| Description Of Item | Poole did a significant amount of research on the records of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. He had hoped to publish a book himself but W S Craig was able to use his papers when he wrote his history of the College. In the previous catalogue these has been described as 'Subject Files I' but had retained Poole's original arrangement of the papers into groups labelled AA, BB etc. Poole copied out extracts from the College records so the dates in the entry reflect the date he did the copying and not the content, with the dates of the content given in the title or the description. It is not always possible to tell whether an item is original or a copy Poole made later. When items are originals, or there is the possibility that they are, the original date is entered. (It should be noted that even on originals, Poole frequently added later annotations as part of his research.) The titles are mostly as Poole wrote them himself. A lot of the items could be seen as College Archives, particularly correspondence to Poole where he is acting for the College, but they were kept and arranged as part of Poole's own papers so have been retained in this collection.
The records of Poole's own practice at POR/3/28-29 are not listed in the catalogue at POR/3/2 and Poole may have decided to include them later. |