Author Description

Translator names not noted above: Stephen Paget, Robert Willis, F. Faulkner, D.C. Robb, and H.C. Ernst. Originally published between 1909 and 1917 under the name "Harvard Classics," this stupendous 51-volume set-a collection of the greatest writings from literature, philosophy, history, and mythology-was assembled by American academic CHARLES WILLIAM ELIOT (1834-1926), Harvard University's longest-serving president. Also known as "Dr. Eliot's Five Foot Shelf," it represented Eliot's belief that a basic liberal education could be gleaned by reading from an anthology of works that could fit on five feet of bookshelf. Volume XXXVIII includes important foundational works of science and medicine: [ "The Oath" of Hippocrates, dating from the 4th century BC [ "Journeys in Diverse Places," by Ambroise Par, the 16th-century army doctor who pioneered battlefield medicine [ "On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals," by William Harvey, the 1628 paper that examined the operation of the biological circulatory system [ "The Three Original Publications on Vaccination Against Smallpox," by Edward Jenner, who established the field of immunology [ "The Contagiousness of Puerperal Fever," the 1843 article by physician Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. that proposed the germ theory of disease [ "On the Antiseptic Principle of the Practice of Surgery," by Joseph Lister, an 1867 essay that promoted sterile surgical practices [ "Scientific Papers," by Louis Pasteur, the 19th-century French chemist [ "Scientific Papers," by Charles Lyell, the 19th-century British geologist