Complete Record - Heirs of Hippocrates No. 1779

AUSTIN FLINT (1812-1886) Clinical reports on continued fever. Geo. H. Derby 1852 ix [9]-390 pp. 22.3 cm.

After receiving his medical degree at Harvard in 1833, Flint went on to become one of the most brilliant leaders of clinical medicine and medical education in the United States during the middle years of the nineteenth century. He was a founder of the Buffalo Medical College in 1846 and of Bellevue Medical College in 1860. In addition, Flint was professor at Rush Medical College, and the medical schools of the University of Buffalo, University of New Orleans, Long Island University, and University of Louisville. He was active as a hospital physician, served a term as president of the American Medical Association, and was a prolific writer on a wide range of medical subjects. Flint's major contributions to medicine were in the areas of physical diagnosis, tuberculosis, and the epidemiology of infectious diseases. The present work resulted when, at the annual meeting of the New York State Medical Society in 1850, Flint was appointed chairman of a committee to collect information regarding continued fevers, especially typhus and typhoid fevers. "The assignment of this duty led the author to examine the cases, occurring under his own observation, the histories of which he had recorded, and finding the number considerable" (p. [iii]), he published them in the Buffalo medical journal, which he edited for ten years. In addition to these 164 cases, other papers by Flint on typhus, typhoid, and relapsing fever are included. Perhaps the most important is his reanalysis of a typhoid epidemic at North Boston, New York in 1843 about which he first reported in 1845. At that time, and again here, Flint concluded that the well water, most likely responsible for the outbreak, played no part in the epidemic. At a meeting of the American Public Health Association in 1873, he recognized the work of Snow and William Budd in proving the communicability of typhoid fever by drinking water and freely admitted his mistake at North Boston. The work was translated into French in 1854, reprinted at Philadelphia in 1855, and translated into Japanese in 1868.

Cited references: Osler 2603