Experiments and Observations on the Communcation Between the Stomach and the Urinary Organs, and On the Propriety of Administering Medicine by Injection Into the Veins

Boston: Oliver Everett and Joseph W. Ingraham, 1821. First edition.

1821 ORIGINAL REPORTS BY A YOUNG BOSTON PHYSICIAN USING SELF-EXPERIMENTATION TO STUDY URINARY EXCRETION OF ORAL AND INTRAVENOUS ADMINISTRATION OF MEDICATIONS.

5 3/4 x 9 1/2 inches paperbound book, untrimmed in green printed covers, 135 pp, covers browned and foxed, front cover detached, spine partly perished, pages unmarked. TOGETHER WITH anonymous review of the dissertations in North American Review, January 1922. The medical dissertations by the Boston physician who published these remarkable papers were awarded the Harvard University Boylston Prize for 1819 and 1821. Both papers describe self-experimentation, the second describing intravenous infusions in rabbits as well as a harrowing account of the author's intravenous injection of castor oil in himself.

ENOCH HALE, JR. (1790-1848) was born on January 19, 1790, in Westhampton, Massachusetts. The family was descended from Robert Hale of Kent, England, who settled in Charlestown, Massachusetts, in 1632. His uncle was the patriot, Nathan Hale and his brother, Nathan Hale, for many years edited the Boston Daily Advertiser. As a young man, Hale showed signs of a grave pulmonary condition and was sent, therefore, to New Haven, Connecticut, where he attended the lectures on chemistry of Professor Benjamin Silliman. From Silliman he acquired a scientific point of view which led to experimental investigations in other fields than chemistry. He began his studies in medicine, his health much improved, under the direction of Jacob Bigelow and John Warren in Boston, and received his M.D. from Harvard Medical School in 1813. His inaugural dissertation, Experiments on the Production of Animal Heat by Respiration (1813), was a creditable piece of experimental work and called forth a refutation by Benjamin C. Brodie and a "reply" by the youthful Hale. In 1818 Hale moved to Boston, where he practiced and taught medicine for the rest of his life. He was appointed district physician to the Boston Dispensary in 1819, served on the first staff of the Boston Lying-In Hospital, established in 1832, and was visiting physician to the Massachusetts General Hospital from 1837 to 1848. As a teacher, especially in private instruction in midwifery, he was closely associated with John Collins Warren, George Hayward, and Walter Channing. He was a founder of the Boston Society for Medical Improvement (1828), the leading medical and literary society of its time, and served as recording secretary of the Massachusetts Medical Society. Toward the end of his life, in 1846, he strongly upheld the claims of W. T. G. Morton as the discoverer of ether anesthesia.