Brown John.Remarks on the Older Systems of Medicine.Frankfurt am Main, 1807

“...the emptiest and most fallacious of all medical theories—the doctrine of spasm, which, like the spirit of a deceased criminal, has maliciously tormented the human race for generations...”

John Brown's Bemerkungen über die ältern Systeme der Medizin und Umriss der neuen Lehre / herausgegeben von Dr. Andr. Röschlaub. — (John Brown's sämmtliche Werke; Dritter Band).

Frankfurt am Main: in der Andreäischen Buchhandlung, 1807. — 376 pp., 1 folded engraved plate. — In German.

In an old cardboard binding: spine and corners covered with marbled buff-brown paper, boards in a blue-green patterned paper; remains of a red label on the spine, endpapers of pale green paper. Corners rubbed, with losses of paper; rubbing and minor losses of marbled paper along the edges of the spine; dark stains at the top of the upper board and the number “5” written in white ink at the bottom. Paper naturally yellowed with foxing, heaviest on the half-title and title pages; creases in the sheet before the introduction; folded plate with creases along the folds and light rubbing at the edges. Text block tight. On the title page, a blue circular stamp of the Society of Galician Physicians (Towarzystwo Lekarzy Galicyjskich) with the Rod of Asclepius, beside which is a faint impression of an oval stamp, and “61/09” written in blue ink at the top; on the verso of the title page, an oval stamp “Biblioteka Towarzystwa Lekarskiego Lwowskiego” and the number “739”. On the flyleaf, an old ink cipher “G. H. M.” with numbers; on the front endpaper, a pencil library cipher and an ex-libris label of the “Rare Books” bookstore. Condition: good.

The book has historical and cultural value and is of collecting interest.

INFORMATION

The third volume of the collected German works of John Brown—a translation of his “Observations on the principles of the old system of physic” (1787): a sharp polemic against old medicine, especially the doctrine of spasm of his former teacher William Cullen, and a concise exposition of his own “new science.” As the publisher notes in the preface, this is one of the few texts that Brown publicly acknowledged as his own. The engraved plate mentioned on the title page—the famous Brownian “scale of life”: two columns, “excitability” and “excitation,” each with 80 degrees, with “the fullest state and most perfect force of life” in the middle, and deviations in either direction leading through a tendency toward sthenic or asthenic diseases to death.

John Brown (1735–1788) was a Scottish physician, pupil and assistant to Cullen in Edinburgh, and later his irreconcilable opponent. In “Elementa medicinae” (1780), he reduced all diseases to an excess or deficiency of irritation—sthenia and asthenia. His system captivated Germany at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries, and its most zealous promoter was the Bamberg professor Andreas Röschlaub (1768–1835), who developed his own theory of excitation based on it. Röschlaub published his translation only in 1806–1807 in three volumes—this was the last German translation of Brown.

This copy has a Lviv history: stamps of the Society of Galician Physicians, founded in 1867, and the library of the Lviv Medical Society—a single institution that operated under both names. The society’s book collection later formed the basis of the collections of the Lviv Regional Scientific Medical Library.