood & Company, 1889.
Description : [i]-viii p., -420 ; ill.: in-text photos., engrs. ; 21 cm.
Photographs : photoengravings, in-text.
Subject : Ear — Diseases ; Anatomy & Physiology.
Except for Delafield's pathology first printed in 1882, William Wood & Company rarely lavished its books and journals with photographic illustrations. It was known, instead, for publishing large edition runs of moderately priced textbooks that were compiled or written by medical academicians with stellar reputations. Not until the introduction of half-tone printing in the late 1880's did the photographic printing plate become cheap and durable enough to fit comfortably with the publisher's business model.
Albert Henry Buck was the son of Gurdon Buck (1807-1877) who is remembered as the father of American reparative surgery and the first American surgeon to take up the photographic arts for recording before and after images of plastic operations.1 Gurdon Buck was also published by William Wood & Company, but it was his son who became indispensible to the firm as the supervising editor of several of the publisher's most ambitious projects, most notably a translation of Ziemssen's Cyclopedia of the practice of medicine in 22 royal octavo volumes which commenced publication in 1874. His first monograph, an 18 page pamphlet titled, An Essay on the mechanism of the ossicles of the ear was printed by Wood in 1870. He also helped to launch the first American journal of otology which William Wood began publishing in 1879, edited by Clarence John Blake (1843-1919) of Harvard. Dr. Blake collaborated with Alexander Graham Bell in the invention of the phonautograph and the first article in the journal is Blake's paper on magnifying minute vibrations of sound by photography titled, The graphic and photographic illustration of sound-waves (N. Y.: Wood, 1879). His name is cataloged by Garrison Morton for two monographs on the history of medicine (GM-6410 & GM-6412) published by Yale University Press.
1. See: Contributions to reparative surgery..etc. New York: D. Appleton, 1876, which has 86 wood engravings copied from Dr. Gurdon Buck's photographs.