Flint, Practice of Medicine, 3rd ed, 1868
A Treatise on the Principles and Practice of Medicine; Designed for the use of Practitioners and Students of Medicine. By Austin Flint, M. D., Professor of the Principles and Practice of Medicine in the Bellevue Hospital Medical College, Fellow of the New York Academy of Medicine, etc. Third Edition, Thoroughly Revised. Philadelphia: Henry C. Lea. 1868.
Original full brown leather with black title label on spine. Leather scuffed and chipped with scattered stains. Head band torn. Joints and hinges strong. 1872 owner’s inscription on ffep (name uncertain—Leffingwell?). Clean, bright, and tight throughout with minimal foxing.
Ffep, blank, title – xvi, 1002, 32 (ads), blank, rfep.
Austin Flint (1812-1886) held positions in six medical schools. He was a friend of W. H. Welch, and was “one of the outstanding professors of medicine” in the mid 19th century. He graduated from Harvard Medical School when he was 21, then practiced and taught in Boston, Buffalo, Chicago (Rush Medical College), and Louisville (for one year), New Orleans, and New York (Bellevue, etc). He established and edited the Buffalo Medical Journal for 10 years. He held professorships in Theory and Practice of Medicine, Pathology and Clinical Medicine, Clinical Medicine, Principles and Practice of Medicine, and in Pathology and Practical Medicine. He published a textbook on medicine 25 years before Osler. Flint’s Law states “an elevation of pitch always accompanies diminution of resonance in consequence of pulmonary consolidation. In other words, dullness of resonance is never present without the pitch being raised.” The Austin Flint murmur is “a loud presystolic murmur at the apex in aortic regurgitation.” He was involved in public health and ascertained the source of Typhoid fever (a well contaminated by seepage from a privy), in the 1843 outbreak in New Boston (a few miles south of Buffalo). He was part of a six-physician dynasty whose practice of medicine in America lasted over two centuries. (Talbott, Biographical History of Medicine).
A former president of the American Medical Association (1884), he died of a stroke at the age of 74. He was greatly influenced by James Jackson, his teacher at Harvard, who was an advocate for the stethoscope. Flint left almost 17,000 hand-written pages of observations about his patients. He is further described as “a tall hansom man with an excellent voice.” (Dictionary of Medical Biography)
