Glasgow University’s Special Collections Department is one of the foremost resources in Scotland for academic research and teaching. Built up over a period of more than 500 years by purchase, gift and bequest, the collections now contain more than 200,000 manuscript items and around 200,000 printed works, including over 1,000 incunabula.

Probably the best known of the Library’s rare book collections, the Hunterian Library contains some 10,000 printed books and 650 manuscripts and forms one of the finest eighteenth-century libraries to survive intact. It was assembled by Dr William Hunter. Under the terms of Hunter’s will, his library and other collections remained in London for several years after his death - for the use of his nephew, Dr Matthew Baillie (1761- 1823 ) - and finally came to the University in 1807.

About one third of Hunter’s books – not unnaturally - are to do with medicine, with a good balance struck between the great historical texts (such as editions of Hippocrates, Galen, Vesalius, Harvey) and the writings of his own contemporaries (men like Smellie, the Monros, Albinus, Haller). Anatomy and obstetrics – the two fields in which Hunter made his fame and fortune - are particularly well represented; though an interest in other topics such as naval medicine, the deficiency diseases, inoculation against smallpox, are also represented.