Beschreibung:

An Essay on the West India Dry-Gripes; With the Method of Preventing and Curing that Cruel Distemper. To which is added, An Extraordinary Case in Physick.
Philadelphia: B. Franklin, 1745. v, [1], 42 pp., small 4to (190 x 125 mm). Woodcut tailpiece. [Bound after:] [Theodore TRONCHIN]. A Treatise on the Colica Pictonum; or the Dry Belly-Ach . London: W. Johnston, 1764. Translated into English by Ralph Schomberg. 8vo (190 x 125 mm). Together, 2 volumes in one. Early quarter sheep over marbled paper boards, spine ruled in gilt and with red morocco lettering piece. Housed in a morocco-backed clamshell box. Condition : minor foxing, very minor torn area in the upper margin of the terminal text leaf; boards worn at extremities. Provenance : Haskell F. Norman (booklabel, sale Christie’s New York, 15 June 1998, lot 347). the norman copy of among the earliest distinctly american medical books and a rare franklin imprint. Cadwalader (1708-1779) a noted colonial Philadelphia physician, was among the founders of Pennsylvania Hospital and served as a founding trustee of the University of Pennsylvania medical school. In this Essay, Cadwalader’s only published work, he addresses a growing illness afflicting colonial Philadelphians: lead poisoning. Lead colic and lead palsy were “both very common ailments in eighteenth-century America due to the custom of drinking punch made with Jamaica rum, which was distilled in lead pipes” (Norman). Cadwalader advises the discontinuation of the standard treatment of mercury and purgatives and suggests mild cathartics and opium as more effective. The few medical tracts published in America prior to this work dealt largely with smallpox and the question of innoculation, or were reprints of earlier non-American medical works. Cadwalader’s Dry-Gripes was the first published work by an American physician of a broad scientific character based on original research which dealt with the pathology of a specific illness and its treatment. As such, it is considered by some to be the first distinctly American medical book. Of significant note is the additional “Extraordinary Case of Physick” which is appended to the work. In it, Cadwalader describes his autopsy of a woman who suffered from osteomalacia. This account is the first published description of an autopsy in America. The book is very rare with only a handful of institutional copies and only this and one other copy appearing at auction in the last quarter century. [With:] Two typed letters signed from Franklin bibliographer C. William Miller to Haskell Norman, concerning this copy, writing “The Dry Gripes, as you are aware, is a rare item in Franklin bibliography.” Austin 380; Evans 5553; Garrison-Morton 2094; Guerra a-213; Hildeburn 922; Miller 369; Norman 385.