The American Practice of Medicine, Revised, Enlarged, and Improved: Being a Practical Exposition of Pathology, Therapeutics, Surgery, Materia Medica, and Pharmacy, on Reformed Principles; Embracing the Mose Useful Portions of the Former Work, with Correc…

lviii, 720; vii, 584; 592 pp. 8vo. Full leather, black morocco spine labels, gilt titles & rules. Includes numerous color plates, including a fold-out frontispiece in volume 2. We found no complete sets offered in the trade or at auction. Hoolihan 245: 'The first edition of Beach's three-volume American practice of medicine was published in New York in 1833, and the second in 1836... These three volumes are illustrated with 181 hand-colored lithographic plates and numerous wood engravings in-text. The utility of chromatic illustrations of pathological conditions doubtless came to Beach during his medical tour of Europe in 1848-49. Excepting the botanical plates in volume three, the numerous colored lithographs constitute a kind of poor man's Cruveilhier, whose pathological specimens at the Museum Dupuytren in Paris Beach notes in the introduction (I:xxxiv), and whose atlas he must have known. The surgical volume contains the greatest number of wood engravings, many of which are crudely copied from the surgical texts of such authors as Astley Cooper and Robert Liston.'