The Midwest pioneer, his ills, cures, & doctors - University Library ...

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bleeding— and those of the vegetable kind were listed and
recommended. Benezet's book may have had other editions,
for it was well known in the West in its day.
The number of domestic-medicine books of this type
published in the West is not definitely known. Many were
of limited circulation, confined largely to the localities in
which they were published. They varied in size from the
six-page Physician at Hand or a Collection of Receipts and
Cures to Heal Diseases and Wounds of Various Kinds, by
Dr. W. Smith (Wooster, Ohio, 1829), with its even dozen
recipes— including treatment of mortification and the
leprosy— to the thousand-page Gunn.
Often these books were so similar that it is apparent that
they were copied from their predecessors. Occasionally one
would have distinguishing merits. For instance, A. Weyer
published at St. Clairsville, Ohio, in 1831, The Family
Physician or Poor Man's Friend, and Married Lady's Companion:
Containing a great variety of Valuable Medical
Recipes, designed to assist heads of Families, Travellers,
and Sea-faring People in ctiring Disease. This work was
largely botanic — though it also recommended opium, calomel,
and bleeding— but certainly was not intended for use
in the prohibition era. For the dyspepsia: "Take one quart
of good whiskey to which add ...."; to purify the blood:
"Take three pints of good rye whiskey ...."; to make a
balsam: "Take a quart of rye whiskey ."
. . . The printer
and pubhsher, Horton J. Howard, was stimulated by the
Botanic Samuel Thomson's visit to Ohio in 1829, but
apparently did not give Thomson monopoly rights to his
press. As a result he and Thomson became bitter enemies
and proceeded to air their differences in print.
A Travellers Pocket Medical Guide was published anonymously
at Louisville in 1833. The printer, "Wilcox, made it
of convenient pocket size by confining its one hundred
fifty-two pages to a size of two by three inches.
At Connersville, Indiana, in 1834 Dr. Buell Eastman
published a Practical Treatise on Diseases Peculiar to Women
and Girls, to which was added an "eclectic system of