Medecine

Second Edition, revised and enlarged, half-title, 2 folding tables at end, lightly browned, xxxii, 478 pp., contemporary half sheep, spine gilt, slightly rubbed. "Pinel was among the first to treat the insane humanely; he dispensed with chains and placed his patient under the care of specially selected physicians [he] founded the French School of Psychiatry." - Garrison & Morton. This is an important book in the history of medicine, in which Pinel further explains his analytical method and its application to pathology. Pinel applied the Hippocratic method in therapeutics. In 1795, he became chief physician of the Hospice de la Salp?tri?re, a post that he retained for the rest of his life. The Salp?tri?re was, at the time, like a large village, with seven thousand elderly indigent and ailing women, an entrenched bureaucracy, a teeming market and huge infirmaries. Pinel missed Pussin, and in 1802 secured his transfer to the Salp?tri?re. Pinel created an inoculation clinic in his service at the Salp?tri?re in 1799 and the first vaccination in Paris was given there in April 1800. A statue in his honour stands outside the Salp?tri?re. In 1795 Pinel was also appointed as a professor of medical pathology, a chair that he held for twenty years. He was briefly dismissed from this position in 1822, with ten other professors, suspected of political liberalism, but reinstated as an honorary professor shortly thereafter. Wellcome, lV, p.388; Garrison and Morton, 4922; Waller, 7453.