A TREATISE ON THE NATURE AND CURE OF GOUT AND RHEUMATISM INCLUDING GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS ON MORBID STATES OF THE DIGESTIVE ORGANS, SOME REMARKS ON REGIMEN; AND PRACTICAL OBSERVATIONS ON GRAVEL (Mason Locke Weems's copy)

Philadelphia, PA: Published by Edward Earle, Corner of Fourth and Library Streets. (William Brown, printer), 1819. First American Edition. Leather-bound. Good Plus. 8vo. Full leather, with contrasting red title label to spine. Double ruled in gilt. 8-3/4 in. Includes prefaces to the first and second London editions of 1816 and 1817. Half title. Includes index. xix, [1], 335, [1] p. 22 cm. V-shaped dampstain at top centered on gutter visible throughout. Textblocks browned from ink with peripheral browning from damp.

The author's observations on approximately one-hundred cases of gout. "In 1820 he was appointed physician to Prince Leopold of Saxe-Gotha.[1] He attended the novelist Ann Radcliffe at her death in 1823; surviving records have led to the suggestion that Scudamore's prescriptions worsened her condition..." (ODNB). This copy from the library of M.L. Weems, M.D.,(and bearing his printed stamp atop the title page) probably the famous "Parson Weems", biographer of George Washington, William Penn,Francis Marion, and others, whom some say was somewhat more mythologizer and even hagiographer, than accurate recounter of biographical facts surrounding historical figures. He is the progenitor of the famed Chopping down the Cherry Tree story told about the youthful George Washington.

"Mason Locke Weems (1759-1825), bookseller, author, and Episcopal clergyman...Having received medical training in London and at the University of Edinburgh prior to the Revolutionary War, he [underwent religious conversion and] returned to Great Britain after the conflict and was ordained into the Episcopal ministry in 1784. Weems served in two parishes in Maryland, 1784-92, before relocating to Dumfries, Virginia, in the mid-1790s. About that time he became an agent for the prominent Philadelphia publisher Mathew Carey and, as such, spent the rest of his life traveling up and down the East Coast selling books. Following the publication of his famed biography of George Washington in 1800, a later edition of which included the oft-repeated cherry-tree story, Weems wrote biographies of Francis Marion, Benjamin Franklin, and William Penn, as well as a number of moralizing tracts." (National Historical Publications and Records Commission/National Archives).