Notes and Recollections of a Professional Life. . . . Edited by His Son, James Fergusson.

xvi, 248 pp; ads. Recent cloth. 4 leaves carelessly opened. Very Good. First Edition. William Fergusson (1773-1846), inspector-general of military hospitals, is not to be confused with Sir William Fergusson (1808-1877). "In 1794 he became assistant-surgeon in the army, and served in Holland, the West Indies, the Baltic, the Peninsula, and in the expedition against Guadeloupe in 1815. Having retired from the service in 1817, he settled in practice at Edinburgh, but removed fours years after to Windsor on the invitation of the Duke of Gloucester, on whose staff he had been for twenty years" (D.N.B.). Hirsch (II: 354) confounds the author with another military surgeon named William Fergusson who served in Sierra Leone from 1823 to 1846. Drew, Commissioned Officers in the Medical Services of the British Army, no. 1263, Vol. I, p. 79. Part I is devoted to: military tactics; exercise, dress and arms; barracks and barracks life; military hospitals and staff; diet and rations; fever as an army disease; disinfectants; dysentery; ophthalmia; and syphilis. Part II and the Appendix reprint writings on plague and quarantine; yellow fever; typhus fever and contagion in general; marsh miasmata; black troops in the West Indies; and letters on cholera. "The most important essay, for which Fergusson will be remembered, is that on the marsh poison . . . 1820. He was probably the first to do justice, in a professional sense, to the now familiar fact that malarial fevers often occur on dry and barren soils, either sandy plains or rocky uplands, where rotting vegetation is out of the question, his own experience having been gained with the troops in Holland, Portugal, and the West Indies. This was an important step towards widening and rationalising the doctrine of malaria" (D.N.B.).…