A guide to the use of the Saratoga mineral waters / By W.O. Stillman.

  • Stillman, William Olin, 1856-
Date:
[1881]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A guide to the use of the Saratoga mineral waters / By W.O. Stillman. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School.

    55/78 page 42
    BIBLIOGRAPHY, OR LITERATURE OF THE SPRINGS. The history of the medical papers and treatises on the min- eral waters of Saratoga, may be very quickly given. It is curi- ous how little of any real value has been written. Very little of careful, analytical study has been given to their consideration; indeed, the same may be safely asserted of mineral springs in general, notwithstanding the large share of public attention which they have always received. The first j)hysician to settle in Saratoga was Dr. Blakesley, in 1789, but he does not appear to have written anything. Dr. Constable, of Schenectady, in 1770, also examined the waters, and with like result. The first publication of which I can find record was a letter to Dr. Joshua Fisher, of Boston, written by a regimental surgeon, named Samuel Tenney, after a visit here in 1783, which was published in the Memoirs of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, vol. ii., part 1, 1793. The ven- erable Samuel Mitchell, LL.D,, also records a visit to the springs in 1787, and investigations with reference to the escaping gas, which he denominated fixed air, and recorded as possessing the ]30wer of extinguishing flame and destroying all animal life. The first really scientific examination of the waters was pub- lished in 1793, in a work entitled A Dissertation on the Min- eral Waters of Saratoga, by Valentine Seaman, M.D., a then noted physician, and one of the surgeons of the New York Hos- pital. His investigations, however, were almost entirely con- fined to one spring—the High Rock. From that time until Dr. Steel wrote his first observations on the medicinal springs of Saratoga and Ballston, in 1817, there does not appear to have been anything published, with the exception of a graduating
    digitised image 1
    digitised image 2
    digitised image 3