A Treatise on Ruptures: … The Second Edition: Altered, Corrected, and Improved.

LEADING ENGLISH SURGEON'S CLASSIC FIRST BOOK
8vo. xvii, [1 (advt.)], 198, [2 (errata & blank)]pp., contemporary calf, sometime rebacked with a new spine with black morocco title label, no front free endpaper (as rebacked), boards worn at corners and edges, else very good.
Early signature erased from front pastedown endpaper and some contemporary manuscript comments on the text written in the margins by presumably that owner. Early engraved armorial bookplate of MacDonnell Earl of Antrim.
ESTC t55009. L6 a cancel as usual. First published in 1756 and again reprinted in 1769 and 1775. Garrison Morton 3576 (first edition).
Pott (1714-1788), English surgeon, became assistant surgeon at St Bartholomew's Hospital, London in 1745 and in 1753 he and William Hunter were elected the first lecturers in anatomy to the new Surgeons Company (later Royal College of Surgeons). "At St Bartholomew's Hospital Pott saw many patients and acquired the profound clinical experience so evident in his later written work. ... Appointment to full surgeon at St Bartholomew's in 1749 enabled him to challenge long established and painful therapeutic measures" [O.D.N.B.].When a fall from his horse in the street caused a compound fracture of his leg he "was confined to bed for [three months], and during that period wrote his classic book on hernia. He refuted many of the old theories concerning its causation and methods of treatment based on these theories. The book includes the first description of congenital hernia" [Garrison Morton]. The book, his first and the first significant work on the subject since the sixteenth century, was an "immediate success [which] generated a series of monographs during the succeeding twenty-eight years which analysed ophthalmic, neurological, genito-urinary, orthopaedic, and traumatological subjects. Fortuitously, the enforced rest of his fracture revealed a talent for writing which otherwise might not have flourished" [O.D.N.B.]
"Pott spurned publication of a systematic surgical textbook in favour of single subject studies which, he maintained, promoted greater attention to detail. ... Each monograph debated a burning topic of the day and their popularity is evident from the numerous editions, translations into German, French, Dutch, and Italian, and several issues of collected works, lastly in 1819. If Pott's Treatise on Ruptures (1756) first drew attention to his ability as a surgical author, it lacked the detailed references of later works and the individual clinical case observations of several others. None the less, Pott's vigorous challenge to old ideas and methods, his concern for patients mishandled by ignorant practitioners, and his overall lucidity set a pattern repeated in later monographs. [His] advocacy of early operation for strangulated inguinal hernia must have saved numerous lives ....Pott introduced a wholesome scepticism into surgical practice, placing emphasis on personal observations described with clarity and accuracy, illuminated by a mastery of macroscopic anatomy and diligent post-mortem dissection. Unlike many contemporaries he recorded success and failure alike, believing more was gleaned from an unfavourable than a favourable case" [O.D.N.B.].