A Narrative of the Life and Medical Discoveries of Samuel Thomson (1822), frontispiece portrait
period print · 1822
LINK
SUMMARY
Engraved frontispiece portrait of Samuel Thomson, from the 1822 first edition of his autobiographical Narrative. The Wikimedia Commons file page (category Samuel Thomson 1769-1843; PD US expired) tags it explicit public domain, which is the record used for rights verification. The plate itself names and dates the subject as botanist, born 9 February 1769, matching Thomson's documented birth date, so the identification rests on the plate caption itself rather than an inference. The Commons upload's own credit line points only to a private antiques listing (worthpoint.com), so a further search was made for a direct institutional holding record: the same plate (identical caption and engraver credit to H. Williams) was located and visually confirmed as the frontispiece (leaf 3) of the National Library of Medicine's copy of the identical 1822 edition, digitized by the Internet Archive (https://archive.org/details/56310610R.nlm.nih.gov, bearing a Surgeon General's Office Library accession stamp). The higher-resolution downloaded image used for this case's media asset is from that NLM/Internet Archive scan; the Commons page is cited here as the rights record because it is one of this project's four deterministically-checked archives. The same NLM/Internet Archive scan's OCR full text (fetched directly from https://ia802800.us.archive.org/18/items/56310610R.nlm.nih.gov/56310610R_djvu.txt) was also checked for the one-cause/one-remedy doctrine and the lobelia-harmlessness claim used elsewhere in this bundle: both appear in this 1822 first edition (e.g. 'effect of one general cause, and may be removed by one general remedy' and 'perfectly harmless in its operation, even' when a large quantity is taken), confirming both claims were already stated in 1822, not only in the 1835 printing.
NOTES
The engraved frontispiece portrait of Samuel Thomson from the 1822 first edition of his autobiographical Narrative of the Life and Medical Discoveries of Samuel Thomson, captioned in the plate itself with his name, occupation as botanist, and birth date. Wikimedia Commons hosts this plate tagged public domain, credited there only to a private antiques listing; a further search located the same plate as the frontispiece of the National Library of Medicine’s copy of the identical 1822 edition, digitized by the Internet Archive, which supplies this case’s actual (higher-resolution) downloaded image. That same digitized copy’s full OCR text was also checked directly and confirms the one-cause/one-remedy doctrine and the lobelia-harmlessness claim both already appear in this 1822 first edition.