Material collected mainly by EBL on physicians and medicine in the North West of England outside of the Greater Manchester area. Most material is 'historical' in nature, comprising notes made by Leech from a variety of antiquarian and historical works, and relates to short biographical notes about medical practitioners from the late medieval period to the early nineteenth century.
Leech created the same type of brief holograph notes about regional medical practitioners dating from the 16th to the 19th century as he had for the Manchester-based medical practitioners of the same period in MMC/2. However, this part of the Collection has not been updated in the same way as MMC/2. More recent information about non-Manchester medical practitioners in the North-West may be found in the main biographical file series (MMC/2). Nearly all the material concerns doctors in Lancashire and Cheshire.
In nearly all cases only a single piece of information has been gathered on each individual. Leech appears to have made his notes from a narrow range of sources, particularly Robert Innes-Smith, English-speaking students of the University of Leyden (Edinburgh and London 1932), which lists British graduates of the University of Leyden, a major centre for medical education in the 17th and 18th centuries; T. Cann Hughes ed., The rolls of the freemen of the borough of Lancaster(2 vols. Edinburgh, 1935, 1938); John Brownbill ed., List of clergymen in the diocese of Chester, 1691 (Chetham Miscellanies 3.3. Manchester 1915), which includes information on clergy who possessed faculties to practise medicine in the Diocese of Chester (which at the time covered most of North West England); Richard Kay, A Lancashire doctor's diary: 1737 to 1750(Southport, 1895).