Saunders

About Saunders

Saunders, historically W. B. Saunders Company, is a medical and scientific publisher founded in Philadelphia in 1888 by Walter Burns Saunders, and today an imprint of Elsevier.

The firm began by issuing "Quiz Compend" study guides for medical students from premises at 33 South Tenth Street. Its first major textbook was the American Textbook of Surgery (1892), edited by W. W. Keen and J. William White, followed in 1894 by William Pepper's two-volume Practice of Medicine. Over the following decades Saunders built a list covering most areas of clinical medicine, nursing and textbooks for college courses, and it became the publisher of Dorland's medical dictionary. In the early twentieth century it moved into a headquarters on West Washington Square designed by John Torrey Windrim.

Its best-known trade success came by accident. Alfred Kinsey wanted a serious publisher that would not sensationalise his research, and Saunders, which sold to professionals rather than the general public, printed only 5,000 copies of Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948). The book sold hundreds of thousands, and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953) was also a best seller.

The Saunders family kept control until 1968, when CBS bought the company and placed it within Holt, Rinehart and Winston. When CBS left publishing in 1986 its academic units went to Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, and Saunders passed to Reed Elsevier when it acquired Harcourt in 2001. Elsevier still publishes Dorland's and other health-science titles under the Saunders name.