The admirable secrets of physick and chyrurgery

THOMAS PALMER, The admirable secrets ofphysick and chyrurgery, edited by Thomas Rogers Forbes, New Haven, Conn., and London, Yale University Press, 1984, 8vo, pp. x, 221, £25.00. One of the earliest documents of medical practice in the North American colonies is published here for the first time. This is a notebook, containing medical remedies, compiled in 1696 by Thomas Palmer (c. 1666-1743), a Massachusetts minister and medical practitioner. Although they have received less attention than the products of more formal academic medicine, remedy collections were always a fundamental resource in medical practice. They provided the content of the practitioner's vade mecum, and laymen, too, compiled collections for domestic use. The text edited here is a useful addition to the literature, presenting to the reader the information which a young American practitioner thought most important to his daily work. Most of the content was transcribed by Palmer from other sources, and at times the editor appears incautious in attributing to Palmer autobiographical statements and opinions which may not have been his own. Sadly, too, a less than admirable secret concerns the whereabouts of the original of Palmer's notebook. T.R. Forbes could not trace it, and worked from one of several known photocopies. This is not altogether satisfactory. Can we, for instance, be entirely certain that the pages missing from the photocopy were really missing or blank in the original? These caveats apart, historians will be grateful to T.R. Forbes for making available a valuable text, for coping successfully with Palmer's lapses into shorthand, and for providing a useful glossary.