Apologia Chyrurgica.

exposing quackery

First and only edition of this uncommon work on reforming the practice of surgery, which describes a large number of what the author considered medical abuses, including the work work 'quacks', 'mountebanks', and 'pretending bone-setters'. Worldcat locates only two institutional copies, at the Wellcome and Glasgow, and there are two in recent auction records.

At the time this volume was written, surgery — consisting mainly of bloodletting, cutting out bladder stones and cataracts, bone-setting, and treating wounds — was considered a low trade, while gentlemen physicians did not generally touch the patient's body but could prescribe medications taken internally. Unusually for the time, Daniel Turner (1667-1741) was for the first half of his career a surgeon, spending twenty years as a member of the London Barber-Surgeons' Company before being admitted to the Royal College of Physicians in 1711. The present text was directed at the Barber–Surgeons' Company, 'explaining his plan to reform the "shameful" state of surgical practice' (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography). He later reiterated his desire to reform 'vulgar' surgical practice in his later work The Present State of Chyrurgery (1703).

First edition; 8vo (15 x 9 cm); old ownership signatures to the title and front pastedown, old manuscript letter 'e' to the final leaf of text, title toned and marked, uneven spotting and marks to contents, small stain across the fore-edge, front free endpaper mounted on a stub and a little ragged along the edges, old repairs to paste-downs; contemporary speckled cal rebacked, 4 raised bands with gilt rules, titles to spine gilt, double gilt fillets, boards worn with some old repairs at the corners, very good condition; 140pp.