Free summaries
Health & Medicine — page 9
457 public-domain health & medicine books, summarised. Page 9 of 10.
Prof. E. H. Crane's manual of instructions to undertakers
Elliott H. Crane
This guide serves as a practical, professional handbook for the late-nineteenth-century undertaker, detailing the chemical and mechanical processes required to preserve human remains with scientific reliability.
Down the Scale or Up
Barbara Abel
A guide to achieving and maintaining your ideal weight through balanced nutrition.
Appendicitis: The Etiology, Hygenic and Dietetic Treatment
J. H. (John Henry) Tilden
Appendicitis is a defiant, polemical medical manifesto that argues for the total rejection of surgery and drugs in favor of absolute fasting and physiological rest. It serves as a rigorous, albeit idiosyncratic, challenge to early 20th-century surgical orthodoxy.
The Sweating Sickness: A boke or counseill against the disease commonly called the sweate or sweatyng sicknesse
John Caius
This mid-sixteenth-century medical treatise serves as both a clinical observation of a terrifying, rapid-onset plague and a desperate plea for the English people to embrace temperance and order.
A treatise on foreign teas: Abstracted from an ingenious work, lately published, entitled An essay on the nerves
Hugh Smith
A stern eighteenth-century medical warning gives way to a bold commercial pitch, insisting that daily cups of imported green and bohea tea ruin the human nervous system while offering an herbal domestic brew as the ultimate physiological salvation.
Dissertations on Inflammation, Vol. 2
John Burns
This clinical treatise offers a rigorous, systematic examination of inflammatory conditions as understood by a Scottish surgeon at the turn of the nineteenth century. It serves as both a manual for practice and a survey of the medical knowledge of its era.
Golden rules of medical evidence
Stanley B. (Stanley Bean) Atkinson
The court is a theater of cold fact, and the medical witness is its most essential, yet often most reluctant, performer. Understanding the intersection of clinical observation and legal mandate is the singular key to surviving the witness box.
Measles
William Colby Rucker
Measles is not merely a nuisance of childhood, but a formidable, lethal disease that demands rigorous public health vigilance and a rejection of the dangerous myth that it is an unavoidable rite of passage.
The Leper in England: with some account of English lazar-houses
Robert Charles Hope
The history of the leper in England is a chronicle of profound social isolation, governed by an agonizing blend of religious ritual and harsh civil exclusion. It explores how a nation defined, contained, and eventually eradicated a misunderstood scourge.
The pathology of influenza
M. C. (Milton C.) Winternitz
This clinical account documents the devastating physical transformation of the human lung during the 1918 influenza pandemic, offering a precise, unflinching look at a disease that defied conventional medical understanding.
Venereal Diseases in New Zealand (1922): Report of the Special Committee of the Board of Health appointed by the Hon. Minister of Health
New Zealand. Committee of the Board of Health
This official government inquiry provides a stark, unvarnished look at the public health crisis of sexually transmitted diseases in early 20th-century New Zealand. It serves as both a clinical breakdown of the problem and a blueprint for social and legislative reform.
Why do we die?
T. Bodley Scott
The persistent decay of human vitality in middle age is not an inevitable fate, but a condition often rooted in the silent, progressive hardening of our own blood vessels.
A Short Discourse Concerning Pestilential Contagion, and the Methods to Be Used to Prevent It
Richard Mead
HOOK This 1720 medical treatise argues that public health is best served by compassion and scientific observation rather than the cruel isolation of the sick.
Medical jurisprudence as it relates to insanity, according to the law of England
John Haslam
When the law meets the volatile, often hidden terrain of the human mind, the result is frequently a collision between rigid standards and the complex, shifting reality of clinical observation. This early nineteenth-century work offers a focused, reasoned exploration of how medical practitioners should navigate the…
The danger of premature interment
Joseph Taylor
The prospect of waking in the dark, entombed and forgotten, remains a primal human fear. This nineteenth-century compilation gathers historical accounts and cautionary arguments to warn against the perils of hasty burials.
Rules and directions for the employment of injections in various diseases
Thomas Lewis
This guide offers clear, practical instructions for managing a wide range of common ailments through the use of an improved portable syringe. It serves as both a medical manual and an essential companion for home healthcare.
A Treatise on the Crime of Onan: Illustrated with a Variety of Cases, Together with the Method of Cure
S. A. D. (Samuel Auguste David) Tissot
This clinical manifesto argues that the physical depletion caused by self-pollution triggers a cascade of systemic nervous and bodily failures. It serves as a historical blueprint for the medicalization of sexual morality in the Enlightenment.
An Enquiry Into the Origin and Intimate Nature of Malaria
Wilson, Thomas, active 1795-1858
The invisible agents of disease remain one of humanity’s most persistent mysteries, challenging both our best scientific theories and our most fundamental assumptions about the natural world.
Emergency Childbirth: A Reference Guide for Students of the Medical Self-help Training Course, Lesson No. 11
United States. Office of Civil Defense
A calm hand in a dark hour, this cold-war manual strips obstetric care down to its barest essentials.
The care of the skin and hair
Morris Fishbein
Modern beauty standards often promise transformation through simple products, but this medical guide from the 1920s reveals the enduring, often dangerous, divide between marketing claims and biological reality.
The Frugal Life: A Paradox
Ortensio Landi
The art of living well is found not in the abundance of one’s table, but in the restraint of one’s desires. By stripping away the excess of a decadent society, the human spirit is finally free to pursue true wisdom and lasting health.
The Philosophy of Health; Volume 2 (of 2)
Southwood Smith
The human body is an intricate machine defined by constant, vital chemical exchanges, where every heartbeat and breath serves a singular purpose: the maintenance of life through the perpetual renewal of its internal environment.
Confidential Chats with Boys
William Lee Howard
The human body is an intricate machine, yet the young often navigate its complexities in total, damaging darkness. This guide aims to replace harmful myths with the clarity of physiological fact and practical wisdom.
The American Practitioner and News. Vol. XXV. No. 3. Feb. 1, 1898: A Semi-Monthly Journal of Medicine and Surgery
Various
The American Practitioner and News captures a transitional moment in late nineteenth-century medicine, balancing entrenched clinical traditions with emerging scientific bacteriology and pharmacology.
The Hospital Bulletin, Vol. V, No. 2, April 15, 1909
Various
This collection offers a candid, firsthand window into the moral struggles and technical evolution of physicians practicing in early twentieth-century Maryland.
Medicina Gymnastica
Francis Fuller
Riding a horse or engaging in active movement can restore human health far more effectively than harsh drugs or a sedentary life.
Notes on Diseases of Swine, Sheep, Poultry and the Dog: Cause, Symptoms and Treatments
Charles James Korinek
A comprehensive guide to diagnosing and treating diseases in swine, sheep, poultry, and dogs.
Spectacle secrets
George (Optician) Cox
Uncover the secrets of spectacle selection and avoid the pitfalls of quackery.
The New Science of Controlled Breathing, Vol. 1 (of 2): The Secret of Strength, Energy and Beauty—Through Breath Control
Edward Lankow
Air is the vital fluid that animates our being, and the secret of true strength, energy, and beauty lies not in food or heavy muscle building, but in consciously controlled respiration.
The Brooklyn Medical Journal. Vol. II. No. 2. Aug., 1888
Various
This clinical document captures the evolving landscape of late 19th-century medical practice, serving as a repository for the specialized knowledge, surgical innovation, and professional anxieties of Brooklyn’s medical community in 1888.
Baths and bathing
Various
Water is the primary instrument of health in this examination of hydrotherapy, exploring how the skin responds to heat, cold, and minerals through the lens of nineteenth-century science.
Saunders' Books on Pathology, Physiology Histology, Embryology and Bacteriology
W.B. Saunders Company
This volume serves as a comprehensive bibliographic window into the early twentieth-century medical landscape, capturing the definitive textbooks and reference works that shaped the education of a generation of physicians. It is a preserved archive of professional standards and pedagogical tools from a pivotal era…
The Hunterian lectures on colour-vision and colour-blindness
F. W. (Frederick William) Edridge-Green
A pioneering medical text provides a rigorous examination of how the human eye perceives light and why modern testing methods are essential for public safety.
A Treatise of Cleanness in Meats and Drinks, of the Preparation of Food,: the Excellency of Good Airs, and the Benefits of Clean Sweet Beds. Also of the Generation of Bugs, and Their Cure. To Which Is Added, a Short Discourse of the Pain in the Teeth, Shewing What Cause It Does Chiefly Proceed, and Also How to Prevent It
Thomas Tryon
True physical wellness begins not with complex medicines or rich spices, but with the simple, restorative virtues of pure water, fresh air, and clean, hard bedding.
Complete Treatise on the mare and foal at the time of delivery, with illustrations.: Also on cows and calves, with stallion and mare, when diseased by Gonorrhea (clap) or Pox, also Diarrhea and Costiveness in Colts
Conrad Mitchell
A practical 1869 veterinary guide detailing the management of equine and bovine births, common obstetrical complications, and specific livestock ailments encountered by nineteenth-century rural practitioners.
Treatment of the diseases of the eye, by means of prussic acid vapour, and other medicinal agents
Alexander Turnbull
Locked in glass-stoppered bottles, volatile acid vapours and friction-warmed essential oils promise to clear opaque corneas, dissolve stubborn cataracts, and restore light to eyes written off as hopeless.
A Treatise on Electricity: Wherein its various phænomena are accounted for, and the cause of the attraction and gravitation of solids, assigned. To which is added, a short account, how the electrical effluvia act upon the animal frame, and in what disorders the same may probably be applied with success, and in what not
Francis Penrose
By framing the natural world as a grand, interconnected machine, this mid-eighteenth-century work argues that electricity—not gravity—is the hidden force governing the movement of all solid matter.
Some possible bearings of genetics on pathology
Thomas Hunt Morgan
Scientific inquiry requires a rigorous skepticism, especially when applying the laws of heredity to the complex, often unpredictable realities of human pathology. This lecture balances foundational genetic theory with the cautious, evidence-based interpretation of medical data.
History of Iridotomy: Knife-Needle vs. Scissors—Description of Author's V-Shaped Method
S. Lewis (Samuel Lewis) Ziegler
A century of surgical evolution in ophthalmology culminates here in a refined, precise technique for restoring sight by creating an artificial pupil. This technical monograph documents the transition from dangerous, invasive cutting to the delicate, controlled incisions that define modern eye surgery.
North Carolina Medical Journal. Vol. 3. No. 4. April, 1879
Various
This medical periodical captures the evolving clinical standards and sanitary anxieties of the late nineteenth-century South, offering a window into a period when modern germ theory began to challenge traditional, often speculative, treatment methods.
Report of the Committee of Inquiry into the Various Aspects of the Problem of Abortion in New Zealand
New Zealand. Committee of Inquiry into various aspects of the Problem of Abortion in New Zealand
An urgent investigation into a 1930s health crisis reveals how economic pressures, changing social attitudes, and clandestine procedures combined to turn illegal medical interventions into a major driver of national maternal mortality.
The Cleveland Medical Gazette, Vol. 1, No. 5, March 1886
Various
This collection of articles and reports captures the evolving rigor and the distinct social character of the American medical profession in the late nineteenth century. It documents a period where clinical observation, emerging laboratory techniques, and intense professional debate shaped the identity of the…
A Letter on Suspended Animation: containing experiments shewing that it may be safely employed during operations on animals
Henry Hill Hickman
This brief, historic text serves as a pioneering plea for the systematic use of anesthesia in surgery. It marks a foundational moment in medical history, advocating for the relief of human agony during operations.
Rudimental Divine Science
Mary Baker Eddy
Spiritual freedom requires discarding the illusion that matter rules existence, grounding all reality and healing in a single, infinite divine Mind.
How to live: A manual of hygiene for use in the schools of the Philippine islands
Adeline Knapp
Health is a machine’s most vital requirement, and the human body, when maintained with knowledge and care, is built to function with efficiency and vigor for a full seventy years.
A Short Narrative of an Extraordinary Delivery of Rabbets, Perform'd by Mr. John Howard Surgeon at Guilford
Nathanael St. André
A medical professional’s desperate attempt to document a series of impossible births, this account captures the precise moment a sensational fraud gripped the imagination of 18th-century England. It stands as a cautionary relic of how even the most learned observers can be misled by the appearance of scientific…
Conception Control and Its Effects on the Individual and the Nation
Florence Elizabeth Barrett
The question of how to limit child-bearing occupies the center of this 1922 medical and moral inquiry, which argues that artificial methods of birth control are both unnecessary and socially destructive.
The suppression of tuberculosis
Emil von Behring
An authoritative medical text outlines scientific methods for combating tuberculosis through cattle immunization, early intestinal infection theories, and stringent dairy hygiene.