JF Ptak Science Books   Quick Post

It happens now and then that I unearth interesting bits from the pamphlet collection here that instantly create their own categorization–this in spite of already having a hundred sculpted categories. Works like this demand a deeper inspection to sustain their uncommon non-bond with other similar but not-so works. On the face of it, Fairchild’s Nature’s Laws… looks like just another quack medical remedy/cure/belief system (or suspension thereof), except that on closer inspection there is more text regarding the product on the pamphlet’s covers than in the work itself.  The thing does wind up being 36pp long, but it is most testimonial and promise–after all, you can’t say all that much abut secret ingredients for the “liver patch” that you were supposed to wear, and you couldn’t say much about the medical inventiveness and foundation behind it because there wasn’t any. So I guess you fill space with words that aren’t necessarily connected to anything and that collectively had no value, much like a year’s worth of Trumpian nothingness. Anyway, there’s a lot going on on teh covers of this pamphlet, and much like what is going on inside of it, it all adds up to chicken scratches. 

D.W. Fairchild. Nature’s Laws; New Ideas Concerning Them. A Medical Lecture Delivered in Wesleyan Hall, Boston, on Friday Evening, March 30, 1877…Illustrating the Principles of Absorption, as Developed in the Holman Liver Pad…copied from the Boston Daily Globe of Saturday, March 31st, 1877. 22×14.5cm, 36pp. Printed by the Holman Liver Pad Company, 1877.  WorldCat/OCLC locates only two print copies and many others in microform.