The Family Physician and Guide to Health, in Three Parts: Part I. Contains the Theory and Practise of Physic. Part II. Diseases of Women and Children, and the Botanic Practice. Part III. Dispensatory, Anatomy, and the Practice of Surgery; together with T…

vi, 599 pp. 8vo. Original full calf, gilt titles & rules. Hoolihan 3768: "This first edition of Whitney's Family physician was published at Penn-Yan, Yates Co., N.Y., a village southeast of Rochester at the head of Keuka Lake, incorporated the year this book was published. The details of Whitney's medical education are unknown, but [he was] obviously trained as an allopath as he does not hesitate to recommend 'bleeding, puking and purging' - a therapeutic triad generally eschewed by alternative practitioners of his generation. Whitney acknowledges the favorable place that botanic medicine occupied in the public consciousness by providing a section on the 'reformed' practice in which he provides vegetable remedies for many of the disorders discussed in part I and a 'Dispensatory of American botanic remedies.' His chapter on cholera is a timely response to that disease's appearance in the northeast and along the Erie Canal the year before, and demonstrates a familiarity with the medical literature on the subject. His discussion of anatomy and physiology logically precedes the surgical section, but also represents an early contribution to a genre of popular health reform literature that would mature in the 1840s. It is illustrated with four of the book's five rather crudely executed wood-engravings. The lengthy section on domestic surgery provides directions for the treatment of a wide variety of disorders, from carbuncles, to burns, cancers, ruptures, head injuries, dislocations, etc."