Waters, Nicholas B; Bell, Benjamin (3 results)

Hardcover. Condition: Fair. 1st Edition. First Edition of this summary of the multi-volume works of Benjamin Bell. Full leather binding, boards well worn, spine with wear and creases, spine title label barely readable. Binding is nice and strong. Internally, viii, 570, xxx pp. including 12 plates in appendix. Lacks front end paper, title page with 3 previous owner's names. pages generally toned with some foxing, though still quite readable, Some pages with creased corners. All 12 plates of surgical instruments are present though several have small pieces missing as a result of folding. See attached photos for better details. All of our books are individually inspected and described. Never ex-lib unless explicitly described as such.

Hardcover. Condition: Very Good-. Third Edition. Third Edition. Hardcover. Bell, a renowned Scottish surgeon and Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons in Edinburgh. Bell published a number of important medical treatises and is widely considered the first Scottish scientific surgeon. In his 1796, A System of Surgery, he advocated the routine use of opium to relieve post-operative pain, "to be able to alleviate the misery of those who are obliged to submit to dangerous operations must afford the biggest gratification to every practitioner". Uncommon generally, quite scarce complete and in the condition found here. Light shelf/edge wear, ffep very tender at joint, owner signature at second ffep, light foxing at preliminaries and minor sporadic throughout, tipps gently bumped, wear at head, else tight, bright and unmarred. 570pp; xxix; plus Plates I-XII. Illus. (b/w plates). Index.

Hardcover. Condition: Good. Full leather with maroon title box to spine and gilt lettering and horizontal rulings. Book is tight and square with just a few slighltly loose pages and rubbing to the edges and corners of boards. Free of major flaws or markings inside and out, other than a white spot to front, the aforementioned wear, general toning to pages, and the signature of the prior and original 1791 owner, Cyrus Hamlin. Provenance is detailed in a laid-in hand-written note - this was the original copy used by Cyrus Hamlin, father of the future Vice-President of the USA, Hannibal Hamlin, under Abraham Lincoln, when he attended Harvard Medical School in 1793. Purchased from the Hamlin estate in 2022. All 12 fold-out plates, which appear in the Appendix along with a complete text explanation of each, were engraved by James Trenchard. They are all in Good+ or better condition with small closed tears to some of them. They depict various surgical instruments. This is the First Edition of the American abridgment of Bell's 6-volume System of Surgery (1782 -87) in which Bell, amongst many other advances such as developments in vascular surgery, advocated the routine use of opium to relieve post-operative pain, "to be able to alleviate the misery of those who are obliged to submit to dangerous operations must afford the biggest gratification to every practitioner". In his preface, the editor, Waters, credits the famous New York surgeon John Jones with reviewing the manuscript and with adding footnotes, which appear throughout. Jones was the author of the first surgical text by an American.