Recent progress in surgery. The annual address delivered before the Massachusetts Medical Society, May 25, 1864

Boston: David Clapp, 1864. FIRST EDITION. Purple cloth with elegant device stamped in gilt and blind to boards; sunning to spine, minor chipping at head and tail of spine. Inscribed by the author to James T. Fields (1817-1881) of the notable publisher Ticknor and Fields on the fly-leaf. A very nice wide-margined copy. First edition of the published annual address on recent advances in surgery by the eminent Boston physician Jonathan Mason Warren. Warren here provides a summation of a lifetime of surgical practice, offering accounts of minutiae such his method for curing varicocele, which supplanted an “insupportably painful” screw-clamp of Breschet, as well as insights on amputation, excision of tumors, etc. Warren opens his address celebrating his use of “artificial anesthesia” as a replacement for the then-common and frequently fatal use of chloroform on surgical patients. Warren ends his account with a “brief allusion to the vast field for surgical improvement opened up by the gigantic war in which we are now engaged.”

Warren (1811-1867), the son of noted Massachusetts physician John Collins Warren was a pioneer in surgical practice at the forefront in the use of anesthesia and reconstructive surgery, most notably rhinoplasty and cleft palate surgery.

Cordasco, I, 60-1925; Kelly & Burrage, pp. 1264-1265.