DOVER, Thomas.

The Ancient Physician's Legacy to his Country. Being what he has collected himself in forty-nine Years Practice: or, an Account of the several Diseases incident to Mankind, described in so plain a Manner, that any Person may know the Nature of his own Disease. Together with the several Remedies for each Distemper, faithfully set down. Designed for the Use of all private Families ...

London: Printed for the Author: and sold by A. Bettesworth and C. Hitch … W. Mears … and Lawton Gilliver. 1732. [With:] [DOVER, Thomas]. Encomium Argenti Vivi: a Treatise upon the Use and Properties of Quicksilver; or, the natural, chymical, and Two volumes, 8vo. The Ancient Physician’s Legacy: pp. [6], 80, 79-94, 91-‘255’ [i.e. 155], [1], rebound in old calf boards. Encomium Argenti Vivi: pp. [2], viii, 64, contemporary panelled calf, rebacked. On the endleaves of the Encomium there is a manuscript index to both works, which must therefore once have been bound together. Other contemporary manuscript annotations in brown ink draw attention to many passages and provide several prescriptions ascribed to the quack doctor Joshua Ward, favoured of royals and consulted by Henry Fielding. First editions of two medical tracts, annotated by a contemporary practitioner. Thomas Dover (1662-1742) studied under the famous physician Thomas Sydenham before engaging in the West Indies trade and finally participating in a piratical expedition to the Spanish Main. As second Captain of The Duke he commanded the boat which landed at Juan Fernandez island and rescued the shipwrecked sailor Alexander Selkirk, who provided the inspiration for Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. In 1721, Dover was admitted to the Royal College of Physicians (a ‘clan of prejudiced Gentlemen’, he notes bitterly), and practised in Gloucestershire and Bristol, before returning to London and treating patients at the Jerusalem Coffee House. There, he gained the mocking title ‘The Quicksilver Doctor’ from his frequent prescription of mercury.Dover’s Ancient Physician’s Legacy, a manual of diseases and their treatments, is best known for its defence of the pharmacological use of mercury: ‘Quicksilver ... secures the Patient from all Vermicular diseases … it opens all Obstructions … it makes a pure Balsam of the Blood beyond all other Things in the Creation’. The treatise, written ‘for the common Benefit of Mankind’, also describes a drug still in use as late as the twentieth century as ‘Dover’s Powder’, comprising ‘Opium one ounce, Salt-Petre and Tartar vitriolated, each four Ounces, Ipocacuana one Ounce, Liquorish one Ounce’.Wellcome, II, 484; Blake, p. 126 (later editions of The ancient Physician’s Legacy only).

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