"A Dissertation on Medical Education, and on the Medical Profession," in Medical Dissertations read before the Massachusetts Medical Society

8vo (9.5" x 6"), printed blue wrappers affixed to end papers, untrimmed. 44 pp. CONDITION: Chipped and split at spine, damp stain to lower wrapper. Offsetting and some damp staining, otherwise very good. This pamphlet of a talk presented at the 1822 annual meeting of the Massachusetts Medical Society argues that physicians ought to have a thorough liberal education—in geography, natural philosophy, the science of numbers, and ideally also "poetry, drawing, and every other kind of polite literature"—before training in medicine, surgery, and pharmacy. "The most important language to the physician is that of the country in which he is to live and do business: and yet from the style in which many of our body write and speak, should doubt whether this obvious idea had ever been generally adopted, or much regarded." Coffin also suggests that physicians broaden their medical expertise and be capable of performing the work so often done by overly specialized surgeons, apothecaries, and "mere bleeders." Diseases in the District of Maine 1772–1820: The Unpublished Work of Jeremiah Barker, a Rural Physician in New England by Richard Kahn provides a biography of Coffin: "John Gorham Coffin was born in New Buxton, Maine, and apprenticed with his uncle, Charles Coffin of Newburyport, Massachusetts. He practiced in Boston, was an attending physician at the Boston Dispensary, and founded and edited the Boston Medical Intelligencer, a precursor to the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal and later the New England Journal of Medicine. He was also a founder and first secretary of what would become the Boston Medical Library, now part of the Countway Medical Library at Harvard Medical School" (77).