Maternal Physician.
“Every Mother her Child’s Best Physician”
[Health issues]. (Tyler, Mary Palmer). An American Matron. The Maternal Physician; A Treatise on the Nurture and Management of Infants…New-York: Isaac Riley, 1811.
8vo.; closed tear to front endpaper; contemporary ownership signature; ink spots on rear endpapers; some foxing throughout, including fore-edges; brown paper-covered boards; worn, soiled, and rubbed; 1” crack on upper board; spine stamped in gilt. In a specially made cloth slipcase.
First edition of Tyler’s only book; OCLC cites 20 copies, though that robust figure belies the infrequency with which copies pop up in commerce. John Heldebrand, a veteran dealer in medical books who supplied this copy, claims to have handled only this one and one other in 25 years of dealing. The title page boasts the author’s “sixteen years’ experience in the nursery,” which, Tyler explains in her Introduction, is a result of raising eight children of her own. The contemporary ownership signature, surprisingly, indicates that this book originally belonged to a man, not a woman.
In five chapters, including a “Conclusion” and “Notes”; chapter one is titled, “On the proper treatment of Infants under the age of four months” and includes sections like, “The mother’s milk the best and only proper food for infants,” “On Diseases of the Navel,” “Thrush, commonly called the Sore Mouth,” “Snuffles,” and “Wind in the Stomach and Bowels.” Chapter two focuses on teething, and includes sections regarding teaching babies about using their hands and “setting Infants on their feet.” Chapter three begins with a section on weaning, and includes a section on “infant temper and disposition.” Chapter four begins with a section on childhood diseases, like dysentery, worms, measles, small pox, chicken pox, “hooping-cough,” inflammation of the lungs, earaches, scald head, herpes or ringworm, shingles, canker in the mouth, chilblains, warts and sties. Chapter five provides names of healing plants and herbs and their appropriate uses; the Angelica plant, for example, “grows wild in the woods and fields in Vermont, and many if not all the other States. It is frequently preserved, and forms an elegant confection, and is of use as a carminative; children who have flatulent complaints will readily take it in this form. The root is an ingredient in the aromatic tincture of the shops” (p. 254).
Tyler was spurred to share her views as a “maternal physician” when she noticed – by reading the obituaries in “a file of old newspapers” – an unusually high death rate in children under the age of two. Tyler recalled the advice of a doctor she consulted after the birth of her first child, who explained to her that a mother is a child’s best physician; following that suggestion, she raised her own brood in a way that “[permitted] the roses of health to bloom on their cheeks with almost uninterrupted continuity” (p. 5). She recognized that her method of “recommending a mode of treatment founded chiefly upon [her] own experience” (pp. 17-18), might seem suspiciously non-objective, but she explains her motives were unselfish; she sought to enlighten mothers and provide them with practical advice on raising a child from birth until age two.
In her Dedication page, and her Conclusion, Tyler reveals how devoted she was to the idea of a Republican Motherhood; where an American woman’s greatest contribution to society is through raising the next generation of men. She dedicates the book to her own mother, about whom she writes, “For the nurture of my infancy I am most grateful – but for my education, and, above all, for the sublime lesson you taught me, ‘that the best pleasures of a woman’s life are found in the faithful discharge of maternal duties,’ I owe you more than gratitude” (p. 3). This idea is furthered in her Conclusion:
Surely it is wrong to immure boys, from a desire to see them look fair and delicate, whose chief attraction, both now and in af
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