Botanic Guide to Health, and the Natural Pathology of Disease, Twenty-third edition.

Botanic Guide to Health, and the Natural Pathology of Disease, Twenty-Third Edition. Coffin, Albert Isaiah. c1855. London: British Medico-Botanico Establishment.

12mo.(4" x 6.625") xxiv + 384 pp. Quarter black polished leather with cornrs over marbled boards. Spine with double gilt rule as bands, gilt lettering to maroon gilt decorated leather in the second compartment. Edgewear, corners bumped and rubbed, head and foot of spine rubbed. Small loss of marbled paper to board edges. Boards scuffed and rubbed. Marbled endpapers. Front hinge starting, securely held by cords. Spots of foxing throughout, heaviest at front of text. First free endpaper, flyleaves and portrait frontispiece separating at foot, still securely attached. Pg. iii/iv with marginal tears and chipping not affecting any text, darker stain to fore-edge of the same page with transference to pages to either side.

A mid-nineteenth-century edition of Albert Isaiah Coffin’s Botanic Guide to Health, and the Natural Pathology of Disease, a popular manual of the British medico-botanical movement. Coffin was an American-born practitioner who became one of the principal promoters in Britain of a system of medicine based heavily on botanical remedies, especially stimulants, emetics, vapour baths, and preparations made from medicinal plants. His followers became sufficiently numerous to be known as “Coffinites,” and his writings circulated through many editions.

Coffin opposed much of contemporary orthodox medicine and argued that ordinary people should understand disease and be able to treat themselves using botanical preparations rather than depend exclusively upon formally trained physicians. His system drew heavily from the American Thomsonian medical tradition and treated disease in terms of disrupted bodily heat and obstruction. Remedies discussed in his works include cayenne, lobelia, myrrh, valerian, raspberry leaves, vapour baths, and numerous other herbal preparations.

Today the book is particularly interesting as an artifact of medical history, herbalism, alternative medicine, and nineteenth-century health reform. Coffin occupied the contested border between popular medicine and professional practice, and contemporary medical authorities regarded systems such as his as unorthodox or quack medicine. The book therefore documents not only period herbal remedies, but also the larger struggle over who had the authority to practice medicine as the profession became increasingly standardized during the nineteenth century.