Flint, Medical Ethics, 1883

Medical Ethics and Etiquette. The code of ethics adopted by the American Medical Association, with commentaries by Austin Flint, M. D. New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1, 3, and 5 Bond Street. 1883. 
 
Green publisher’s cloth with black text on front board. Later paper label affixed to spine. Some scattered scuffing and staining of cloth. Floral end papers. Six pages of ads at rear. Binding beginning to crack between pages 20 and 21, otherwise tight. Pages mildly toned, and a few stains on verso of rear blank, but otherwise very clean.
 
Ffep, blank, title, (2), 97, (6), blank, rfep. 
 
Approximately 7 ½ x 5 1/8 x ½ inches. 
 
Waller 3082 
 
Austin Flint (1812-1886) held positions in six medical schools. He was a friend of W. H. Welch, and was “one of the outstanding professors of medicine” in the mid 19th century. He graduated from Harvard Medical School when he was 21, then practiced and taught in Boston, Buffalo, Chicago (Rush Medical College), and Louisville (for one year), New Orleans, and New York (Bellevue, etc). He established and edited the Buffalo Medical Journal for 10 years. He held professorships in Theory and Practice of Medicine, in Pathology and Clinical Medicine, in Clinical Medicine, Principles and Practice of Medicine, and in Pathology and Practical Medicine. He published a textbook on medicine 25 years before Osler. Flint’s Law states “an elevation of pitch always accompanies diminution of resonance in consequence of pulmonary consolidation. In other words, dullness of resonance is never present without the pitch being raised.” The Austin Flint murmur is “a loud presystolic murmur at the apex in aortic regurgitation.” He was involved in public health and ascertained the source of Typhoid fever (a well contaminated by seepage from a privy), in the 1843 outbreak in New Boston (a few miles south of Buffalo). He was part of a six-physician dynasty whose practice of medicine in America lasted over two centuries. (Talbott, Biographical History of Medicine). 
A former president of the American Medical Association (1884), he died of a stroke at the age of 74. He was greatly influenced by James Jackson, his teacher at Harvard, who was an advocate for the stethoscope. Flint left almost 17,000 hand-written pages of observations about his patients. He is further described as “a tall hansom man with an excellent voice.” (Dictionary of Medical Biography)