New Guide to Health; or, Botanic Family Physician

period print · 1835

type:period print

year:1835

citation:Thomson, Samuel. New Guide to Health; or, Botanic Family Physician. Containing a Complete System of Practice, upon a Plan Entirely New: with a Description of the Vegetables Made Use of, and Directions for Preparing and Administering Them, to Cure Disease. To Which Is Prefixed, A Narrative of the Life and Medical Discoveries of the Author. Boston: Printed for the Author, and sold by his General Agent, at the Office of the Boston Investigator, J. Q. Adams, Printer, 1835.

LINK

http://www.loc.gov/item/07016095/

SUMMARY

Samuel Thomson's own patented-system manual and autobiography, in this 1835 Boston printing. Library of Congress digitized copy (gdcmassbookdig:newguidetohealt00thom), title page bearing manuscript deposit stamps dated May and July 1835; used here for the title-page media asset. The autobiographical narrative section (identical text, cross-checked against the National Library of Medicine's copy of the same 1835 edition digitized by the Internet Archive at https://archive.org/details/2575007R.nlm.nih.gov) is the primary source for: Thomson's account of the one-cause/one-remedy theory of disease; his description of steaming, emetic, and enema treatment; the case of the patient Ezra Lovett; the full account of his December 1809 indictment and trial for Lovett's death, including the courtroom moment in which the substance introduced as lobelia, a deadly poison, was shown by the botanist Dr. (Manasseh) Cutler to be marsh rosemary; and his own narrative of obtaining the 1813 federal patent. As Thomson's own account, it is used for facts he had no motive to fabricate (dates, named participants, the trial record) and is balanced against James Harvey Young's independent scholarly account for evaluative characterization.

NOTES

Samuel Thomson’s patented-system manual and life narrative, the primary self-account this case draws on for the 1809 murder trial (naming the patient Ezra Lovett, the presiding Supreme Judicial Court panel, and the marsh-rosemary courtroom reversal), the 1813 patent narrative, and the doctrine of disease as a single derangement of the body’s natural heat. The Library of Congress 1835 printing supplies the title-page media asset; the identical text was cross-checked against the National Library of Medicine’s 1835 copy digitized by the Internet Archive.