James Thacher and his influence on American medicine / Henry R. Viets.

  • Viets, Henry R. (Henry Rouse), 1890-1969.
Date:
[1949]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: James Thacher and his influence on American medicine / Henry R. Viets. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    13/20 (page 11)
    1844, at the age of ninety. One book, the Military Journal, was reprinted, with change of title, at least seven times after his death. This was a prodi¬ gious output for a country doctor with a large prac¬ tice. Much was made possible by his semi-retire¬ ment at the age of seventy on account of deafness in 1824, but his most important book, the Military Journal, was off the press in 1823, when Thacher was also not far from his period of greatest use¬ fulness as a physician and surgeon. Securely settled in 1784, Thacher married in April of the next year. Of his six children, only two survived him at his death. As his practice grew, young men came to him to learn the art of medicine.4 They lived in his house as apprentices, but he was more than a master for he taught them medicine in a manner as good as and perhaps even superior to the regular instruction then available in qualified medical schools. Few local boys could afford to leave home for courses offered under John Warren and Benjamin Waterhouse in 1782 at the University at Cambridge, and even fewer could journey to Philadelphia to hear William Shippen and John Morgan, who had begun to teach in 1764. Thacher built his own “school” into his private practice, obtained his dissecting material from a neighboring church-yard, and assembled his own library of English authors, then the only texts available. He soon visualized the importance of books by American physicians and he was among the first in America to write books for the use of his students. In this endeavor he was most suc¬ cessful. The Medical Writings of James Thacher The first years, from 1784 to 1804, were devoted almost entirely to building up a practice, for Thacher did not join the Massachusetts Medical Society until 1803, presumably too busy to take the long journey to Boston for the annual meeting. But he soon profited greatly by his membership, for the Society issued its Pharmacopoeia in 1808, a book that completely changed the language of ma¬ teria medica in this country. Thacher was quick to grasp the importance of the scholarly and safe contribution of John C. Warren and James Jack- son, and he hastened to incorporate the essence of the Massachusetts Medical Society Pharmacopoeia into his first publication, The American New Dis¬ pensatory (1810). The book, a standard work written in familiar language in concentrated form, was immediately successful, and three additional editions were printed in the following eleven years. The current literature was fully scanned, augmented by the extensive correspondence Thacher must have carried on with physicians in other parts of the country. Thacher soon discovered that there was no sys¬ tematic treatise on practical medicine available to his American students other than the standard Eng¬ lish textbooks of his times. For years he collected data, particularly on diseases most frequently en¬ countered by him in practice. His American Mod¬ ern Practice, first issued in 1817, placed before the students and practitioners of the country a compre¬ hensive, practical book. His chapters on the “Du¬ ties of a Physician” is one of outstanding value in arrangement and full of sound advice. “To excel in the profession of medicine,” wrote Thacher, “and to practice with success and reputation, requires indefatiguability, industry, and a vast variety of liberal accomplishments, as well as an understand¬ ing improved by knowledge and experience.” Sure¬ ly no one better exemplified than Thacher “in- defatiguable industry,” “liberal accomplishments,” and “understanding improved by knowledge and experience.” A second edition, in 1826, expanded and finely printed, brought the subject up to date and the book was established as the outstanding contribution in its field. Not the least important was the introduc¬ tory “Historical Sketch of Medical Sciences, and the Sources and Means of Medical Instruction in the United States,” assembling all the material re¬ lated to medical instruction in America up to the time of publication of each of the two editions. This chapter was not only useful at the time but it preserved for medical historians in future times a wealth of factual data and a complete review of medical education as practiced in the early years of the nineteenth century in this country. In chronological order, between The American New Dispensatory (1810) and American Modern Practice. (1817) came the slightest of Thacher’s works, Observations on Hydrophobia, issued in Plymouth in 1812. Two patients dying of this disease were seen by Thacher in 1810 and they form the starting point for the book. Their symp¬ toms are well described. The book reflects, more¬ over, his wide reading, for its condenses most of 'll