The Doctrine of Purgation, Curiosities from Ancient and Modern Literature
period print · 1871
LINK
SUMMARY
Wellcome Collection catalogue record and IIIF-digitized copy (b24854797, Public Domain Mark), fetched and inspected directly by viewing the page images at high resolution (no OCR text page exists for this scan, so quoted text below is transcribed by direct visual reading rather than a mechanically fetchable text source; title page, copyright page, and the book's own introduction, headed by its own title naming purgation, disease, and premature death, were all inspected this way). This is Benjamin Brandreth's own 224-page advertising/apologia volume, compiled under his own name and M.D. title, collecting quotations from historical medical writers to argue that purgation is the corner-stone of all remedies. Its introduction makes the case's central longevity claim explicit: it distinguishes premature from natural death, asserts natural death is merely a cessation of the faculties with no disease involved, and argues that no one need die of disease because prompt purgation is what stands between life and death. Used in this bundle as the primary-source basis for the case's charismatic-practitioner and vague-mechanism sections and for the two page-image media assets (title page and the premature-death passage).
NOTES
Benjamin Brandreth’s The Doctrine of Purgation (2nd ed., New York, 1871) is his own promotional anthology, not a secondary account of him: 224 pages of quotations from Hippocrates and other historical medical writers assembled to argue that purgation is the foundation of all cures. The Wellcome Collection’s digitized copy (Public Domain Mark) was inspected directly, page by page, for this bundle (as high-resolution page images; the scan has no separate OCR text page for a mechanical re-fetch, so its wording is reported here in this archive’s own words rather than as machine-verified verbatim quotation). Its introduction states the book’s longevity argument in Brandreth’s own terms: natural death is merely a cessation of all the faculties, premature death is caused by retained corruption, and no one need die of disease because prompt purgation is what stands between life and death. This is the case’s primary documentary source for the claim that timely purgation preserves health and extends life, and it supplies two of the case’s media assets (the title page and the premature-death passage, both photographed directly from the digitized book).