Essai sur le typhus ou sur les fièvres dites malignes, putrides, bilieuses, muqueuses, jaune, la peste; exposition analytique et expérimentale de la nature des fièvres en general …

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8vo, pp. xiv, 479, [1 (blank)]; very occasional light spotting or creasing; original marbled-brown paper wrappers, printed title label on spine (worn), all edges uncut; extremities lightly rubbed and creased; a very fresh, crisp copy in the original wrappers; provenance: Librarie de V[euv]e Bergeret, Bordeaux (contemporary printed bookseller's label on upper wrapper).First edition by the physiologist and pathologist Hernandez (1769 1835). In Essai sur le typhus he rejects traditional book learning (especially humoral theories) and proposes an empirical approach for investigating the origin, epidemiology, contagion patterns and treatment of inflammatory and 'intermittent' fevers, and typhus a disease with especially devastating epidemics during the period of the Napoleonic Wars. Hernandez' references are both historical and firmly situated within the fabric of the Napoleonic Wars, often based on his own professional experience, and informed by his wide-spread interests in hygiene and epidemiology. In the historical and medical parts of his narrative, Hernandez refers to typhus, yellow fever and plague epidemics in Europe and Russia (Toulon, London, Constantinople, Moldovia, Moscow), the Caribbean (West Indies, Guadeloupe), and North America (including Halifax, Nova Scotia, Charlottetown, New York, and Philadelphia); names a large number of contemporary doctors and their predecessors, and assesses their approaches to these diseases; and identifies ships and seamen (and thus implicitly wars, trade and exploration) as the cause of the international movement of epidemics. Hernandez was also a participant in the medical controversies of his time: a contemporary review (Journal de médecine… de Montpellier (1816), p. 150) comments on Hernandez's affinities with the Brunonian system of medicine; this had been developed by John Brown, a student of William Cullen's at Edinburgh, whom Hernandez refers to on the half-title ('Essai sur le Typhus de Cullen, ou Fièvre Asthénique'), and Brown's theories on typhus had been acutely discussed during the German typhus epidemic of 1813-14. Interestingly, Hernandez was attacked in Toulon for promoting Brown's controversial theories of physiological irritability, excitability, and disease, and attempts were made to remove him from his posts. Wellcome III, p. 254. Language: French. N° de ref. del artículo T4126

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