Scientific and medical texts represented a small percentage of all titles published in eighteenth-century Britain. Yet, this literature contributed greatly to both the progress of the Enlightenment and the establishment of natural knowledge in British culture. The commercial histories of scientific and medical books share some common characteristics, but their cultural roles tended to be quite different. More often than not, medical books were written by medical practitioners and read by students preparing for medical careers. In contrast, writers of scientific books often earned their livings in occupations that typically had no direct relationship to the subject of their work, while their readers generally did no. anticipate using the knowledge gained from their study to earn money. At the high end of the market for scientific and medical works were those books published in large format with multiple illustrations.

The book trade of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries underwent a massive expansion and diversification of its products. The changes in the sciences that took place in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain were intimately interconnected with the revolution that took place in print culture. The transformations in print culture were accompanied by a related transformation in the natural and medical sciences. The diversification of reading audiences served to foster both the specialization of scientific knowledge and its removal into technical periodicals. Yet, neither men of science themselves, nor the new entrepreneurial publishers, were blind to the market for an increasing range of scientific publications addressed to non-specialists, including popular periodicals, introductory works, systematic treatises, encyclopaedias and textbooks. It was in negotiating these changed conditions of communication that the new notions of the scientific expert and of 'popular science', so characteristic of nineteenth-century science, began to be developed.

Linda Voigts's survey of manuscript book production in England between 1375 and 1500 demonstrates the multi-lingual character of most medical and scientific books. That is to say, Middle English and Anglo-Norman are to be found alongside the Latin of the scholastics. The fifteenth century is the first for which we have a number of commonplace books written by practitioners. One example is the Practica and surgery written by Thomas Fayreford, a medical practitioner in north Devon and Somerset in the first quarter of the century. Access to scientific books of the sort Fayreford required was probably only available at Oxford and Cambridge, where both institutional and private collections were built up with a deliberate bias towards medicine and science. Roger Marchall's commissioning, purchasing, annotating and disposing of books gives us an idea of how a fifteenth-century academic and medical practitioner might have used manuscripts. The scientific best-seller of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was undoubtedly the almanac.