Complete Record - Heirs of Hippocrates No. 1932

THOMAS SPENCER COBBOLD (1828-1886) Entozoa: An introduction to the study of helminthology, with reference more particularly to the internal parasites of man. Groombridge 1864 xxvi, 480 pp., illus., plates (part col.). 26 cm.

An eminent British parasitologist, Cobbold received his medical degree from the University of Edinburgh. He began his career as curator of the Edinburgh Anatomical Museum and was also professor of comparative anatomy at Edinburgh for many years. Later in his career he was curator and professor of geology at the British Museum and professor of botany and helminthology at the Royal Veterinary College. Especially interested in the parasitic worms that infect man and animals, he is often remembered for naming the nematode Filaria bancrofti (1864) and the trematode Bilharzia haematobrium (1877). Cobbold was very active as an author and wrote thirteen books as well as many scientific papers. The present work is Cobbold's first book, which he decided to write because there was no original work on the topic available in English at that time. The book contains twenty-one finely lithographed colored plates and eighty-two wood-engraved textual figures. About one half of the illustrations were from original sources with the remainder being taken from the works of well-known researchers of the day. Cobbold did an exhaustive search of the English language literature on helminthology and at the end of the book is a sixty page bibliography covering the first half of the nineteenth century. Although the work is complete in itself, Cobbold prepared a short supplementary volume which was issued in 1869.

Cited references: Garrison-Morton 2452; Waller 2019

Gift of John Martin, M.D.