Tale of a Physician: or, The Seeds and Fruits of Crime. de Davis, Andrew Jackson - 1869

Boston: William White & Company, 1869. First edition. Cloth sunned, with boards and spine nearly completely turned tan; some light wear, with fraying at the head and foot of the spine; a little light foxing; in very good condition. 8vo (7.5 x 5.13 inches), original blind-stamped purple cloth, gilt lettering on the spine, 325, [1], 8 pages. "Moreover, finally, and in short: he found that, by this mysterious and immutable law of phreno-electrotyping, so to call it, which is outwrought on the sensitive surfaces of, and by the means of the psycho-dynamical forces at work within the unborn brain, the offspring could, and absolutely does, mentally inherit a predisposition to particular vices and crimes, as easily as to be born with cross-eyes, red-hair, far-sightedness, stammering, deafness and dumbness, cutaneous diseases, scrofula, and consumption." A crime novel from the clairvoyant free-love mesmerist Davis, using the developing tropes of the detective novel to dramatize his Spiritualist-inflected ideas of influence and inheritance. Wright II, 68; Hubin, Crime Fiction, page 108.