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Jean-louis-Maire Alibert often referred to as the father of dermatology, was chief physician of the Saint Louis Hospital Paris and physician to King Louis XVIII. The first English translation of Albert's collected medical journals including dissertations on Yellow Fever and its effects. Additionally, this is the first edition to include Caldwell's appendix in which writes of Philadelphia's 1805 Yellow Fever epidemic. Caldwell' research demonstrates the strides the medical community had take to identify the root causes, origin, and effects of the disease ar just how widespread it had become. Scarce in commerce with only or recorded sale at auction in 1979.Note Type
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From Miner: A translation of the third edition (1804) of the renowned dermatologist's Traité des fievres pernicieuses intermittentes, originally published as his medical dissertation in 1800. In his introduction Caldwell writes that in his opinion Alibert's is the best treatise available on the topic, and that, "a competent knowledge of the principles laid down in this work, would, in the year 1793, have prevented the fatal mistakes into which many of the physicians of Philadelphia fell, relative to the origin and causes of the epidemic of that season."
Caldwell appended to this work his own "An essay on the pestilential or yellow fever, as it prevailed in Philadelphia in the year eighteen hundred and five" (116 p.). Citing Hippocrates' observation that epidemic diseases always arise from the atmosphere of the places where they prevail, Caldwell concludes,"... wherever we find an atmosphere possessing a temperature sufficiently high, provided that temperature be long continued, and be aided by moisture in its action on large masses of dead animal and vegetable substances, there yellow fever may make its appearance." The appearance of yellow fever at Philadelphia in 1805 was likewise attributed "to the hotness and dryness of the season, co-operating with the filthiness and impurity of our streets," specifically, to emanations from several hundred bushels of putrefying oysters on the Catherine Street wharf.