The 1600's and 1700's

Thomas Thacher (1620-1678)
A Brief Rule to Guide the Common People of New-England How to Order Themselves & Theirs in the Small-pocks, or Measels
(Boston : reprinted for Benjamin Eliot, 1702)

This is the second edition of the first medical treatise to be published in the American colonies. Only two specimens of the first edition—printed as a broadside in 1677/8—are known. The second edition is also extremely rare. This is one of three copies extant and the only one with its title-page intact. Thomas Thacher was a minister at Boston’s Old South Church. He devised these guidelines for the diagnosis and treatment of smallpox after an epidemic of the disease in the city in 1676-1677. Another epidemic threatened Boston in 1702, prompting this reprinting of Thacher’s work in pamphlet form.

William Smellie was an pioneer English obstetrician who taught over nine hundred students, including William Hunter (1718-1783). He invented the steel-lock, curved, and double-curved forceps and was the first obstetrician to use forceps to rotate a fetal head. This edition of William Smellie’s classic work, On the Theory and Practice of Midwifery (1752), holds a dual distinction in the history of medicine: it is both the first illustrated medical text and the first obstetrical work to be published in the United States.