OSLER, WILLIAM. 1849-1919.


The Principles and Practice of Medicine. New York: Appleton, 1892. 8vo. Original green cloth. Slightest wear to head and tail of spine, small stain to upper cover, minor rubbing to joints. Cloth folding case. Provenance M. Boots (owner's name on the front free endpaper). "ONE OF THE MOST INFLUENTIAL TEXTBOOKS OF GENERAL MEDICINE EVER WRITTEN" (Norman). FIRST EDITION, FIRST ISSUE with title of Plato's Socratic dialogue Gorgias misspelled "Georgias" (on the verso of the third leaf), and the publisher's advertisements dated November 1891. William Osler was already well known in North American and European medical circles when he became physician-in-chief of the Johns Hopkins Hospital in 1889. His stature increased steadily after his textbook was published three years later. By the early 20th-century, Osler was recognized as the world's leading internist. His account "The Writing of a Text-Book" was published in the Bibliotheca Osleriana (Oxford, 1929), 315-316. Three thousand copies of the first printing were sold in just two months. Michael Bliss writes, "The timing of the textbook was almost perfect. Principles and Practice was at once a monument to the achievements of nineteenth-century scientific medicine and a gateway to the twentieth century ... Its merits, apart from the up-to-date content, were its extreme clarity, Osler's straightforward style, and the sense he conveyed that medicine was anything but cut-and-dried" (Michael Bliss, William Osler: A Life in Medicine, New York, 1999, pp 185-186). A very fine copy of the earliest issue of the first printing of Osler's monumental textbook. Garrison-Morton 2231; Golden & Roland 1375; Norman 2231: Osler 3543.