author
Oscar Jennings
A Paris-trained physician with a taste for bold ideas, this little-known writer moved easily between medicine, self-help, and the history of the book. His works range from treatments for morphine addiction and chronic illness to a beautifully curated study of Renaissance woodcut initials.
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About the author
Oscar Jennings was a British-born doctor and author who lived from 1851 to 1914. Library and bibliographic records identify him as a physician, and his books show an unusually wide set of interests: addiction treatment, nervous disorders, exercise and health, and the visual culture of early printing.
Several of his best-known works center on medicine and personal reform, including On the Cure of the Morphia Habit, The Morphia Habit and Its Voluntary Renunciation, and La santé par le tricycle. He also wrote Early Woodcut Initials (1908), a richly illustrated reference work drawn from his collection of decorative letters from fifteenth- and sixteenth-century books.
That collection had a life beyond the book itself. The Victoria and Albert Museum notes that in 1921 it acquired around 24,000 early printed initials from Jennings's widow, Cécile, suggesting that his work as a collector was serious and lasting as well as scholarly.