Under the Olive Tree. Songs and Stories

Medford, Mass.: The Prophet Publishing House, (1898). First edition. Frontis., 136pp + [1] plate. 12mo. Publisher’s decorated cloth. Publisher’s decorated cloth.Some staining to covers and at top edge; light staining throughout textblock, at very top of upper margins; good. First edition of the author’s first and only book and with illustrations by thespian and artist Joseph Jefferson and Frank Eugene. Ruth Clement was a Quaker physician. Where she earned her medical degree is unknown, but in her book —a mixture of poetry, short stories, and a novelette incorporating Chester, County, Pennsylvania Quaker history— themes of medicine presents at least twice. (And facing the table of contents, a poem by one Dr. K.S. Guthrie is also published.) In "Joe, A Hospital Story" a young patient dues suddenly. His physician muses on his death and then has a vision about the "Divine Physician." Elsewhere she writes of doctors yore who "waxed sleek and wise in blessed unconsciousness of the coming X ray, that revised edition of physician, priest and sorcerer combined, before whose sweet oblivion antidote the mighty microbe vanished like the mist before the sun. before the world was carried along upon the shoulders of Edison and Rontgen." (p56).…