[Rarebooks] fa: Kirwan on MANURE (1796) - Prichard on INSANITY (1835)

[Ardwight Chamberlain]

Listed now, auctions ending Sunday, Jan. 31. Details and images can be  
found at the URL below or by searching under the seller name arch_in_la.

http://shop.ebay.com/arch_in_la/m.html?_nkw=&_armrs=1&_from=&_ipg=&_trksid=p4340

Thanks,
Ardwight Chamberlain
L.A., CA USA

RICHARD KIRWAN: The Manures Most Advantageously Applicable to the  
various Sorts of soils, and the Causes of their Beneficial Effect in  
Each Particular Instance. London: Printed for Vernor and Hood, Birchin- 
Lane, 1796. First separate edition. Softcover 8vo (21 cm) in modern  
stiff paper wraps with printed labels; [2] + 96 pp.; lacking half- 
title page. ESTC T38958.
A foundational work in the science of fertilizers, an earlier version  
of which appeared as an article in the Transactions of the Royal Irish  
Academy in 1794. Richard Kirwan (1733-1812) was an eminent Irish  
chemist, fellow of the Royal Society, winner of the Copley Medal in  
1782, and president of the Royal Irish Academy. Active in the fields  
of meteorology and geology as well as chemistry, he corresponded with  
all the significant savants of the era, and counted Priestley,  
Cavendish, Burke and Horne Tooke as friends and colleagues. He was one  
of the last leading figures to abandon the theory of phlogiston.  
Becoming increasingly eccentric with age, "flies were his especial  
aversion; he kept a pet eagle [and he] always ate alone, his diet  
consisting of ham and milk... He died as a consequence of 'starving  
out' a cold" (DNB)



JAMES COWLES PRICHARD: A Treatise on Insanity and Other Disorders  
Affecting the Mind. London: Sherwood, Gilbert, and Piper, 1835. FIRST  
EDITION. Hardcover 8vo (23 cm) in original publisher's pebbled cloth  
with printed spine label; xvi + 483 + [1] + 16 pp. (publisher's  
catalogue bound in at rear). Garrison-Morton 4928; Heirs of  
Hippocrates 1421; etc.

A pioneer in the field that later became known as psychiatry,  
"Prichard was the first English [physician] who separated from the  
omnibus 'insanity' a 'new' group of mental disorders which he called  
'moral insanity' and so added a new term to psychiatric nosography. He  
gave a brief description of it in an article on insanity. This he  
enlarged into his famous Treatise on Insanity. It was Prichard who  
first put at the centre of the psychiatric map the many mental  
disorders which reveal themselves only by disturbances of affect and  
behaviour and which had been largely neglected. At his time it was a  
considerable advance, almost revolutionary, to equate with insanity  
proper cases without those twin features, delusions and  
hallucinations, which had long been and indeed still are considered  
the hallmark of the insane" (Hunter & Macalpine, Three Hundred Years  
of Psychiatry). His Treatise also contains the first detailed  
description of what is now called psychopathy. Prichard was a  
Commissioner in Lunacy as well as a Fellow of the Royal Society and  
president of the Ethnological Society.