Identifying a family heirloom: The Indian Doctor's Dispensatory.

For over a century and a half a small book of pharmacological interest has been passed down within my family. Leather-bound in what may be sextodecimo format, it contains nearly 200 prescriptions for botanical remedies and descriptions of curative roots, leaves, barks, and berries found in eastern North America. References in the text suggest it was published in the United States in the second or third decade of the nineteenth century. The title page is missing, however, as are the table of contents, the preface, most of the introduction, and a few pages of text. Consequently, the author's name, title, place, and date of publication remained a mystery for more than 35 years after the book was given to me by an elderly aunt who had found it in a bookcase in her farmhouse in Ontario's Ottawa Valley. Recent investigation has now established not only its identity, but its bibliographical significance as well. At first thought to be a copy of Peter Smith's The Indian Doctor's Dispensatory, our book now appears to be an even rarer work incorporating Smith's under a slightly different title: The Indian Doctor's Dispensato ry, or Every Man His Own Physician, published in New York state in 1833. That the book should have been owned and carefully passed on in this manner is not surprising, for my family had a long tradition of prac, tical medicine. Franz Otto, my great-great-great-great-grandfather, who lived in prerevolutionary Schoharie, New York, was long remembered as a doctor, barber, and phlebotomist.' Today another branch of the family preserves a lancet that may have been his. After the Revolution Franz's elder son Johan Gottlieb Otto (1758-1803), a Loyalist, claimed war losses that included, "Sundry medicines left to him by his father who died & was a Doer."= Since Johan Gottlieb died before the date of, our book's publication, it is assumed that his son, Gottlieb (1787-1855), was its first owner.