Complete Record - Heirs of Hippocrates No. 1609

MOSES L KNAPP (1799-1879) Discovery of the cause, nature, cure and prevention of epidemic cholera. H. W. Derby 1855 48 pp. 20.7 cm.

Knapp, a native of Barkhamstead, Connecticut, received his medical degree from Jefferson Medical College where he was a member of the first class to graduate from the school. He was number one in his class and his thesis on Indian hemp was cited in the first edition of the Dispensatory of the United States. Knapp practiced for a time at Baltimore before relocating to Illinois, where he eventually settled in Chicago. He became professor of obstetrics at Rush when it was organized in 1843 and was also professor of materia medica at the Indiana Medical College in La Porte. Knapp delivered the opening address at the first session of the Rock Island Medical College in Illinois where he was president and professor of materia medica and therapeutics. He moved with the school to Davenport, Iowa in 1849 where it became the College of Physicians and Surgeons of the Upper Mississippi River, both institutions being affiliated with the then State University of Iowa as its medical department. In 1852 Knapp moved to Covington, Kentucky where he established a private practice and in 1860 went to Mexico because of poor health. The present treatise was first published in the January 1855 issue of the New York journal of medicine with an appendix consisting of extracts from British journals, chiefly case histories supporting Knapp's views. It was Knapp's belief that "Cholera is but a modified form of scorbutus, or a younger sister-scourge of the same parentage; probably better expressed by calling it a hemorrhagic termination, or a manifestation of the dying phenomena of scorbutus" (p. 9). He carefully explains his theory of the scorbutic nature of cholera and provides many case histories from his own experience, cured by his regimen of administering foods of high vitamin C content.

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