Surgical Operations on Tumours with Cases and Operations, showing open cancer of the face.]]> here through the Medical Heritage Library]]> Boston Medical and Surgical Journal for March 8, 1837. The article is a landmark in the history of plastic surgery in this country. It was reprinted with two additional cases in 1840. The case appears again, thirty years later, in Dr. Warren's Surgical operations with cases and observations (Boston : Ticknor and Fields, 1867).]]> Rhinoplastic Operations with Some Remarks on the Autoplastic Methods by J. Mason Warren 1811-1867]]> The second edition of Dr. Warren

]]> Physical Education and the Preservation of Health by John Collins Warren (1778-1856)]]> The Royal College of Physicians first began to publish an authoritative list of pharmaceutical compounds and directions for their use in 1618. The title-page of this third edition of the Pharmacopoeia is notable for the succession of signatures of its owners in the Warren family.

Before coming into the possession of John Warren, the volume belonged to Zabdiel Boylston (1679-1766), the physician who first inoculated the citizens of Boston against smallpox during the epidemic of 1721. Dr. Boylston signed his name at the end of the Pharmacopoeia, along with the Latin tag against book theft, “Hic nomen pono quia librum perdere nolo. Si quis furatur, per collum pendatur” [Here I place my name as I do not wish to lose my book. If anyone should steal it, let him hang by the neck.]

]]> Pharmacopoeia Collegii Regalis Londini, showing the signatures of Dr. Zabdiel Boyslton and various members of the Warren family]]> here]]> Following the first public operation with ether anesthesia, Dr. John Collins Warren began to assemble data from over 200 surgical cases to promote the discovery, hoping to change "the slow progress of the practice of etherization in this country beyond the vicinity of its first introduction, compared with its rapid extension on the other side of the Atlantic."

This copy of Etherization was presented by John Collins Warren to poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882), then on the faculty of Harvard College. Longfellow said, "I rejoice that such a calm, dispassionate and firm approval of the great discovery should appear from your pen to cheer the timid, and convince the skeptical. The words you have spoken will have great weight for you speak with authority, and have an indisputable right to speak." Longfellow, too, had a right to speak as, just a year earlier, his wife, Fanny, became the first woman in the United States to undergo childbirth with anesthesia.

]]> Etherization, with Surgical Remarks]]> The New England Journal of Medicine and Surgery—this is his only monograph. It was published near the end of his life and concerns the medical uses of mercury in fever treatment.]]> A View of the Mercurial Practice in Febrile Diseases]]> here through Archive.org]]> Just as his great-grandfather had been instrumental in establishing the Harvard Medical School in the eighteenth century, so Dr. J. Collins Warren provided the impetus for the construction of the buildings of the Quad at the beginning of the twentieth. With Dr. Henry P. Bowditch, J. Collins Warren developed plans for the Longwood campus, persuaded hospitals to relocate to the area, and obtained funds from John Pierpont Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and Mrs. Collis P. Huntingdon to make the new facilities a reality.

]]> American medical botany is the first publication in this country to employ a color printing process for its plates, using an innovative etched stone process. Jacob Bigelow, Harvard's professor of materia medica, hoped to decrease reliance on foreign imported medicinal substances by substitution of domestic compounds: "Several departments of the Materia Medica may be amply supplied from our own forests and meadows, although there are others, for which we must as yet depend on foreign countries. We have yet to discover our anodynes and our emetics.... A great number of foreign drugs, such as gentian, columbo, chamomile, kino, catechu, cascarilla, canella, &c. for which we pay a large annual tax to other countries, might in all probability be superceded by the indigenous products of our own." The plate displayed shows panax quinquefolium [ginseng].]]> panax quinquefolium, from Jacob Bigelow's American medical botany]]> Conciliator differentiarum [Reconciler of the Differences Between Philosophers and Physicians] represents his attempt to answer medical questions through a synthesis of Greek, Arabic, Jewish, and Latin authorities, including Aristotle, Avicenna, and Averro]]> Conciliator differentiarum (Venice: Bonetus Locatellus, for Octavianus Scotus, 15 March 1496)]]> "It is enough for us to believe that the doctrine of the origin of disease, of the principles by which it should be managed, and the method of administering remedial agents, as proposed by Hahnemann and his disciples, are untrue and unsafe, and that therefore we cannot give to those who adopt this mode of practice the sanction of our Society by receiving them as members of our fraternity." No formal action was taken at this time, but the 1860 edition of the Society's by-laws forbids the acceptance of any practitioner "who professes to cure diseases by Spiritualism, Homoeopathy or Thomsonianism."]]> ]]> "I can truly say that the limited time and attention, which the hurry so apt to attend the close of lectures has allowed me, render me very diffident in approaching the subject at all, and especially so in the presence of one who, however lenient in his judgment, could hardly avoid seeing the imperfections which must attend my brief glance at the subject."In 1849, Warren had taken possession of the Boston Phrenological Society's collection of casts and skulls, including the skull of Johann Gaspar Spurzheim. That collection now resides with the Warren Anatomical Museum.

By 1861, however, Holmes’ views on phrenology were set. He said, “I am not one of its haters; on the contrary, I am grateful for the incidental good it has done…. Yet I should not have devoted so many words to it, did I not recognize the light it has thrown on human actions by its study of congenital organic tendencies. Its maps of the surface of the head are, I feel sure, founded on a delusion, but its studies of individual character are always interesting and instructive.”

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