SMITH, STEPHEN.


Doctor in Medicine: and Other Papers on Professional Subjects. New York: William Wood & Co., 1872. 8vo. Collotype photographic portrait frontispiece tipped in before title page. Publisher's green cloth decorated in blind, gilt titles on spine. Rubbed, glue residue and offsetting around portrait, light browning. SIGNED AND INSCRIBED on the free front endpaper: "Mrs. M.P. Richards, Kind regards of Stephen Smith." This collection of 58 papers by Smith, previously published in periodicals, cover a wide range of subjects relating to the practice of medicine in the 19th century, including the use of anesthetics, conservative surgery, nostrum advertising, the care of infants, foreign emigration, the relations of physicians to each other and to patients, women physicians, female nurses in hospitals, incurable diseases, prescription writing, physicians in old age, specialists in medicine, modern military science, medical fees, medical education, medical ethics, and many other subjects. Smith was a pioneer in public health in America, playing a major role in the creation of the New York Metropolitan Board of Health. He was also one of the earliest Americans to advocate antiseptic surgery, was a principal founder of the American Public Health Association, the initiation of sundry reforms in hospital service in New York, founded and organized Bellevue Medical College, laid out plans for Roosevelt Hospital in New York, and he was one of five physicians who contributed to the 1875 book Hospital Plans, which addressed options regarding the structure and organization of the Johns Hopkins Hospital. See Garrison-Morton 5805; Sabin 84257