Excerpt from American Family Physician: Detailing Important Means of Preserving Health, From Infancy to Old Age; The Offices Women Should Perform to Each Other at Births, and the Diseases Peculiar to the Sex; With Those of Children and of Adults

Doctor Buchan was the first English author who wrote for the public of his country on medicine. Probably be rendered the British nation more service, by his treatise on domestic medi cine, than all the physicians of his age put together. His direc tions for preserving health are exceedingly judicious; those for the practice of physic are very tolerable, at least, for his own country: but his work is replete with false, absurd, exploded doctrines - with unnecessarily compounded prescriptions, and with many medicines disused, at least, in the United States.

Our latest and greatest improvements in the medic art, arise from the simplification of its theories or doctrines, which has led to a correspondent simplicity in practice. My preceptor in medi cine, the late Dr. Rush - a man most dear to the recollections of all who heard his lectures - was the author of the prevailing and increasing simplicity of theory and practice in this country. That a work on medicine is now wanted for the public, in unison with the doctrines of that great ornament of medical science, cannot' be questioned. The last book of the kind published in the United States, is, in its directions for practice, rather better than any preceding; but is excessively incumbered with compli cated prescriptions. It is true, that, by the aid of recommenda tions so easily obtained, and by bestowing praises on So many men, spirits blue, black, and grey, it has gone through several editions; notwithstanding some glaring defects in its details great ignorance of authors - much absurdity of doctrine - and an enormity of price, excluding it from those whose circumstances most require cheap instruction. It will be enough to state of the work, that the fifth edition before me, having on its title page greatly im/zroved, contains 649 pages, of which 178 are on' the art of preserving health; all of which are so full of poetry - stories to amuse school-boys - moral subjects - and such other irrelevant matter, not excepting examples of getting the brains blown out as proof of the health of patriotism, - all chiefly taken from the Medical Extracts published by a wild visionary, Dr. Thornton, (this one is of London); that persons would be apt to mistake the object of the part, were they not perpetually reminded of it on the top of the page. It only contains 216 pages relating to dis eases: and full 168 about a Materia Medica and Dispensatory.

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