The medical side of Benjamin Franklin / by William Pepper.

  • William Pepper
Date:
1911
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The medical side of Benjamin Franklin / by William Pepper. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    lead makers, and painters; (from the latter, it has been conjectured, it took its name colica Pictonum, by the mistake of a letter, and not from its being the disease of Poictou) and, although the worms of stills ought to be of pure tin, they are often made of pewter, which has a great mixture in it of lead. . . . Dr. John Hunter founded his essay on the “Dry belly-ache of the Tropics upon Franklin’s letters, giving the credit freely to him for the suggestions. An interesting letter is the following. London, July 28, 1768. To Barbeu Dubourg.1 I greatly approve the epithet which you give, in your letter of the 8th of June, to the new method of treating the small-pox, which you call the tonic or bracing method; I will take occasion from it to mention a practice to which I have accustomed myself. You know the cold bath has long been in vogue here as a tonic; but the shock of the cold water has always appeared to me, generally speaking, as too violent, and I have found it much more agreeable to my constitution to bathe in another element, I mean cold air. With this view I rise almost every morning, and sit in my chamber without any clothes whatever, half an hour or an hour, according to the season, either reading or writing. This practice is not in the least painful, but, on the contrary, agreeable; and, if I return to bed afterwards, before I dress myself, as sometimes happens, I make a supplement 1 Barbeu Dubourg, 1709-1779, a French physician. French editor of Franklin’s works, “ (Euvres de M. Franklin, Docteur eis Loix, Traduites de l’Anglois sur la quatrieme edition. Par M. Barbeu Dubourg, avec des additions nouvelles et des Figures en Taille douce. Paris, 1773.” In 1761 published a Gazette of Medicine and in 1767 the “Botaniste Franpaise.” Dedicated to Franklin his “ Petit Code de la Raison Humaine,” the first edition of which was published in 1774, the second in 1782 at Franklin’s press at Passy. Member of the Clinical Philosophical Society, Medical Society of London, Member of Royal Society of Medicine of Paris, Academy of Stockholm. He gave up the practice of medicine and devoted himself to the American cause during the Revolution. Franklin notes in his journal that on Dec. 29, 1780, “Went by particular invitation to the Sorbonne, to an Assembly of the Faculty of Physick in the College Hall; where we had the eloge of my friend, M. Dubourg, and other pieces. Suffer’d by cold.” Franklin’s original invitation to attend Dubourg’s funeral is in the American Philosophical Society.
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