Essai sur les etablissemens necessaires et les moins dispendieux

Paris: Royez, 1787. FIRST EDITION. With 2 large folding letterpress tables. Nineteenth-century calf-backed boards; spine rubbed, occasional light foxing, but otherwise a good, complete copy. First edition of this economic guide to hospitals. Here the author, a military and port physician, sets out the services that must be offered at a medical facility along with the cheapest way of providing them. He describes the proper furniture and rooms that should be built as well as pharmacies, chaplains, and staff. The final part of the text calls for a standardized educational program for doctors. The two folding letterpress tables serve as boilerplate charts that Dulaurens insists hospitals should keep in order to maintain accountability and streamline prognoses. The first lists one day of patient registrations at the Hôpital Royal de la Marine de Rochefort, where Dulaurens was a physician, and their names, date of entry, symptoms, medications given, dietary regime, observations after treatment, number of bloodlettings, and number of purgatives. The second chart repeats the first, but in a shorthand format for quicker work.

OCLC records 6 copies in the U.S. (Yale, NLM, Ohio State, Amherst, Hagley, Michigan)

Wellcome II: 496; Blake 128.