The Principles and Practice of Medicine.

OSLER, William.

$850.00

Item Number: 140471

New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1895.

Rare first printing of the second edition of Osler’s magnum opus. Thick octavo, bound in contemporary leatherette. In very good condition.

"During his first four years in Baltimore, Osler had relatively few duties. The routine work in the hospital being performed by his residents, he was free to devote more time to writing. The principal result was his Principles and Practice of Medicine, published to great acclaim in 1892. Dedicated to his early teachers, Johnson, Bovell, and Howard, it was one of the last single-authored textbooks to cover the whole of medicine. Although Osler later complained that effecting the revisions for subsequent editions was a millstone around his neck, it turned a national physician into an international figure. It was eventually translated into French, German, Spanish, and Chinese and went through eight editions during Osler's lifetime..." (Dictionary of National Biography). "The timing of the textbook was almost perfect. Principles and Practice was at once a monument to the achievements of nineteenth-century scientific medicine and a gateway to the twentieth century. Osler had mastered the mainstream clinicopathological tradition of the past seventy years. He was thoroughly up on the bacteriological work of the 1880s that had solved such a central conundrum in the etiology of infectious disease. With a few exceptions, his accounts of the natural history of disease still make sense, in some instances are considered classic. In 1892 the endocrine system had not been understood, the body's immune system was still a mystery, viruses could not be identified, principles of nutrition and genetics were largely unknown, and x-rays, electrocardiographs, and scores of other diagnostic devices had not yet been developed" (Bliss, William Osler: A Life in Medicine).