Lot 250
Falconer, William
Remarks on the Influence of Climate
Rare Books, Manuscripts, Maps & Photographs
Auction: 21 September 2023 at 10:00 BST
Description
Situation, Nature of Country, Population, Nature of Food, and Way of Life, on the Disposition and Temper, Manners and Behaviour, Intellects, Laws and Customs, Form of Government, and Religion, of Mankind. London: C. Dilly 1781. First edition, 4to (28 x 22.5cm), xvi 552 [28] pp., uncut in original boards, expertly rebacked to style, spotting to covers and endpapers, occasionally to text, stain to lower margin of p. 163, short closed tear in Z4, [ESTC T60417; Goldsmiths'-Kress 12116; Norman 755]
Footnote
Note: An unsung forerunner of 19th-century historical materialism, the work was awarded the Fothergill gold medal by the Medical Society of London in 1796. Falconer was an Edinburgh-trained physician 'most famous for his research into the Bath waters and their impact on chronic conditions ... In investigating the efficacy of the spa, William Falconer made an important contribution to later Georgian medical quantification, which contests the view that clinical statistics only emerged at the Paris hospitals after the French Revolution' (ODNB).